Conference notes

So, a few interesting things from the conference last week:

Green stimulus (that is, stimulus spending on renewables/efficiency/etc.):
1) Green stimulus made up 16% of total stimulus, and 0.7% of world GDP. By country, South Korea had the highest share of GDP in green stimulus (5% - Korea essentially put all of its stimulus in green stimulus, I believe, as it's a big part of their national strategy). China (unsurprising) and Saudia Arabia (really? he didn't go into this) were also relatively high. The US spent 0.9% of GDP on it, just a bit above average.
2) 2/3 of green spending was energy efficiency. The lower total spend was as a percentage of GDP per country, the higher the percentage given to efficiency tended to be; so only in countries with relatively large spends did countries find much room for investment in renewables or environmental improvements. Those countries, incidentally, were countries like Japan, South Korea, the US, and China. Not surprising.
3) Actual disbursement of green stimulus funds has been slow - only 6% in 2009, and only 29% by the end of 2010 in the US. It is believed we'll eventually get to the target in terms of disbursement and jobs, but not till 2012.

Be afraid; be very afraid:
From last year to this year, China went from 24 cars per 1000 people to 32 cars for 1000. As a snapshot of one year, just think about that. It's huge.
Similarly, over the past 30 years, China has urbanized more than 300,000,000 people - essentially, a group the size of the entire United States.
China consumes 43% of the world's coal.

The most subsidized industry in the US:
Is transportation. This is obvious once you think about it: roads built by the government are a huge subsidy. I'd just never thought about it in those terms before.

Tokyo:
Has its own little cap and trade program!

China and efficiency:
One of the speakers projected that inefficiency in energy use will become a large and growing drag on China's economy, with 5-6% of GDP projected to be tied up in environmental costs under the business as usual scenario. Subsidies don't help with this. At times, the cost of generating a kilowatt-hour from coal is actually higher than the price at which that kilowatt-hour is sold.