A majority of likely voters – 71% – favors the American Clean Energy and Security Act recently passed by the House of Representatives, and two-thirds (67%) believe Congress is either doing the right amount (22%) or should be doing more (45%) to address global warming, new Zogby International telephone poll shows. Just 28% believe that Congress is doing too much.
Greenopia recently released a comprehensive ranking of 50 governors in the US and compared their policies, transparency, and interest group ratings to determine which governors were eco-leaders and reveals which state governments are most dedicated to preserving the environment. Topping the list is Governor Bill Ritter of Colorado followed closely by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California.
The Princeton Review, today released its second annual Green Ratings of colleges. In this measure of how environmentally friendly the institutions are on a scale of 60 to 99, the company tallied its Green Ratings for 697 institutions based on data it collected from the colleges in 2008-09 concerning their environmentally related policies, practices, and academic offerings. The Princeton Review also named 15 colleges to its “2010 Green Rating Honor Roll” – a list that salutes the institutions that received the highest possible score – 99 – in this year’s rating tallies.
SustainableBusiness.com recently announced its 2009 Sustainable Business 20 (SB20) List: The World’s Top Sustainable Stocks. The 8th Annual SB20 List consists of 20 public companies that are leading the way to a sustainable economy. The list is presented in the Progressive Investor newsletter, published by SustainableBusiness.com, which tracks and analyzes green stocks. To choose the 20 companies, SustainableBusiness.com works with a group of judges, who are among the most respected green stock analysts in the world. Judges select companies across the range of green business sectors – solar, wind, geothermal, smart grid, water, food, agriculture, green building and transport. In addition, over a third of the companies populating this year’s SB20 List are “Corporate Pioneers” – companies with conventional products and services that are greening their product lines.
In a presentation before national policymakers and analysts recently, leading clean energy venture capitalists, academics and CEOs unveiled the “Gigaton Throwdown,” an assessment of the nation’s clean energy potential that identifies seven industries capable of creating 5 million clean energy jobs and reducing CO2 emissions by 5-7 gigatons by 2020. The report, a collaborative effort between leading researchers at UC Berkeley, MIT, University of Michigan, Stanford, and Drexel University, and clean tech leaders, challenges Washington policymakers to remove obstacles that keep billions of capital investment dollars sitting on the sidelines.
The second Renewable Energy Finance Forum – West (REFF-West), will take place in San Francisco on September 29-30, 2009. It builds on the success of both REFF-Wall St and the inaugural REFF-West, which took place in Seattle in October 2008.
The conference focuses on finance and investment for clean energy technologies, with a particular emphasis on the Western US, and covers both large scale projects and the development and commercialization of new technologies. REFF-West is targeted at a senior level audience including investors, financiers, project developers and clean technology companies. Conference sessions will examine opportunities in a range of cleantech markets.
The newly published, inaugural Carbon Salary Survey, is one the first studies to provide detailed information about professionals working in the climate change and emissions trading markets globally. The Carbon Salary Survey, which culled responses from 1,157 participants, is a collaborative project between Acre Resources, a green recruiting consulting firm; Acona, a CSR consulting firm; and Thomson Reuters Carbon Market Community. Throughout April 2009, they surveyed people working in the following areas: renewable energy; clean technology and energy efficiency; carbon finance/brokering; carbon/climate change law, policy or regulation; the project-based emissions market under the Kyoto Protocol(CDM & JI); and the voluntary offset market and climate change science. Based on the results, it appears that green professionals overall are well-paid, feel that they have job security and are happy.
The report, entitled “Cleantech Comes of Age,” discusses the trends in clean technology from the impact of oil prices to the M&A market and includes data from the MoneyTree Report, a quarterly survey that tracks cash-for-equity investments by the professional venture capital community in private emerging companies in the United States.The increased venture capital investment into the Cleantech sector can be directly associated with the growing concerns about the environment, energy costs and security. Despite signs of a weakening economy, the high investment level and intensified adoption rate of technologies in this sector validates the expected growth predicted by industry experts.
Energy efficiency has never been more important, according to new research commissioned by Johnson Controls (NYSE: JCI) . The Energy Efficiency Indicator (EEI) survey, a research report targeting professionals responsible for energy management, revealed barriers to investing in energy efficiency include: limited funding, uncertainty about future energy prices, government incentives, and energy and climate legislation.
