The Carbon Trust
03 Aug 2007 - JG
If you had a load of money you wanted to invest in a project, how would you go about ensuring that you made as much return for as little risk as possible? Chances are you'd seek some sort of professional advice. Now suppose that someone forced you to hand over your own money and they told you that they would invest it for you - you wouldn't be very happy. You'd even less happy if they told you that they were just going to have a punt with it rather than treating it like they had something to lose. This, in a nutshell, is what the government is doing with our hard earned money through collecting our taxes and ploughing it in to project regardless of risk. Take carbon-saving projects...
If it's not your money to lose, why speak to the people who really know what they're talking about? That is the mentality of the government - they would rather hand it all over to a Quango with nothing to lose. Enter the Carbon Trust.
The government has awarded more than £1m to fund seven projects. Garry Staunton, from the Carbon Trust, said they had "-the potential to make significant carbon savings and to be commercially very successful-". Note the word potential. Coventry University has been awarded £150,000 for aluminium smelting technology that could reduce emissions by 20%. Note the word could. Warwick Manufacturing Group has been given £250,000 to develop a paint coating process that would eliminate the need for paint shops in the making of plastic components. Note the word would. Incredibly over the past four years the Carbon Trust has invested more than £17m in low carbon projects. Why?
Why should they be handed money to take a gamble on what they speculate would be the next great thing in carbon reduction technology - they have nothing to lose and therefore no real incentive to get it right. Surely it would make more sense to get real backers in to push these projects meaning the ones with real potential will get noticed and the ones with no chance go back to the drawing board. It would save us money, make some money for the designers and investors and we would not be wasting millions of pounds and man hours on pointless initiatives.