问题详情

cleaning up
The current row over climate change sounds all too familiar. Germany, host of this year"s G8 summit, is trying to get the world to agree on what to do when the Kyoto protocol on curbing greenhouse gases runs out in 2012. America, which dislikes the tough targets that the Europeans want the world to sign up to, is proposing separate negotiations between the world"s big emitters. Environmentalists accuse it of trying to sidetrack the issue. The lineup is much like the one that led to America"s withdrawal from the Kyoto agreement in 2001. Yet to conclude from this that nothing has changed would be wrong, Attitudes have shifted sharply over the past six years, most importantly among businesspeople. Until recently business tended to take a dim view of the idea that the climate was changing. The notion implied that industry had damaged the planet, and should therefore pay for the consequences. Since companies couldn"t see the damage they were supposed to have done, they preferred, by and large, to argue that it wasn"t happening.
No longer. These days businesspeople are falling over each other to prove their greenness. That"s partly because the politics of climate change have moved so fast in America. Five bills in Congress would introduce federal controls. Most of the serious presidential candidates for 2008 favour them. California now has binding targets to cut CO2 emissions, and other states plan to follow. Many chief executives have come round to the view that federal controls would be better than a patchwork of state laws. And if federal regulations are coming, companies need to support them, in order to be involved in designing them. Hence the need to be seen to be green. However, companies are not driven purely by fear of regulation. Cleaner energy means new technologies, and new money to be made. Businesspeople concerned to position themselves well for a carbon-constrained future must do more than get themselves photographed with A1 Gore: they need to invest in technologies that will produce cleaner energy. There"s scope for new investment. In 2003, the most recent year for which figures are available, America"s power-generation business, arguably the world"s biggest single polluter, spent a rather smaller proportion of its revenues on R&D than did America"s pet-food business. But that"s beginning to change, as our survey this week makes clear. Global investment in renewable power-generation, biofuels and low-carbon technologies rose from $28 billion in 2004 to $71 billion in 2006, according to New Energy Finance, are search company. The stock prices of clean-energy companies have been rocketing up. Silicon Valley"s venture capitalists are piling into the business, convinced that they can design revolutionary technologies, bring down prices and turf out incumbents in the energy business just as they did in the software business. Oil firms, carmakers, power generators, nervous of being outmanoeuvred, are jacking UP their investments in renewables and biofuels.
As the likes of General Electric and BP put money into cleaner technologies, costs will fall. The price of a watt of solar photovoltaic capacity dropped from around $20 in the 1970s to $2.70 in 2004 (though a silicon shortage, caused by rocketing demand as a result of madly generous German subsidies, has pushed it up since). The price of wind power has fallen from $2 per kilowatt hour in the 1970s to 5-8 cents now, compared with 2-4 cents for coal-fired power. More investment will bring prices down further; and, as the gap shrinks, so the costs of switching from dirty energy to the clean sort will fall.
Yet business"s new enthusiasm for dean energy is a fragile green shoot in a dark landscape. Much could happen to crush it. A sustained fall m the oil price, for instance, would undermine investment in costlier, cleaner technologies. But the bigger risk is political. Businesses are investing in alternatives to fossil
A．are keen to demonstrate their green credentials.
B．do not believe that they have damaged the environment at all.
C．believe that governments should take responsibility for the environment.请帮忙给出正确答案和分析，谢谢！