EPA Ruling Great News For Cleantech
Date: 04/18/2009
Company: RockPort Capital
Source: Forbes
Greentech investors and entrepreneurs are guardedly optimistic that the Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health will provide a boost to their industry.
Friday, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson signed the agency’s 133-page endangerment finding, legally obligating the agency to regulate carbon dioxide and related greenhouse gas emissions. The landmark decision could force the automotive industry and electric utilities, which together account for one-half of such U.S. emissions, to take drastic steps to cut emissions.
If the EPA’s endangerment finding is upheld following a 60-day public comment period, the agency is likely to begin the process of requiring automakers, utilities and a vast swath of U.S. industry to spend billions of dollars on technologies to slash C02 emissions that many scientists say contribute to global warming.
“This is the stick that will force industry to do things to clean up greenhouse emissions that they might not have done otherwise,” says Wilber James, chairman of Rockport Capital Partners, a cleantech venture capital firm in Boston. Electric utilities have been regulated for decades on emissions of pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, the principal cause of acid rain that once denuded forests and killed Adirondack lakes. But lacking similar legislation to cut the production of carbon dioxide, utilities have limited their investment in anti-greenhouse technology to small test projects.