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When Goldman Sachs published a landmark study this summer on clean energy, the greenies cheered. The Wall Street giant didn’t really say anything new, but its conclusions reinforced the notion that the oil era is winding down and that renewable energy would soak up the bulk of the entire energy industry’s investment dollars.
Specifically, the report, “Carbonomics: The green engine of economic recovery,” said that renewable power will emerge as the No. 1 area of energy spending in 2021, usurping oil and gas spending for the first time, and that the green transition will drive US$1-trillion to US$2-trillion per year – per year! – in infrastructure investments, while generating as many as 20 million new jobs worldwide.
All encouraging news, if true, and even better news for the planet. The United Nations has predicted all sorts of life-threatening calamities if carbon emissions push average global temperatures beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
When I read the Goldman Sachs report, and similar ones in recent weeks, my first thought was that we are on the verge of an investment bonanza that might make the spectacular returns seen by Big Tech (Facebook, Amazon, Tesla and others) in recent years look like a minor upward deviation in the wealth-creation norm.
For the rest of this column: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-the-green-revolution-is-coming-but-is-overly-hyped/