The G20 Business Summit issued a strong and unified message to the global political leadership, urging them to put a robust price on carbon, allow free trade in green goods and services, ratchet up research and development, and end fossil fuel subsidies within five years.
Vestas President and CEO Ditlev Engel, in his capacity as Chairman for the “Creating Green Jobs” Working Group, told world leaders, “Our commitment is unprecedented, as is the willpower on our side. Together we can create great results,” Mr. Engel reiterated his offer on behalf of the Working Group to visit each of the G20 leaders to help tailor policy frameworks that will create green jobs in their countries.
“What is truly distinctive here today is the deep and broad consensus among business leaders on the need for governments to take urgent action – to give business transparent, long-term, and certain policy frameworks – so that business can do what it does best. Namely, to forge innovative, efficient, and profitable solutions that create the jobs of the future,” Mr. Engel continued.
In the joint statement following the Summit, the Working Group on Creating Green Jobs highlighted the critical need for “G20 countries to adopt policies that strike a new balance between incentives and disincentives that indisputably favours green investment.”
Key recommendations from the Working Group include putting a price on carbon high and stable enough to change people’s behaviour and investment decisions; allowing free trade in green goods and services, which will accelerate diffusion of green technologies, lower prices, encourage competition, and result in faster job creation; scaling up research and development; and abolishing fossil-fuel subsidies within the shortest possible timeframe, and not more than five years.
And specific to the power sector, the Working Group urges G20 leaders “to accelerate the uptake of renewable and other low-carbon energies, and expand and upgrade electrical grids to guarantee priority access for green energy.”
“We need transparency – transparency when it comes to planning and lawmaking. We need certainty – certainty as far as the regulatory framework is concerned. We simply need to know that the foundation for our existence and our work won’t change completely the day after tomorrow. And finally – down the very same road – we need to see policy making based on long-term perspectives,” Mr. Engel concluded.