Clinton sees economic ‘boom’ in fighting climate change

New York, 27 September: Fighting climate change can stimulate an economic “boom” for advanced and developing economies, said former US President Bill Clinton at the New York launch of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP).

On Monday, the CDP released its fifth annual report on greenhouse gas emissions and mitigation efforts by major corporations. The CDP is a collaboration of 315 institutional investors with $41 trillion under management, that sends a questionnaire on climate-related issues to the world’s largest companies.

In the 2007 survey, 383 companies, or 77% of the FT500 index, responded, compared with 72% in 2006. Separately, 282 members, or 56%, of the S&P 500 index responded, up from 47% in 2006.

Only 69% of US firms see commercial opportunities in climate change, while 82% of the FT500 see opportunities.

The latter view is endorsed by Clinton, who heads the William J. Clinton Foundation in New York. He said: “Addressing the problem of climate change will provide for wealthy countries the biggest economic boom since we mobilised for World War II.”

For developing countries, the effort provides “a way to develop even more rapidly, in a way that will spread the benefits of economic growth more widely than... through the ordinary expansion of trade and investment”.

Clinton said commitments in the climate change area “are actually good for business”. He mentioned retailer Wal-Mart, which has reduced packaging by 5%, which will save $3.5 billion in its supply chain by 2013 and remove 210,000 trucks from the road.

Advanced economies require “a source of good new jobs every five to eight years”, Clinton stated. In the 1990s, the computer industry provided that growth when “information technology broke out of the dot-com companies in Silicon Valley and... swept through every aspect of the US economy. You can’t run a dry cleaning operation the way you did 10 years ago,” he commented.

Climate change “is this decade’s source of new jobs for rich countries, and foolishly [the US] has passed it up”, he told the conference. In the UK, which has aggressively pursued climate goals, median wages have risen, despite high immigration.

Much of the work is “labour-intensive, oriented toward small business and evenly distributed”, he added. “It is a phenomenal opportunity to more rapidly develop poor countries, not to slow them down.”