by David Sassoon -
Sep 23rd, 2009 
Deutsche Bank last week released a research note of curious interest just ahead of this busy week of international climate meetings and upcoming Senate action on federal climate law. Called Creating Jobs and Growth: The German Green Experience, it reviewed the policy architecture responsible for Germany's rise as a global clean tech leader over the last decade.
The plot line goes like this: Thanks especially to a mechanism called a "feed-in tariff," Germany has been able to create 300,000 new jobs since 2000 in a booming renewable energy sector, with renewable energy supply more than doubling, jumping from 6.3 percent of total electricity supply in 2000 to 14 percent in 2007. The people of the European nation of 82 million also saw only modest electricity price rises.
Over the same time period in the U.S., the contribution of renewable sources of energy to total supply has contracted, going from 10.1 percent in 2000 to 9.4 percent in 2007, with the sector still struggling today against a right wing campaign that vilifies the very idea of green jobs and a clean energy future as a socialist plot to undermine the U.S. economy.
The brief report from one of the largest investment banks in the world tells a different story, with a clean energy boom being an outcome that any genuine capitalist would be proud to have engineered. But the report also sounds a warning to U.S. lawmakers: Failure to enact climate and energy legislation will keep investors away from U.S. markets.
"Capital is a free-flowing system," Bruce Kahn a Deutsche Asset Management senior investment analyst and co-author of the report told SolveClimate. "If the U.S. is not an attractive place to invest in renewable energy, capital will flow elsewhere. The German example shows how capital can be attracted when there are a clear set of policies."
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