GOING GREEN, REALLY GREEN!
By Steve Busch
In 2004, President Bush signed the Recreation Enhancement Act which specifically authorized increased fee collections on public lands for entrance fees, recreational use fees, and many other service fees. Such legislation falls directly in line with the United Nations Environmental Programme’s Green Economy Initiative.
A blogger named Sian Sullivan wrote a terrific expose regarding the monetization of nature/sustainable development connection. There is big money to be made by simply appearing to be “green.” In the corporate world, image is everything. I’ve paraphrased some salient points from Sullivan’s blog for brevity.
There is no better example of the money to be made in “going green”, than a multi-trillion dollar Wall Street fund offering investment services for sustainability-enhanced approaches headed by Matthew Kiernan, acclaimed author of Investing in a Sustainable World, former President of the World Business Council of Sustainable Development (WBCSD), and regular speaker at the annual Davos World Economic Forum. Kiernan suggests that we are entering a ‘Sustainable Investment Revolution’, poised to re-engineer ‘the very “DNA” of the capital markets’.
Yes, that’s right, a complete re-engineering of capital markets.
(The following is a direct excerpt from Sullivan’s blog page):
“The cover of Kiernan’s book features an image of a blue-green earth, half of which is subsumed by gleaming American quarter-dollar coins (1.). This ‘earth-as-money’ trope is repeated in the logo of the United Nation’s Environment Programme’s (UNEP) New Green Deal initiative, which depicts a delicate young green plant, shooting up from a pile of Euro coins (2.); and echoes an earlier UNEP and IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) document on payments for ecosystem services (PES) that includes an image of verdant green foliage amongst which various currency notes appear as ‘leaves’ (3).”
https://www.unenvironment.org/explore-topics/green-economy/about-green-economy
https://www.unenvironment.org/explore-topics/green-economy
http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title16/chapter87&edition=prelim