Clean Innovation

But the magnitude of the opportunity, its importance to society, and the array of market barriers facing clean innovators means that government also has a critical role to play. [...] Clean innovation is the through-line connecting and driving the major business trends of the twenty-first century, and it represents the greatest economic opportunity of our age. [...] Scratch under the surface of a smartphone or probe the backstory of the canola harvest or the oil sands boom, and you’ll find that the private investment and entrepreneurship that drove the innovation into the marketplace was amply backed by government research and public money. [...] The barriers along the path from idea to product are many, and they loom large in the early stages of the innovation process, when success and profitability can be many risky and uncertain years away. [...] It emerged from lab research led by physicist David Keith at the University of Calgary in the young field of geoengineering — the investigation of ways to intervene in the atmosphere at planetary scale in order to reverse the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions.