There are reasons that the green economy may disappoint. For starters it's not only carbon capture and storage (CCS) that may fail to scale up; that may also turn out to be true of second generation biofuel, ultracapacitors and nonvolcanic geothermal. Secondly vested interests may blackmail or stall governments into maintaining their protected status to the bitter end. How realistic is say a 20% cut in coal production within a decade? We're talking the certainty of loss of traditional jobs and higher electricity prices against uncertain green industry growth. The temptation is overwhelming to procrastinate or question (a la 60 Minutes) the need to go green.

My fear is that the government will lose its nerve and the public will go into denial. See later comments by others. Then when it becomes clear that early decisive action was needed after all we will be underprepared.

Paul, there may be great opportunities for making money in the dirty environment arena. And the dirtier and more threatening things become, the more opportunities there will be for some to make a killing.

But will it get us anywhere? It seems that there will only be significant profit potential for as long as there are very significant problems with pollution and all manner of other environmental impacts.

Unfortunately the latter will always be well ahead of the former....if we just leave it up to market forces to sort out.

But much more importantly, yet again we have another article which only addresses one side of the equation. Absolutely nothing is said here about the ever-increasing pressure on our environment or the absurdity of our addiction to an ever-bigger population, ever-bigger economic turnover and ever-bigger impact on the environment, despite our best efforts to improve efficient usage of resources and energy and reduce pollution/emissions.

Greenpeace has always been terrible when it comes to this stuff, and with respect, it seems that you are continuing the trend.

I ask you; what is the point of writing about improving efforts to clean up the environment if you are just going to sit back and have nothing to say about our ever-bigger rate of impact??

Your article is good, but not in isolation. There is no indication that is written with the broader holistic framework in mind.