The SMH has an article from the economics editor of The Guardian, calling for a green new deal / new world order - G20 must seize the opportunity for a Green New Deal. I don't think linking these two phrases is helpful.

The security clampdown will be the same. The press will gather in droves. The spin doctors will be in full flow, claiming victory for their respective governments. But in every other way the meeting that Gordon Brown will host on April 2 will be different from the last gathering of world leaders hosted by a British prime minister - Tony Blair's 2005 Gleneagles summit.

The world has changed irrevocably since the financial crisis began in 2007, grew last year and will probably result in 2009 being the first year the global economy has contracted since World War II. In Brown's view the era of laissez-faire is over. Although they disagree about the means, Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel agree.

A new world order is not going to be shaped in one day, but next week's meeting can help chart the right course, creating the framework for reform at a national level. Here are the five big areas that the Group of 20 should be concentrating on:

One: It's time for a new economics. The financial crisis and the environmental crisis are one and the same: crises of excess. There will be no lasting recovery without recognising that the world needs to slow down. For central banks it means a wider range of instruments so they can lean against the wind. More generally, it involves adopting the precautionary principle of elevating the local above the global - and having the humility to accept that the G20 does not have all the answers.

Two: A Green New Deal. If Roosevelt's big idea for the Great Depression was public works, then it makes sense to use this crisis to start the long, hard process of making economies more sustainable and less dependent on fossil fuels. A combination of low interest rates and fiscal expansion is ideal - provided the investment is used productively rather than for speculation. That will involve two concepts that have been anathema during the heyday of laissez-faire: industrial policy and credit controls.

A Green New Deal is vital for the world. The US has only 4 per cent of the world's population, but is responsible for 25 per cent of global CO2 emissions. The problems of the big three car makers provide Obama with an unprecedented opportunity to send the gas guzzler to the scrapheap. Rebalancing the global economy means countries such as China must increase domestic demand; one way to do that would be through investment in greener energy.

Three: Reform the International Monetary Fund. One reason the big Asian creditor nations built up huge surpluses before the crash of 2007 was that they were badly scarred by the financial crisis a decade earlier and were determined never again to be at the mercy of the IMF. Its response - as it has always been since 1944 - was that countries seeing capital flight should be subject to austerity programs.

So, reforms must overhaul the fund - not just to beef up its surveillance role but to make it less dominated by developed nations (especially the US) and less driven by the dogmatic belief that free movement of capital is always a force for good. The fund's big shareholders should go back to Keynes's blueprint and accept that the burden of adjustment in crises should fall on both creditors and debtors.

It is a concern that IMF reform appears to be low on the G20 agenda, particularly as the weakening grip of the US over the global economy makes change easier. The era of the unipolar world dancing to the tune of the Washington consensus lasted a scant two decades between the collapse of communism and the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

Four: Make the global financial system more progressive. The humbling of Wall Street and the City of London has made them dependent on support from the taxpayer and opened up the prospect for reform. The most pressing need is for action against tax havens, not just because the money lost to national exchequers could be better used but because the big financial institutions can move offshore if threatened with tougher regulation. There seems to be greater G20 unanimity on tax havens than on any other issue, and the summit should insist on tax havens providing information to any government that asks for it. The G20 should also back a currency transaction tax - set low initially - that would provide the money to hit the United Nations millennium development goals.

Five: Tougher global regulation. Brown should forge ahead with his plans for an international college of supervisors to provide cross-border oversight of multinational banks. The G20 should start work on an international agreement to split retail and investment banks - an updated form of the Glass-Steagall reform in the US in the 1930s. The capital adequacy regime for banks should be toughened up; credit-rating agencies should be made statutorily independent of the companies they monitor; the more exotic forms of derivatives products should be subject to the same sort of licensing regime as new drugs.

We will know governments are really serious about reform when they link the pay of regulators to the pay of bankers.

Ummm - if you link the pay of regulators to that of bankers you have just incentivised the regulators to allow bubbles to be inflated in the same way the bankers are tempted to do so (in their case via bonuses and stock options).

Its really not a good idea (unless you are a regulator who wants to get rich quick).

The Guardian has an article on "leading economists – including Nicholas Stern – calling for an immediate £277bn global fund to generate clean power, insulate homes and create jobs" - Nicholas Stern: Spend billions on green investments now to reverse economic downturn and halt climate change.

Governments across the world must commit to hundreds of billions of pounds in green investments within months in a combined attack on the global economic crisis and global warming, according to leading economists including Nicholas Stern.

