decisions decisions

If you spend any time in meetings talking about such exciting subjects as environmental finance you will hear one simple thing repeated over and over again.

"We need clear long-term signals and action from government"

Oh of course they ask for more money: pump priming money, risk offsetting money, government precurement money, just a fiver to tide me over till the weekend money...

Everyone asks for money.

But clarity and long-term commitment should cost governments nothing and it's the one thing they seem more short of than cash.

Once again the government are dithering over a bit of environmental legislation/finance/regulation. This time it happens to be subsidies for on shore wind farms to placate a set of MPs I have little time for. I'm not an energy expert, my instinct is that in the history of serious innovation everything works badly to begin with and if you stick with it they improve. So helping wind farms out at this stage in their development seems eminently sensible. But that isn't the point.

The point is that these are significant investments in risky new industries. It gets riskier still when you are asking people to invest in such weird things as ecosystem services. The governemnt wants industries (well largley water companies) to pay landowners for ecosystem services (to put less crap into our water). Nobody owns water quality, how can you be sure that the farmer will continue to change his activities; it may take decades for the changes a farmer makes to seep through the water table and affect a river; what if you pay one landowner only for another to increase polluting activities just when you get things set.

These industries are nacent, full of uncertainties: legal, technological, ecological and economic. Some will fail, some will succeed. But they will ALL fail to attract the required investment if they keep pandering to wankers and don't just choose a course and stick to it.

It goes for myriad environmental policy decisions when I say that I'd rather that they scrapped on shore subsidies and stuck to it than dithered around like this. I'm fairly sure that those hoping to develop environmental industries feel the same way.