While brighter minds figure out how to change the Earth’s climate by trading carbon credits, Public Offerings will stick to how best to turn a dollar from global warming.
As illustrated by two recent visits to Vancouver, opportunities abound for B.C. on that front.
Up first: the new green Brits and their nation’s ambitious goal to reduce its carbon emissions 80% by 2050. Atop the shopping list of the 15 British companies attending this year’s Globe conference in Vancouver were partnerships with B.C. clean-tech, waste-to-energy and green building technology companies.
As U.K. vice-consul Michael Rosenfeld pointed out to Public Offerings, B.C. and Britain have much mutual green business to exploit. After all, B.C. and the rest of North America’s West Coast is one of the four top world markets for low-carbon sustainable technologies, products and services targeted by the British government’s “U.K. know how campaign,” which is aimed at expanding the country’s global technology brand.
According to Rosenfeld, Britain sees much potential in B.C.’s renewable energy sector and its commitment to industry subsidies like the carbon tax.
But there are richer pastures from which B.C. can harvest green-dollars. If one of your guesses was the Far East, you’d be right. But not just China. Think Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam. Think about the 1.3 billion people in Asia who don’t have access to modern forms of energy and the governments overseeing them who need the planning expertise to harness and distribute energy generated from small hydro and other renewable power sources. Think of those opportunities.
Samuel Tumiwadoes a lot of that thinking. The deputy director of Asia Development Bank’s North American office was also in town recently. His mission: convince local companies to embrace Asian opportunity thinking. Too many aren’t.
According to Tumiwa, small to medium-sized ventures in B.C. for the most part are unaware of the wealth of business opportunities in Asia for engineering, planning, service and clean-tech companies.
The Far East is hungry for renewable energy intelligence – not because it hopes to reverse planetary climate change. Its hunger is rooted in a far more pragmatic objective: energy security. Thailand, for example, has no natural forms of energy within its borders. Without secure energy sources, it will never achieve its goal of developing beyond a middle-income jurisdiction into an industrial power.
The market for sustainable transportation technology in Asia is also big and getting bigger.
B.C. is blessed with the green energy technology potential to service a lot of Asian development needs. However, it’s far less blessed with the leadership needed to turn those opportunities into revenue. According to Tumiwa, too many B.C. companies:
•don’t know how to market their products and services in Asia;
•fear losing intellectual property when operating in the Far East; and
•haven’t cultivated representatives in Asian countries.
But establishing partnerships with manufacturers in Asia would go a long way to protecting local IP, and travelling to Asia to build meaningful working relationships would be step 1 in opening business doors across the Pacific.
So there’s more to climate change than cranking up doomsday air raid sirens. There’s money to be made and a B.C. brand to be marketed to a renewable-power-hungry world.
We might not be able to control the weather, but we can control how we harness it economically. •