The team says some $400bn (£277bn) should be channelled to support low-carbon technologies such as home insulation and renewable energy. Given the urgency of both the economic and climate crises, it wants the green investment made by this summer and to total 20% of the £1.4tn likely to be spent globally as fiscal stimulus.

Lord Stern, the former Treasury economist and now chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, said: "With billions about to be spent by governments on energy, buildings and transport, it is vital that these public investments do not lock us for many more decades into a costly and unsustainable high-carbon economy."

A report published today, written by many of the team that prepared the influential 2006 Stern Review on the economics of climate change, says politicians should not delay plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions because of the global slowdown. Instead, action to tackle climate change could form a central part of fiscal packages to stimulate national economies.

Lord Stern said: "The rich industrialised countries need to show leadership this year by committing to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050, compared with 1990, and their economic recovery plans need to be consistent with this target."

The report assesses the likely success of investment in a variety of green policies. It says the most effective of these could be energy efficiency measures for homes and public buildlings, boiler replacement programmes, efforts to fit cleaner appliances and lights, and a switch to renewable sources of heat, such as biomass. It also calls for greater investment in energy research and development, streamlined planning to promote renewable energy projects such as wind farms, and moves to encourage less polluting vehicles by adjusting car tax bands. One of the most cost-effective measures to reduce emissions, it says, is to encourage simple checks on tyre pressure. A green stimulus could provide a boost to the economy, increase the demand for labour and build the foundations for strong, sustainable growth in the future, the report says.

Alex Bowen of the Grantham Institute and formerly of the Bank of England, who is lead author on the report, said: "Our assessment shows that $400bn spent globally in the next 18 months on green policies and investments, such as smarter use of electricity, will help us to deal with current economic crisis, create jobs and help tackle climate change."

The Telegraph reports on talk of a green new deal in the UK to support the economy and the environment - Green new deal proposed by Lord Turner.

Lord Turner of Ecchinswell, the chairman of the Climate Change Committee, will report in September on ways the Government can relieve the recession at the same time as tackling climate change. Ideas include retraining people in the construction industry, who are unemployed because of a lack of building work, to fit new boilers, double glazing and lagging as part of a nationwide effort to improve energy efficiency in homes.

The concept of a "new green deal" was originally put forward by President Barack Obama. Inspired by President Roosevelt's New Deal to kick start the US economy in the Great Depression, the new president plans to create new jobs and commerce by pumping millions of dollars into switching to a low carbon economy.

Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister, has also spoken about his own plans to boost the ailing economy by investing in public works like hospital projects and rail links. But this is the first time that Lord Turner, who is in a powerful position to force change, has revealed his role in the project. As head of the Climate Change Committee, he will be reporting each year on how the Government is progressing on its plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.

But because of the recession this year, Lord Turner will also come up with a series of recommendations on how to boost the economy while reaching the environmental targets. Short term measures could include a Government programme to retrain unemployed builders to retrofit houses with insulation, training thousands of new coach drivers and public transport operators as part of improving public transport, investing in a superfast broadband that will enable more people to work cheaply at home and encouraging more wind and solar power to cut energy costs and boost the industry. In the long term the Government could also look at shifting the manufacturing industry towards more environmentally friendly products like electric cars in order to provide jobs and big public works like tidal power stations.

Newsweek has an article on how "cleaner energy can create jobs and reignite global growth" - Why It’s Time for a ‘Green New Deal’.

In rented offices on a quiet side street in Paris, not far from the Eiffel Tower, analysts for the International Energy Agency spend long days and nights crunching numbers about oil production and greenhouse-gas emissions. They're the staid, sober global accountants who watch over the power supply for the 30 rich countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and their many reports are dry and technical. But lately, the group's pronouncements have taken on more ominous overtones. With a sense of urgency bordering on desperation, the IEA has begun calling for radical changes in the way the world drives its cars, its factories and, indeed, the global economy. This month the agency will issue a collection of comprehensive reports declaring that "a global revolution is needed in ways that energy is supplied and used."

That kind of rhetoric has become familiar to U.S. voters, who've spent months listening to both presidential candidates tout their energy plans. Barack Obama has promised to "strategically invest" $150 billion over 10 years to build a clean-energy economy, one that will create 5 million new green jobs.

Starting this week, [Obama] will have a chance to make good on those promises. On the surface, that opportunity could hardly come at a worse time. Around the globe, the financial crisis plunging the world into recession has caused a wave of doubts, second-guessing and backsliding among many political and business leaders who've pledged allegiance to a green agenda. Italy and several Eastern European states have threatened to sink previously-agreed-upon European Union initiatives. U.S. venture capitalists are getting cautious about investing in clean-tech projects. China's leaders, after what seemed a crisis of environmental conscience during the Beijing Olympics, may reverse course as they see their economic growth drop into single digits.

