Tim Worstall

The world should be investing far more heavily in green technology: just $10 billion a year is spent on it globally, a pathetically small amount.

Where do people get these incredibly strange figures from?

Or rather, why do they only ever include the money doled out by governments as “investment ” and completely ignore the much larger amounts raised and spent in the private sector?

We could start from the entirely trivial amounts that I myself have spent: £800 to a scientist looking at one of the myriad ways to make fuel cells by providing him with materials to play with.

$20,000 to some Greeks looking at new ways to extract the materials needed to make one of those myriad different types of fuel cells.

Sure, I expect my bread to come back after being cast upon the waters (no, I don’t own any patents on anything found and interesting things we did find in both projects) but these are investments in green technologies.

Or the projects which I’ve not funded but which I have been paid for supplying materials to: a decade long project at Airbus for new materials for wing surfaces to reduce fuel use. Or another at the same place to lighten fuselages by 10% for the same reason. These are big money projects and are not included in that $10 billion figure.

And it’s no good saying but this isn’t basic research: yes, all four of them very much are basic research. Peer reviewed papers and patents have followed from them.

Now, I’m just one businessman in a three man company and that’s only part of what I’ve been involved with in creating these new green technologies. Multiply that up by some measure of the size of the private economy and you’ll end up with a vastly larger number than $10 piddling billion.

It simply is not true that government spending upon green stuff, just like it isn’t government spending upon anything else at all, which is the total spending on that stuff.