Uncommon approach by Vestas-boss

I must say I was really surprised by the press release Vestas send out yesterday. The CEO, Ditlev Engel, called on all the G20 leaders that will meet in Seoul in a couple of days, to meet him for an hour to offer them specific solutions on how to create sustainable solutions in their countries. It’s a very uncommon approach, but I think it’s pretty cool to have the guts to ask world leaders like Barack Obama, French Nicholas Sarkozy and Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah for a “date” like that.

The COP15 last December definitely showed that is it almost impossible to get every UN nation to sign the same climate agreement, so offering each country a solution that is custom-fit might not be such a bad idea. If he can get the leaders to listen. And to participate, which might be one of the more difficult tasks.

Engel is the head of a working group for creating green jobs and the group wants the G20-leaders to commit to four actions in order to increase renewable energy solutions.

First of all the group suggests to set a robust price on carbon and create certainty and longer horizons. It believes that “even without a global climate deal or a global carbon market, much can be done on a national and regional level in G20 countries.” Wouldn’t that just be great if the group and Engel could convince the leaders that combating carbon emission on a local level makes sense?

Second, it calls for increasing the R&D spending by a factor of four to get to an optimal level. Actually, that is what Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist, is arguing for in his movie “Cool it”, where he suggest to stop spending billions on dollars on policies that won’t work and instead pour the money into R&D in new technologies to deal with climate change. It just seems that in a world where the financial markets are still unstable and people call for better health care and just clean water, it will be a difficult task to convince leaders to scale up research and development spending by a factor of four. But I’m sure the intentions are good, and maybe raising the question can change something.

Thirdly, the G20 leaders need to end fossil fuel subsidies with the shortest possible time frame and no later than in five years. In 2008 $557 billion were spent annually on fossil subsidies and even though the leaders are already phasing out some of the subsidies it seems like a pretty ambitious goal. Just think about how strong the oil industry lobby is.

Finally the green working group addresses that is it necessary to eliminate tariff and non-tariff barriers and environmental goods.

So far, I haven’t seen if any of the world leaders have responded on the invitation for the one-hour rendez-vous with Ditlev Engel, but I’m really interested in finding out. If he gets through with some of the points I hope we’ll see more renewable energy in the future.