But there are also powerful voices being raised amid the din of despair, saying that now is precisely the time to seize the initiative and launch the "global revolution" the IEA is calling for. And not just because it will stave off disasters two or three decades away, but also because it can provide the impetus to pull the global economy out of the slump it's in now and put it on a more solid foundation than it's had in at least a generation. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have already taken up the cause. United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last month called for a "Green New Deal" that would rebuild and reshape the economy of planet Earth in ways reminiscent of the programs that President Franklin Roosevelt used to revitalize the economy of the United States during the Great Depression. Indeed, even as the slowing economy and falling oil prices make it harder to justify huge new investments in a green economy, there's a strong counterargument that now is precisely the time to make them.

It took a great war, and all the military industries that fed the carnage, to bring America out of the Depression. But to a surprising degree, the world economy has been riding the strength of its hottest sectors ever since. By the 1990s, it was the rise of the Internet, which collapsed with the dotcom bubble and gave way to the housing boom and the financing that paid for it. In each of these recent cases it was the market that discovered and promoted a new engine for growth—creating millions of jobs and trillions in profits worldwide. Between 1996 and 2000, the tech sector created 1.6 million new U.S. jobs, according to Moody's Economy.com—roughly 14 percent of new U.S. job growth. In this decade, the financial sector accounted for the lion's share of U.S. corporate profit, while housing accounted for a staggering 40 percent of new U.S. job growth. Now those two stalled drivers are leading producers of unemployment: Goldman Sachs, for instance, announced a 10 percent staff cut last month.

The world, simply put, needs a new economic driver. Proponents of a Green New Deal argue that massive public investments can lay the groundwork for the private sector to develop whole new industries and create millions of jobs in the near term—and oh, by the way, save the planet in the medium term. "You are not just putting money into hot paper or into a financial-services sector that destroys itself," says Oliver Schäfer, policy director of the European Renewable Energy Council. "You are investing in clean technology, which is real business."

Indeed, in 2008 the promise of jobs may be a stronger incentive to go green than the threat of ice caps melting and coastal cities drowning in 2018 or 2048. In the euro zone, for instance, unemployment is expected to rise from 11.3 million to 14.5 million by the end of next year, pushing the rate up from 7.5 to 9 percent. In the U.S. the rate is 6.1 percent, but is expected to push toward 8 percent by the end of 2009, the highest in 25 years.

Alex Steffen has a post at WorldChanging declaring a bright green economic boom the first priority after the US elections - Job One, Day One: Bright Green Economic Recovery.

"We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late."
--Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

With the U.S. presidential race in its final few weeks, and momentum towards a possible Obama/ Democratic landslide building, it's worth beginning to ask, "What next? What happens here in America after the election?"

The world needs a strong and future-focused United States, but what we have is a U.S. nearing complete collapse. Our financial institutions have nearly failed, our dollar is weak, our government is in deficit spending, our people are neck-deep in debt. Our infrastructure is literally falling apart. Our military is in a shambles. Our health care system is the joke of the developed world, our education system fails half of our children, and we imprison more people than China. Meanwhile, we are the world's worst polluter, having built a car-dependent suburban way of life that pumps money out of our economy and planet-threatening emissions into the sky.

Many Americans, especially young Americans, see this nation's future disintegrating in front of their eyes, and realize that we no longer have options or time to debate. We have only one choice: launch ourselves immediately into a bright green economic transformation, or sink into a potentially irrecoverable decline.

We know that transformation is within our grasp. We know that we can move quickly to transition to smart growth and urban revitalization, green building, efficient electric cars, power generation from renewables, sustainable farming, ecological restoration of our wild lands and rivers, green taxes (with a carbon cap) and a strong commitment to education, public science and diplomacy. Solutions exist to the problems we face.

We know that making this transition quickly and strongly will produce millions of green jobs, and propel America back into the lead of the global economy while benefiting people everywhere. We know too that making this transition will leave Americans healthier, more prosperous and safer, while restoring fiscal stability to our government. A bright green transformation would not be a drag on the economy, but the means of its rescue. Finally, we know that only an all-out effort to make our prosperity sustainable offers us any hope of staving off a planetary ecological disaster. ...

