The Week in Cleantech is a weekly roundup of our favorite cleantech and alt energy blog posts and stories from across the web. If you know of a good piece that you think should be included here, don’t hesitate to let us know! This week, we particularly liked… On Tuesday, Mike Millikin at Green Car Congress detailed Citi’s recently-unveiled climate change initiative for us. Yet more institutional money formally chasing climate and cleantech investments. On Wednesday, Mark Gunther gave us the run-down of Merrill Lynch’s green metrics. The issue of how blue-chip firms are positioning themselves for a carbon-constrained world is beginning to creep into the mainstream, and you can expect more such initiatives in the years ahead. On Wednesday, Dallas Kachan at Inside Greentech took us inside the Silicon Valley cleantech investor brain. On Thursday, Richard Kang at Seeking Alpha told us that the hurricane futures market required investor attention. This is indeed a very interesting (a growing) area of environmental finance. The theory here is that as the weather becomes wackier because of climate change, various commercial entities will seek to hedge their weather risks by by-passing conventional insurance solutions and going straight for the risk-taking appetite of financial markets. A growing pool of capital, including hedge funds, is now willing to step in and take the opposite side of these weather “bets”. On Thursday, Biopact informed us that biofuels were becoming a headache for OPEC. Good! Let us hope that not only biofuels, but also tougher fuel efficiency standards and plug-in hybrids turn this headache into a splitting migraine. Unfortunately, something tells me that OPEC will fight tooth-and-nail to ensure that fossil fuels retain their place in our economy. It would also be naive to assume that the US really wants big holders of its debt to go broke. After all, we don’t want all those safely-stored Greenbacks offloaded on global currency markets, do we? On Friday, Martin LaMonica at CNET News informed us that clean tech VCs were putting money on solar, not IPOs. Investor surveys are always a great starting point for a winning contrarian bet – when everyone’s rushing somewhere, it makes it hard to find good value, so it’s a good idea to seek that value elsewhere.
