Australian IT Expert Bruce McCabe: Global Businesses to Spend $600 Billion on ‘Green Accounting’ (Part 1 of 3)
Submitted by EnergyTechStocks.com
The cost to global business for the information technology that will be needed for sustainability accounting and carbon footprint measuring will come to nearly $600 billion over the next few years, three times what companies spent preparing for Y2K, according to Bruce McCabe of Australian IT research firm S2 Intelligence Pty Ltd.
From his firm’s offices in Sydney, McCabe told EnergyTechStocks.com that the growing number of regulatory initiatives by governments around the world, together with market forces being driven by a global population increasingly aware and concerned about pollution and global warming, will force companies everywhere “to measure with much more fidelity” their impacts on the environment “if they want to do business.”
McCabe, whose firm has just issued a green IT accounting forecast entitled “The Future of Business 2008-2018,” said the cost to businesses will range from $2,000 to $3,000 for a small firm that will need simply to upgrade its software and purchase relatively inexpensive equipment such as smart meters, up to as much as $50 to $100 million for a large multinational company with a large network of suppliers and distributors that will need a new sophisticated computer network to keep track of thousands of separate actions.
Although businesses everywhere are about to get hit with a big new expenditure, McCabe emphasized that they should make up much, if not most, of their outlay as this new equipment lowers their energy costs by optimizing a business’s energy consumption. Knowing exactly how much it has reduced its energy consumption and, hence, its carbon dioxide emissions (aka, its carbon footprint) will enable a company to participate in the global carbon trading market that’s rapidly starting to take shape. (Whether or not a company will make money in this market will depend on whether it reduces its footprint below a regulatorily specified annual limit.)
Of the nearly $600 billion businesses are about to spend on green accounting systems, McCabe said about $90 billion will be spent by U.S. firms. He added that about $190 billion will be spent by Asia/Pacific firms, a category that includes China and Japan.
Coming tomorrow, March 26, in Part 2 of ‘Green Accounting’ – from automobiles to breakfast cereals, every item we buy will carry a carbon footprint label
