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Big Business Fuels Green Boom
Fear of dot-com-like bust grows as money chases scarce ideas
By Colleen Barry
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Posted Sep 1, 07 5:17 PM CDT
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(Newser)
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Greed and idealism are converging as big business propels today’s clean energy industry, CNN reports. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are pulling in capital for oil and coal alternatives, while across the pond, London financiers swapped more than $30 billion last year in "pollution permits"—credits companies can sell if their factories produce less pollution than permitted.
Critics fear that today’s green market boom could inflate and burst like the '90s dot-com bubble. "There's a lot of money chasing not so many ideas, so the prices are going up fast,” one analyst says. Some experts fear that a drop in oil prices could undo progress in fossil fuels. The UN plans to fight off such concerns by forging another treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012.