Making gold from green investments

To European ears, the catchphrase "green is green" from Lorraine Bolsinger, a corporate vice president of General Electric might seem non-sensical.

It translates as "green investments make green dollars". The catchphrase does not work quite so well with multi-coloured euro-notes, but the American conglom-erate thinks European companies can nonetheless learn from it. Bolsinger was in Brussels recently to explain to EU?policymakers the rationale behind GE’s Ecomagination project.

Ecomagination was launched two years ago as a GE project to research and develop low-emission, energy-efficient products across its various industrial divisions. The company has pledged to invest between $700 million and $1.5 billion (€520m to €1.10bn) per year in green technologies over a five-year period. It also aims to cut GE greenhouse gas emissions by 1% and increase energy efficiency by 30% by the end of 2012. Developments so far include an extra-efficient washing machine, a low-energy halogen lamp and a low-emission cargo rail engine.

Bolsinger says Eco-magination was developed in response to increasing public and business interest in environmentalism. GE believes there is no reason why EU industry cannot follow, now the pace has been set. But Bolsinger says there is one important barrier to the investment that the EU needs for green technologies: "Europe needs a predictable price for carbon, not something that changes every day," she says, referring to the EU emission trading scheme which allows companies to buy and sell the right to emit carbon dioxide from each other. Without this stability, or even the certainty that the European emissions trading scheme will continue when the next round comes to an end in 2013, Bolsinger says companies are wary of making green investments.

An ETS review is currently under way but the EU has, so far, no plans to stabilise the price of carbon, or to change the trading periods from the present three to five years.

To European ears, the catchphrase "green is green" from Lorraine Bolsinger, a corporate vice president of General Electric might seem non-sensical.