Gerry is CleanBiz Asia's associate editor. He has been writing and providing editorial consultancy services for nearly 30 years primarily specialising in financial, business and clean/green areas.
Most recently Gerry held the position of editor of Currency Investor and provides consultancy to web sites and corporate editorial development. Mainly based in Europe now he has worked for the Financial Times magazine group and the BBC.
Past experience in Asia includes working as an equities research editor at UBS Securities (Asia) and Kerry Securities in Hong Kong and producing CNBC programmes during the station’s first year launch. He has also worked for the South China Morning Post and numerous other outlets in the Asia Pacific region. His own web site can be found at www.financial-journalist.co.uk .
China's inexorable demand for energy has seen it sign a slew of multi-billion deals in the past in the past week or so, reflecting the new complexities of the international energy market. They add to new calculations by analysts that China is set to produce enough crude oil outside its borders to rival OPEC members such as Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
In a recent interview with the Financial Times International Energy Agency chief economist Fatih Birol said last year's USD35 billion foreign energy company buying spree by Chinese companies will produce the equivalent of Kuwait's output by 2015.
President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech had few surprises except in his use of China as way to motivate rivals to stand behind his green policies. Obama put most of the onus on new climate policies on a less-than-enthusiastic Congress, but dropped a strong hint that if they don't do something, he would use his executive muscle to address climate change “for the sake of our children and our future.”
There's been a debate rumbling on in the US environmental press as to how 'green' President Obama will be during his second term. There are some indications that he might be trying to outflank political opponents in subtle renewable policies, after having been dealt several body blows in previous policy fights.
Apart from having the apparently minor side-effect of trying to preserve the global ecosystem, any major policy edicts from the White House can have major economic benefits for international companies, and those in China in particular.
Sitting in South-East Asia contemplating Santa Claus and Christmas largesse, it's easy to forget the snow and ice associated with Saint Nicholas. The European tradition of elves at the North Pole, sleighs and reindeer, dating from the 1820s doesn't have the same immediacy when you're preparing for a typhoon or sunning yourself on a beach.
But the future effects of having less snow and ice could make those typhoons more intense and perhaps make that beach disappear altogether.
Questions are again being asked of how environmental degradation contributed to the human and financial cost of Typhoon Bopha (or Pablo, as it was known in the Philippines). With the toll continuing to climb well beyond 1,000 and another 841 still missing, and damages are being put in excess of USD173 million, the figures are sadly unsurprising.
The economic turmoil of the financial crash saw China being feted as a white knight with drawbridges being lowered to investment from Chinese companies. This has turned to bitterness, like a liberating army becoming an occupying force.
Even with struggling solar and wind sectors, China has become the dominant global power it terms of renewable energy companies. This has resulted in the US Department of Commerce increasing tariffs to between 23.75 and 250 percent on solar cells which it calls a way of offsetting subsidies provided by China through one mechanism or another.
It was like an elephant in the corner of the room as Hurricane Sandy came roaring through the Northeast United States, disrupting the lives of millions while chalking up to USD45 billion worth of damage, and yet neither presidential candidate mentioned climate change or flagged it as a policy imperative. Throughout the latter weeks of the campaign trail it became painfully obvious that neither Obama nor Romney were willing to utter policy pledges on climate change or anything environmental that could be considered hippy yogurt-weaving scare mongering.
Ernst & Young's second Cleantech Matters on Global Competitiveness shows an industry dominated by Asia, in financial turmoil, but with a positive outlook. The report looked both at what it describes pure-play cleantech companies and cleantech use by 100 global companies with revenues of USD1 billion or more.
While the global companies had a positive attitude to the future of renewable energy and cleantech innovations, financing projects and government policies remained a concern. For the cleantech companies revenues might be on the increase but debt levels have risen and the churn of those in the Ernst & Young index reflect a turbulent and competitive sector.
Hong Kong's seizure of nearly four tonnes of smuggled ivory, worth about USD3.4 million, highlights once again China's significant role in the global trade of endangered species.
According to Hong Kong's customs officials, they made their biggest ever haul of endangered species product following a tip-off from mainland Chinese police. While the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Crime scorecard says China is making some progress in key aspects of compliance and enforcement of rhino and tiger trade, it is flagged for failing on key aspects of compliance or enforcement for the illegal trade in elephant products, primarily ivory.
