Hazel Henderson

Four Signs that China Will Lead World Economy in 2010

I agree with Kevin, as one who has been collaborating with academic and business groups in China regularly since 1986. I also expect that their Green GDP will re-emerge after some opposition from local officials whose performance was still measured by striaght , dirty GDP .
The Chinese people support the green transition , as I pointed out in my editorials ( HazelHenderson.com) and our Ethical Markets-GlobeScan survey in ten countries in Nov 2007 for the European Parliament confirmed that large majorities support overhauling GDP to include indicators of environmental performance (beyond-gdp.eu) and Globescan.com ).
And remember Kevin, when you compare prices of fossil fuels and nukes with renewables , solar wind , etc that the huge subsidies to fossil fuels and nukes , as well as theri heavy uncounted environmental costs , make it appear that they are cheaper. A full-cost accounting would show that solar, wind and geothermal are already cheaper than fossil fuels and nukes.

China Ignores the Cost of Moving Away from Coal

China is acknowledging the social and environmental costs of coal , which economic textbooks refer to as " externalities" which can be excluded from company balance sheets and then further ignored in GDP.
This is why new asset evaluation models take into account environmental, social and governance factors (ESG) as material in accounting terms, and why the European Parliament's BEYOND GDP conference in 2007 ( beyond-gdp.eu) is now integrating these formerly " externalized " costs into national accounts , as China did with its Green GDP. This paradigm battle is still raging , as we see the failures of the "efficienct market hypothesis " and its models : Modern Portfolio Theory , Value-att-Risk,CAPMs , etc
We now know that blinding our money-based accounting ,both at the company and national level leads to enormous un-noticed risks and was one of the causes of the financial meltdown. These were not "black swans ' but caused by deliberate blindness to the larger , longer-term costs and risks now evident today in pollution, desertification , jobless recovery ,and other geo-political risks.

Balance Sheet Wars: U.S. Solar Companies vs. Chinese Government

Add that China's stimulus package was more accurately trageted than was possible in the USA .China's rapid shift toward the green economy and raising domestic consumption is possible because their approach is not limited to hyping private consumption ( e.g. cash for clunkers ) but toward targeting both the green economy and group domestic consumption : e.g. putting a national healthcare system in place , along with beefing up social security ..
And naive financial " pundits" in the USA who keep warning about the solvency of China's banks don't seem to grasp that their percentage of government ownership and China's huge reserves mean that China will never allow its banks to be in financial jeopardy.

So US -based solar companies do face an uphill climb . However, the global green economy market is so huge ( tens of trillions over the next five years ) that there will be enough for everybody ( see Climate Prosperity Funds at EthicalMarkets.com ) . Meanwhile collapsing gas prices due to new ways of accessing shale deposits means that coal is now too expensive , even for old coal utilities , who will begin substituting gas not only for peak loads , but for baseload as well. So if I owned any coal stocks which I don't I'd be shorting them . As for nukes, they are still the most expensive way humans have ever devised to boil water..

Dosclosure : holding Stirling Energy Systems, Solaria, Envision Solar,as well as Suntech

Cap-and-Trade and the Cheap Energy Illusion

Thank you,Jeff Siegel ! I take your Newsletter and I personally invested in many of your stock picks, including Nevada Geothermal, Western Wind, World Water and Solar ,Comverge ,Itron, Eneroc and others. I have written about Green Tax shifting for decades : reduce taxes on incomes and payrolls and shift them to virgin resource exploitation m energy waste and all forms of pollution, not just carbon. Then get the world's pension funds ( $120 trillion in assets) to invest in Climate Prosperity Bonds ( see EthicalMarkets.com)

The Obama Effect: Is Clean Energy Outperforming the Market?

Perhaps Wall Street is finally catching on to the need to update their " fossilized " asset allocation and sector models , and break out the new Sustainability Sector as I have been uging at Seeking Alpha and EthicalMarkets.com