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This report applies a full-cost economics approach to climate change adaptation, using the aluminium industry as a case study to illustrate the complexity of the policy challenge. The report examines the positive value of jobs within the upstream aluminium industry, and the negative value of carbon emissions from the sector. It estimates the value which flows from aluminium jobs to individual workers and to the wider community. The report provides a demographic survey of aluminium towns and finds that aluminium towns are less economically vibrant than the Australian economy as a whole, with lower median incomes (despite high aluminium wages), lower employment and lower workforce participation. This highlights the critical importance of aluminium to these towns, employing thousands of local workers at an average wage more than double the national median.

In the United States, bottled water outsells both milk and beer. And if projections about the bottled water industry prove correct, within four years it will surpass soft drinks, the only beverage category that stands in its way to the top. Considering that clean tap water in the West is widely available for next to nothing, the bottled water industry has tracked a remarkable journey over the last 30 years to the point where it is worth $US60 billion ($62 billion) a year, says author Elizabeth Royte, who has investigated its global ascent.

The CEOs of 100 large multinational corporations -- including companies from carbon-intense industries -- have signed a World Economic Forum statement [PDF] that calls on the G8 to create a strategy to cut global greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 50 percent by 2050.

The advanced industrialized economies were lucky to have had their development fuelled by cheap fossil energy. Today’s developing economies have a much tougher challenge. It was a very short window of opportunity which opened just about 150 years ago and is likely to close in the next 40 years, by when the known reserves will be depleted at current levels of consumption. All told, 200 years is a very brief interlude considering thousands of years of human civilization and hopefully hundreds of thousands of years yet to come. At some time in the distant future, they will look back and remark that the age of fossil fuel was a short inflection point, a point at which humanity passed through the bottleneck of dependency on oil from the ground. Before that point, humanity’s primary source of energy was the sun, and so it will be after that point.

Let’s not kid ourselves: Google’s investment in transportation so far is paltry compared to what it’s spending on other industries. But while we’re not predicting that Google will make a G-car any time soon, its efforts to push plug-in vehicles as a way to build out a smarter power grid, and to bring some of the intelligence of information technology to transportation, will be worth watching.

The term cleantech therefore tends to be a more amorphous industry group than, say, environmental services, and a less rigid investment asset class than, say, financial services.Sectors that appear to fit into the definition of cleantech without dispute include:Renewable energy – wind, solar thermal and photovoltaics, wave, tidal, hydro, geothermal, biomass and biogas;Water technologies that increase efficiency;Energy efficiency, green buildings and biomaterials;Waste management and recycling;Energy storage and fuel cell technologies;Low emission vehicle technologies; andEnvironmental Services