Financing the transition to a greener economy

摘要

Thank you very much for your welcome, and to the Association for inviting me here today. It is a good opportunity for the Green Investment Bank (GIB) and for me to engage with what we recognise as being a broad church of those involved in environmental law and policy, and hopefully it could be the start of a dialogue between the Association and the Green Investment Bank, which we would welcome and I will return to later. I thought Richard Kimblin's remarks on different disciplines were very pertinent.1 To my mind there is a range of different disciplines that are absolutely vital in helping to look at the interaction between energy and environmental law. Until recently I did not think of myself in any way as being a 'private finance' lawyer, but looking at environmental legal issues is becoming increasingly pertinent to how we go about doing what we do and I see these disciplines coming closer together. First, however, a few remarks about how timely I think this topic is as a theme for the UKELA conference. Energy policy, energy law and energy strategy have always been very political in nature. The exploitation of natural resources to deliver energy, how energy feeds into industrial strategy, how it impacts on the life of individual consumers of energy, and the difference between energy consumption in rich and poor countries are all political issues. Added to that, in recent years, is the impact of energy consumption and generation on the natural environment and on our climate, which is a very political subject. Over the last 12 months in particular in the UK we have seen a real maelstrom of political activity and political debate around energy, which has highlighted a number of things that are key to the debate.