By Dennis Posadas

Recently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared officially that six greenhouse gases namely carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride, are a threat to public health and welfare.

Based on scientific evidence, particularly that summarized in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of 2007, these greenhouse gases produce global warming which is responsible for stronger storms, changes in weather patterns, higher sea levels that inundate formerly habitable coastal areas, and other effects.

This declaration by the EPA will hopefully be a precursor to how the United States will act in the Copenhagen summit this year. Copenhagen is where the world’s leaders will gather this year to find a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol which the Bush administration refused to ratify.

Obama has long made it a priority to make the United States drive the technology for clean energy forward, in order to reduce greenhouse gases and cut their dependence on OPEC oil.

Let me point out what many people already know, but some do not. If you shift from fossil fuel based energy (e.g. coal) to clean energy, you will cut greenhouse gas emissions.

But how exactly does this affect the Philippines? Well for starters, we have a new Renewable Energy Act that was signed into law last year by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Key features of this law include tax incentives (no tax for seven years for clean energy businesses), a reduced tax after the seven year period has elapsed, payment for missionary (off-grid) electrification, incentives for domestic development and manufacturing. It also features a Renewable Portfolio Standard and a Feed-in-Tariff mechanism that was popularized in Europe, which gave rise to many of their clean technology companies there.

What this means for the Philippines is that we simply need to get our act together , drive our academe and R&D institutes to do research on clean energy (e.g. micro hydro, micro wind, biogas, solar, energy conservation, biofuels, etc.), and try to transfer these technologies to the market as soon as feasible. In this way, we are able to create new green technology jobs and industries, and put the Philippines on the world map as a leader in clean and green technologies.

Surprisingly, agriculture also contributes to global warming. The manure from farm animals produces methane. But fortunately the solution is a win-win solution. If you use the methane from the manure to generate electricity, you cut global warming and you also save electricity for the farm.

We simply have to pick the niches we will play in. According to Fortune magazine, there was a company in China that was given around $4m in seed money a few years ago, not by the Chinese national government, but by the local provincial government of Wuxi, China. That company, Sun Tech, is now one of the largest solar photovoltaic companies in the world, and employs thousands of workers and generates several billion dollars a year in revenue.

In India, a company called Suzlon Energy came out of nowhere to compete toe to toe in the large wind turbine category, with well-known companies like General Electric.

Maybe we can specialize in typhoon resistant micro wind turbines that are ideal for tropical climates. Or micro hydro turbines. Or micro methane powerplants for agriculture. Or whatever we feel we can be world-class in. The point is to get the ecosystem going so that our researchers, our entrepreneurs, our investors, our policymakers, get together and decide that we are going to do this.

Because we have limited resources, we should pick what technology we will be world-class in, and pour all our resources there, instead of trying to develop everything. We should begin to develop local technology companies that will be world leaders, and begin to shift our economy from a cheap manufacturing destination to one which develops and manufactures the products here.

All the ingredients are there to build a clean tech sector in the Philippines. It is simply a matter of will on our part.

Dennis Posadas is the author of Jump Start: A Technopreneurship Fable (Singapore: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009) and Rice & Chips: Technopreneurship and Innovation in Asia (Singapore: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007)