Environmental Capital: Following the Greenbacks:

Welcome to Environmental Capital, The Wall Street Journal’s new daily blog about the business of the environment. It’s not just about melting ice sheets. It’s about the flow of money.

The global-warming debate is at a tipping point that makes it a massive economic story. There’s widespread agreement that climate change is an issue that isn’t going away. The real debate is over what the world will do about it – and who will foot the bill. That scramble for solutions already is beginning to redistribute capital among countries, companies and investors. We hope to follow that ferment.

There’s no end of hyperbole in the hubbub about saving the planet. Carbon offsets, renewable energy, hybrid cars – all are sensible ideas drawing massive amounts of investment. How much they do for the planet will depend on the details of how they’re rolled out. We’ll drill into those details.

The blog will provide multiple daily takes on the business of the environment, from corporate moves to regulatory shifts to investment analysis. Each morning will start with Green Ink, a roundup of news from around the world that will mine the dead-tree media and the blogosphere alike. Then we’ll weigh in throughout the day with posts looking at the companies, people and ideas shaping this new energy landscape. We’ll bring in voices from around the Journal: reporters covering different parts of the globe and different players in the economy.

http://envirowonk.com/:

EnviroWonk.com was created by Hank Green and Dave Loos. Hank started EcoGeek.org a couple years ago and felt that the world needed a politics blog. So he started talking to his friend Dave, who’d spent a few years in D.C. covering environmental politics for Greenwire, a subscription based newswire.

Of course, with their powers combined, there was no choice but to start up an Eco-Politics blog. And as dave is undoubtably an envirowonk, the name just sprang into existence.

We like to think that EnviroWonk fills a surprisingly empty niche. Enviros can complain all the want about being underserved in the 2008 elections, but take a look at the blogosphere and you’ll notice we’re underserved here as well. EnviroWonk finally fills that void, with insightful, informed, commentary. And yes, with the world the way it is, it’s hard not to crack a joke now and again.

Ever the optimist, I’m hopeful that both of these new sites add something useful to the ongoing conversation. All niceties aside, I’m slightly more confident about the motives and therefore the results we’ll see from EnviroWonk.com than Environmental Capital, if only because the latter is part of Rupert Murdoch’s sprawling media empire.

But both sites are highlighting critical areas in our collective ongoing efforts to deal with global warming. I know that many people (some of whom aren’t shy about e-mailing me) don’t share my endless fascination with public policy and the business side of our evolving situation. I think that’s a shame, because of the importance of these arenas to our shared future. Public policy can have an enormous influence on how we extract and consume fossil fuels–think of the ramifications of one of my favorite notions, replacing the payroll tax in the US with a much higher federal gasoline tax–and all signs are that we’re headed for a much more activist role for federal, state, and local governments. Whether you think that’s a good thing (as I do) or a bad thing, it’s in everyone’s best interest for as many consumers and voters to know what’s going on and to get involved in the process. You know–all that public activism stuff I yammer on about.

The business side is equally important, simply because so much of the R&D to develop new technologies, whether funded privately or publicly, is done by for-profit interests that then (attempt to) turn them into products. Wind turbines, wave and tidal generators, thin film solar panels, more fuel efficient vehicles, etc. plus the army of people it takes to sell and service them, are all part of the capitalistic mix. These companies are on the leading edge of the effort to reshape our entire economy in response to the growing awareness of the global warming mess we’re in, as well as rising oil prices.

Along similar thematic lines, see Warming Law, Hill Heat, and cleantech.