US President Barack Obama is to be sued by a Chinese-owned wind farm company. In another nasty twist to US/China trade relations Ralls Corp – which is part owned by Sany Group, China’s biggest machinery maker – says it plans to sue the president over the unconstitutional act of blocking a wind farm near to a US navy test site in Oregon.
In fact four sites came under Obama's edict that their operation by Ralls was considered to be a security risk based on a report by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
A new KPMG report says that India's national and state governments have to play a greater and more reliable role in promoting solar power. It concludes that the cumulative solar PV power market potential is likely to be around 12.5 GW by 2016-17.
While India’s solar capacity has grown from less than 20 MW to more than a gigawatt in the last two years, helped by the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission, the country is facing a power deficit of 9 percent and in many states, industries are facing up to 50 percent power cuts.
Malaysian logging group Samling, has been accused of using illegal logging permits to give it access to pristine forests in Liberia. The case of Liberia is simply the latest in a long list of allegations of corruption, tax avoidance and evasion and ecological terrorism against the company, which hides behind shady subsidiaries and an intricate web of cross-holdings.
At the top is the private conglomerate Yaw Holdings, led by Yaw Chee Ming, eldest son of the company's founder and one of Malaysia's richest men.
As CleanBiz Asia reported last week, the bodies of evidence that southeast Asian nations are facing ever-rising risks of natural disaster are again mounting. Maplecroft's second Natural Hazards Risk Atlas and the Asian Development Bank's (ADB) Key Indicators for Asia and the Pacific 2012 highlight the risks that Asian cities and coastal areas are facing from events such as flooding, earthquakes and tropical cyclones.
To paraphrase wit and playwright Oscar Wilde: “To lose one grid, Mr Singh, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness”. For India's Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, the power collapse of, eventually, three power grids over two days leaving more than 600 million people without electricity, should be the starkest message yet that India and its politicians need to stop pandering to populism, bite-the-bullet on economic reforms and clean up its legal and regulatory act.
The world's palm oil industry is going through upheavals which bodes ill for the forests of south east Asia and is likely to have impacts as far away as Africa.The markets for palm oil are shifting, refined material prices are dropping, local tariffs are changing and the sustainable land-base is shrinking. These volatile market conditions are being faced by huge conglomerates, many of which have been implicated in breaking laws, ethics and green credentials in the past.
Noting what's not said is often as revealing as what is being said. And such were two examples from South Korea this week. Its press was surprisingly quiet on the conclusion of the five-day East Asian Seas Congress 2012 that's just ended in Changwon, in the south of the country. It was almost as quiet as the South Korean government on leaked news that an internal report scrapped its plan to resume "scientific" whaling, apparently because of fierce international pressure. The man at the ministry just wouldn't say.
March saw a flurry of news whipping around China's solar sector, with most of the focus on the news of the United States Commerce Department's decision to impose duties on Chinese solar panel imports.
But a report from Digitimes says Chinese customs' figures show that the country's polysilicon imports in February were up 62.6 percent on January and an incredible 129.6 percent over a year. While these figures reflect only one aspect of the wide-ranging, multi-product solar industry, they indicate a degree of disarray and which is also reflected in the financial results of China's manufacturers.
Problems for Chinese companies which listed on the US exchanges through reverse mergers, many of which are in the clean tech sector, are set to get worse. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun an investigation into the New York Global Group, which is known as taking Chinese companies public in the United States using reverse mergers.
On Wednesday its offices were searched the by the FBI, increasing the scrutiny of the increasingly controversial practice but there has been no statement from the company or its president, Benjamin Wei.
The eighth annual sustainability report released at the World Economic Forum's conference in Davos, shows Asian companies generally failing to improve their practices in line with other global companies.
While Japan's companies ranked second behind the UK, by having eleven companies in the 2012 Corporate Knights Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World, other Asian nations performed badly against European and north American companies.
While recent share news saw some of China's solar companies making gains in recent days, the China CleanTech Index lost 48 percent of its value during 2011.
The terrible performance was reflected in monthly December loss of 9.4 percent, compared with a 0.2 percent loss for the MSCI World index. Its constituent eight sub-sectors fared little better with all of them showing double-digit losses in 2011.
This report by the World Bank spells out what the world would be like if it warmed by 4 degrees Celsius, which is what scientists are nearly unanimously predicting by the end of the century, without serious policy changes.
Companies in Asia reveal expectations that regulations that could lead to rising costs for reporting and reducing GHG emissions will also be the main sources of climate-related business opportunities.
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