Absolutely. Thank you for the question. It's a great one.
I think the idea that oppressive environmental investment is bad for the economy is, honestly, at this point a misnomer. That was true 20 years ago when the cost of many of these interventions were prohibitive. Now, because of how much cheaper technologies have become, they make a lot more sense.
It's interesting that you bring up the short versus long-term debate here. In our modelling, the job impacts of many of these clean investments are really towards the short term. If you think about building a new renewable energy plant, the whole idea is not to have a significant employee base in the long term because the plants run themselves. However, there is significant employment in the short term and, according to the modelling that we've done with Vivid Economics, a consultancy based out of London, the job creation prospects of those clean investments in almost every case are higher than a dirty alternative. That's the job side.
You've also asked about the economic multiplier side. We've been modelling GVA, or gross value added. Again, in the short term the gross value added from a particular investment is equivalent to, and in many cases greater than, investments in dirty alternatives. The dirty alternative to clean energy is coal or gas; in sustainable transport it's just a new road, for example.
The long-term growth that we talk about is enabled by the short-term investments. Take clean energy, for example. The long-term growth there is a result of much cheaper, long-term access to electricity, which enables your electric vehicles and a transition to more efficient agriculture. All of those different things are enabled by that investment in the long term.
That's the short versus long-term dynamic we talk about.