A killing in clean technology

We'll be moving agricultural zones, redesigning cities, and so it goes on. This level of economic change will also need a lot of services. Banks and brokers will create a whole new set of financial products. Accounting firms will measure and audit carbon emitted and carbon saved. Land values may increase to support bio-fuels and to plant carbon absorbing trees. Uranium and gas volumes and prices will increase as coal becomes the new tobacco, unless they can get carbon capture and storage to work, in which case that will also be enormous.

The International Energy Agency estimates that if CCS works we will need to install CO2 capture at 35 coal-fired and 20 gas-fired power plants every year from 2010 to 2050 at a cost of about $1.5 billion each. That's more than $80 billion, every year for 40 years.

Like any rapid transformation there will be great opportunities, great risks, bursting bubbles, huge successes and dramatic failures. Just the stuff the markets are great at managing when good policy is put in place to guide them.

So this is, without doubt, the largest and fastest economic transformation the world has seen. Not just because we can do it, like the information revolution or industrial revolution, but because business and government have decided we absolutely have to do it, and most scientists are saying do it quickly because the risks posed by inaction are getting higher every year.

That's why investors look at it and see a kind of dotcom boom on steroids with military support. It doesn't get any bigger than this. Hold on for the ride.