Emissions reduction

Despite that it accounts for 3 percent of global emissions, shipping has largely been exempt from emission reductions requirements to date.

The lack of interest in reducing emissions from shipping has also been expressed in the venture capital community. Germany-based SkySails – a maker of towing kite propulsion systems for today’s modern maritime shipping industry – received $10.3 million of venture capital funding way back in 2006. California's KiteShip, pursuing a similar idea, won an award at the California Cleantech Open, also in 2006. Since then SkySails, in particular, has been making gradual commercial progress.

Beyond all the discussions about emissions reductions and capping and trading at the COP15 climate change meetings this December, expect to hear a persistent sub-theme about tech transfer between developed countries and lesser developed ones.

And the topic of cleantech intellectual property rights (IPR)—and who should own them—is only going to become more of a focus as clean technologies are asked to scale, particularly in the developing world.

If you put a cleantech twist on the reality television show Amazing Race it would look something like the BioMotion Tour, which kicked off earlier this week in Paris running until Nov. 12 through seven countries and 35 cities in 31 days.

But instead of traveling by airplanes, taxis, rental cars, boats and on foot, the BioMotion Tour is, as the name implies, all about a fleet of cars zooming from one city to the next powered by different kinds of biofuels. The cars run on well-established fuels such as vegetable oil, biodiesel and ethanol, and also next-generation fuels including biogas (see Sainsbury's expands biogas-vehicle trial).