The next U.S. president and congressional leaders will find themselves under immediate fire from neo-conservatives, reactionary businesses and industries that are irredeemably unsustainable (like the Oil and Coal Lobbies) and will find themselves very quickly pressured to scale back their plans, to speak in the most triangulated language possible, to confine change to the smallest, most halting steps. Those in the U.S. who oppose change are strong, wealthy, unprincipled and ruthless. They're already gearing up to demand that given the tough times, change must be weak, small and slow.

But we don't have another decade to embrace change. We may not have another election, even. Indeed, we need a president and congressional leaders who stand up on their very first days on the job, and commit this nation to big, bold, rapid and visionary change. We need to set the terms of the fight at a level with the order of magnitude of change we need. The stakes are a nation transformed within the next couple years. Without that, even a landslide will prove to have been meaningless.

The Independent has an article declaring a "green New Deal is essential if we are to enjoy a sustainable prosperity" - Green energy is not a middle-class conceit, more the only way forward.

So that's it, then, choruses the commentariat. Collapsing confidence, crashing stock markets and credit-starved banks spell doom not just for the economy, but for environmental concerns. Saving the planet may be all very well in the good times, but is an unaffordable luxury when things turn bad.

The argument is pervasive, persuasive and gaining ground. Even some environmentalists half-accept it, believing they should mute their message. But it is plain wrong. Never have green concerns and measures been more important.

How so? The second best reason is that this financial crisis is mild compared with the environmentally driven ones ahead. The climate crunch, the Stern report concluded, will cost a staggering 20 per cent of global growth if not averted. Peak oil – when the cheap and abundant fuel that has powered our growth becomes scarce and expensive – is likely to be even worse in its impact, reducing supplies of humanity's main source of energy, for the first time in history, before another can take its place.

And neither can wait. There's a growing consensus that emissions of carbon dioxide must head sharply downwards within a decade if global warming is not to run out of control. And peak oil, a growing number of experts believe, may well arrive even sooner.

But the most important reason is wholly positive. Developing a new green economy is our most promising path out of the present crisis. It is the best available new engine of growth, with the best chance of creating the tens of millions of jobs that will soon be desperately needed.

This Wednesday, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) will be making precisely this point, when it launches a new campaign in London. Its multi-million-dollar Green Economy Initiative – already being funded by the German and Norwegian governments and the European Commission – aims to convince the world, that, far from restricting growth, tackling the growing planetary environmental crisis would accelerate it.

UNEP plans to "make and communicate a strong and convincing economic case". As The Independent on Sunday exclusively reported last week, it envisages a Green New Deal to create jobs, revive the international economy, slash poverty and head off environmental disaster.

The launch comes not a moment too soon, for the tide is already flowing strongly in the other direction. Last Thursday it threatened to sweep away the prospects for agreeing a strong successor to the Kyoto Protocol – the best, and last, chance to bring climate change under control.

Eight European leaders – led by Donald Tusk the Prime Minister of Poland, and Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's controversial premier – revolted against ambitious targets for increasing renewable energy adopted at a similar summit just 18 months ago, saying they could no longer afford to meet them. The revolt is serious because it threatens to undermine the authority of the EU, which is leading the drive towards a new climate treaty, and to give other countries the excuse not to act.

It is also shortsighted, for renewables are one of the most important, and fastest growing, parts of the already booming green economy. Worldwide, investment in them grew four-fold, from $33.4bn (£19.3bn) to $148.4bn between 2004 and 2007, Michael Liebreich, CEO of analysts New Energy Finance, will report in the next issue of the UN's environmental magazine, Our Planet.

Renewables' share of Germany's electricity supply has almost tripled to more than 14 per cent over the past 10 years, creating 250,000 jobs. In China 600,000 people are employed in making and installing solar water heaters: they are now used in one in 10 of the nation's homes – a proportion forecast to rise to one in two by 2030. Chinese wind-energy capacity has doubled in each of the past two years, while its production of solar cells soared from virtually nothing in 2005 to the biggest in the world last year. Worldwide, renewables now employ 2.3 million people, a figure expected almost to quadruple by 2030. ...

"The 20th century economy, now in such crisis, was driven by financial capital," says Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director. "The 21st-century one is going to have to be based on developing the world's natural capital to provide the lasting jobs and wealth that are needed, particularly for the poorest people on the planet." He cites Mexico, which is already employing 1.5 million poor people to plant and manage the forests that conserve the country's soil and water supplies.

It makes economic, as well as environmental sense. If the world's two billion desperately poor people can be economically enfranchised, they will become a huge new market, helping to create a new world prosperity.