International Trades Unions go loopy over green finances
THIS is a true glory of a report from the International Trades Unions Conference, ITUC.
They’re thinking about how lovely it would be if there were lots of investment cash to throw at green projects. Which, if you like green projects, it probably would be.
Then they look at pension funds, note they have a lot of money and start to work out how much of that could be spent on all those lovely green projects.
However, they miss the important part of the whole game: where’s the profit?
For that’s what pension funds are supposed to be doing, making a profit so that they can pay our pensions. So where is the profit in green schemes? Sure, there’s the profit of not boiling the oceans but that’s a social good, a public good even. And they are lovely things but the very definition of them is that you can’t make a profit by providing them.
And that’s the bit the whole report entirely misses: what needs to be done is to find a way of making green investments profitable. At which point there won’t be any shortage of money at all because there’s trillions out there all looking for a way to make a profit.
Not that we should be all that surprised at the ITUC looking at the wrong end of the problem really…..
Posted: 30th, May 2012 | In: Money Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
