A cheerier note: China green tax / Australia / new Planetary Stewardship paper

And then you get snippets to cheer you up:

- China’s State Council is studying the introduction of a green tax. They're also planning to cut emissions the unit of GDP by 16% within 4 years; that's very ambitious.

- Australia's Parliament passed carbon tax legislation. And their $10 billion green investment bank (they're calling it a Clean Energy Finance Corporation) should be through Parliament mid-next year and operational in 2013.

- I read a stimulating new paper on "The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship" by a group of the world's leading climate scientists (e.g. Will Steffen, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Katherine Richardson). It's a robustly drawn picture of where we are in terms of our planetary system, and how quickly moving to effective planetary stewardship is essential to our survival. It reminds us all of why we're doing what we're doing; worth a read.

Back to a bonds focus next week as we launch our Climate Bond Standards Scheme. Can we bear the wait!