Cutting carbon a good business opportunity, private sector told
Whatever the global climate agreement reached next year in Paris looks like, the private sector will need to dramatically step up efforts to cut global carbon emissions, negotiators and analysts said at U.N. climate talks in Lima Thursday. Political leaders including U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, U.N. Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon and Peru’s President Ollanta Humala urged the private sector to play a bigger role in cutting carbon emissions because it makes good business sense...Companies have long been peripheral in the UN-backed talks, but the leaders said the need to engage private capital is becoming increasingly obvious, given the scale of the problem...Total climate-friendly investment fell in 2013, to $331 billion from $359 billion the year before...according to the Climate Policy Initiative... That lags far behind the $5 trillion to $6 trillion that the International Energy Agency says is needed in low-carbon energy investment through 2020.