Pressure on the green economy
BIG political news last week was a U-turn on a spending pledge from a political party that’s not in power and so made an unfunded promise that might never have had to implement.
But it’s OK when you can roll back on £28bn a year in green investment when you can blame the Tories for crashing the economy. If you haven’t got the money for such investment, because the finances are instead required to support ‘hard-working families’ in straightened times, then you have to scale back.
It’s a move with a double impact on Guernsey. Both politically, with the island facing the same Paris Agreement commitments with a similar lack of spare cash to get there, and economically, with the impact it might have on our green and sustainable finance sector.
The island’s electricity strategy, agreed last year, was largely a principles-based approach that didn’t look too hard at the numbers, in part because much of the spending was going to happen anyway. But continued economic and financial pressures in the island are going to continue to stress every step on the way to net zero.
Meanwhile, as Guernsey Finance says, ‘sustainable finance is a golden thread that runs through every sector of Guernsey’s specialist financial services industry’.
But decisions like this, and the knock-on impact, might well stress that sector, the green outlook, and the local economy.