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Is the sustainability profitable?

In just three weeks there will be the biggest share offer in the history of the Spanish stock exchange market, IBERDROLA RENOVABLES, and there is something turning from a something like a short live trend to a new way of managing our lives.

It has been more than 18 years since the toxic leak in Bopal (India) that had a cost of more than 4.000 dead and around 180.000 wounded and affected, and in 2007 we could see that an environmental consciences is around the globe from carmakers to American candidates to Nobel Prize winners.

In the old Continent there is a compromise on behalf of the European Union of achieving the use of up to 12% of green energies for the 2.010 and 20% on 2.020. With the petrol prices rolling high to 100 USD , there are many OECD countries that want to reduce their dependence on usual essence providers as Iran or Venezuela, so is not difficult to predict that the demand of alternative energy sources will rocket in the near future.


The most palpable demonstration of this new tendency is the Kyoto Protocol that implied the compromise of a minimum of 55 countries responsible of the 55% of the world emissions, fact that was achieved with the ratification of Russia in September 2004. The objective of the signatories is that in the period 2008-2012, the emissions on the European Union will reduce to a 8% from the figures of 1990 and on the world up to 5,2%. It has been said that the cost of achieving the goals of the Protocol will be of 19 thousand million euros in the next four years and could mean a reduction of the GDP of almost a 1% in the countries that applied it.

Analyzing that such global players as EEUU or China had not retaliated or signed the Protocol the companies will find that we are not playing in a level field in the globalize market of the third millennium. What are the most immediate consequences of having environmental taxes in some countries and not in others? A student of first year of economics would advise that in order to maintain the margin of benefit of a product or a service, maintaining other factors equal, the right decision is to move where those extra costs do not exist, hence delocalization.