About the author:
Mikael Freitag is International Officer and a member of the executive board of Venstres Ungdom (Liberal Youth of Denmark). He is actively engaged in several international organizations and works professionally with democracy promotion and communication.
We live in a decade defined by climate anxiety. From Jakarta to Johannesburg, documentaries, data dashboards, and daily headlines all tell the same story: rising temperatures, shrinking biodiversity, strained social contracts. The sense that the world is sliding into irreversible decline is so pervasive that the Oxford English Dictionary recently added “eco-paralysis” to its watch-list of emerging words – a neat encapsulation of the fear that nothing we do will matter.
That fatalism, however, stands in stark contrast to another, less appreciated reality – the astonishing capacity of human beings to solve problems when they are free to experiment, trade, and compete. For every graph pointing downward, there is a clean-tech prototype, a novel business model, or a public–private partnership pointing the other way. History suggests that progress does not stall because challenges get bigger; it stalls when societies lose the confidence to innovate their way out of them.
Growth is not the enemy
A common thread in today’s environmental debate is the suspicion that economic growth and ecological stewardship are mutually exclusive. Yet the empirical record is more nuanced. Since 1990, the OECD economy has expanded by roughly 80 percent while sulphur-dioxide emissions, the primary driver of acid rain, have fallen by almost 90 percent. The same markets that once rewarded coal are now rewarding renewables, because innovators discovered profitable ways to do things better.
Growth, in other words, is simply a measure of human creativity finding new avenues. The task is not to halt it, but to channel it toward outcomes that respect planetary boundaries. That is precisely what the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) invite us to do: decouple prosperity from pollution and ensure that progress is shared. Governments and NGOs have crucial roles in setting targets and redistributing gains, but only businesses, small, medium, and large, can turn abstract goals into the mass-produced goods and scalable services that make those goals real.
Businesses already delivering SDG value
Consider Grundfos, the Danish pump manufacturer whose energy-efficient motors move water with up to 60 percent less electricity than conventional pumps, directly supporting SDG 6 (clean water) and SDG 7 (clean energy). Or Danfoss, whose smart-control valves enable hyper-efficient heating and cooling systems in skyscrapers from Singapore to São Paulo. Less headline-grabbing, but equally vital, are thousands of green start-ups financing solar micro-grids in West Africa, turning agricultural waste into bio-char in India, or leasing electric motorbikes in Indonesia. These companies contribute more to decarbonisation per tax-euro than any speech delivered at COP-28.
What unites such firms is a willingness to see climate risk as market opportunity. They are not motivated primarily by CSR statements; they are motivated by the prospect of meeting genuine needs at competitive prices. That is why their contributions scale.
The bottleneck is bureaucracy
If solutions exist, why are we not deploying them faster? Ask any clean-tech entrepreneur and the answer is depressingly consistent: bureaucracy. Permitting delays, overlapping standards, and byzantine customs rules raise transaction costs and lengthen payback times. A 2024 World Bank study estimates that clean-energy projects in Sub-Saharan Africa face an average regulatory delay of 30 months – long enough to sink the internal-rate-of-return calculations on which venture capital depends.
The problem is not limited to emerging markets. In the European Union, obtaining an onshore-wind permit can still take six to eight years. In the United States, the queue of renewable projects awaiting grid connection has surpassed 11,000. Each delay is, in effect, a subsidy for the status quo.
Unleashing Green Enterprise
To address these issues, we must try to correct the imbalance through four liberal reforms to unlock innovation in green energy. Firstly, Every new environmental rule should include an automatic review clause. If compliance costs outweigh measurable public benefits after, say, five years, the rule should lapse or be rewritten. Regulatory humility is not deregulation for its own sake; it is evidence-based governance that keeps pace with technological change. By sunsetting regulations when they no longer play a justifiable role will ensure a dynamic market which is not overburdened by regulations which have outlived their purpose.
Secondly, we can speed up innovation by creating fast-track corridors for SDG-aligned products. Green pumps, zero-emission building materials, and life-saving diagnostics should clear customs and safety certification in days, not months. The WHO’s pre-qualification system for vaccines offers a template: once a product meets a globally recognised standard, it gains accelerated access everywhere. Additionally, we must look to tax what we do not want, and stop taxing what we do want to have. Carbon pricing remains the single most efficient way to align market incentives with climate goals. Conversely, value-added tax on repairs, refurbished electronics, or heat-pump installations should be cut to zero. Fewer hidden levies equal faster diffusion of green solutions.
Finally we should tie trade and aid together to promote a global approach to innovation. Development finance should be conditional on local rules that protect investors and consumers alike. When the EU or the United States guarantees loans for wind farms in Kenya, they should also insist on one-stop licensing and transparent grid-connection queues. That approach helps the host country, the foreign investor, and, most importantly, the planet.
Growth with a conscience
Critics may ask reasonable questions about accounting for communities displaced by mining for battery metals, or about how we ensure indigenous rights, or about the constraints of resource limits. Ultimately, these questions matter and they should be engaged with in a productive way. No growth model is sustainable if it tramples human rights or local ecosystems. But the answer is not to stop innovating; it is to innovate responsibly.
Supply-chain traceability, third-party auditing, and stakeholder capitalism are no longer radical ideas; they are baseline expectations in many markets. Legislators should strengthen them where necessary, but also recognise that holding back entire sectors because a few actors behave badly would be a greater injustice – especially to poorer countries that still lack reliable power, clean water, and decent jobs.
Why the Global South matters
More than 85 percent of the world’s population now lives in low- and middle-income countries. Their development trajectory will decide whether the SDGs succeed or fail. If these nations adopt yesterday’s technologies, global emissions will continue to rise even if Europe reaches net-zero tomorrow. Conversely, if they leapfrog straight to clean grids and circular business models, humanity may yet stay within 1.5 °C.
Here the liberal case for open markets becomes self-evident. Tariff-free access to green capital goods, intellectual-property pools for life-saving medicines, and cross-border carbon-credit markets are not charity; they are enlightened self-interest. They allow emerging economies to grow without repeating the dirty phases through which the rich world passed.
A call to leadership — and partnership
The SDGs are ambitious precisely because they presume global cooperation. But cooperation does not mean top-down planning alone. It also means unleashing the bottom-up dynamism of entrepreneurs who see unmet needs not as tragedies, but as invitations to build.
Governments must therefore play dual roles: regulator and facilitator. Regulator, to guarantee that competition is fair and externalities are priced. Facilitator, to ensure that good ideas need weeks, not years, to move from lab bench to laboratory of the real world. NGOs, universities, and multilateral banks can smooth the path, mentor new entrants, and de-risk frontier markets. Yet without businesses free to invent and investors free to back them, the entire SDG edifice is little more than a wish list.
Yes, the clock is ticking. Yes, 2030 is uncomfortably close. But despair is a luxury the planet cannot afford. We know what to build: smarter power grids, regenerative farms, circular factories, resilient health systems. We know who can build them: risk-takers with skills in engineering, finance, logistics, and community organising. What they need is permission to act at the speed and scale that the moment demands.
If we strip away outdated barriers and align incentives with long-term value, businesses, from century-old multinationals to two-person start-ups, will do what they have always done: solve problems, create wealth, and, in the process, lift living standards without breaching the planet’s ecological ceiling. That is the growth story the world needs now, and it is entirely within our grasp.
References
Oxford English Dictionary. (2021, 21 October). New words notes October 2021: Climate and environment update. Oxford University Press
Berkeley Lab. (2024, March 6). Grid connection backlog grows by 30 % in 2023, dominated by requests for solar, wind and energy storage. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
European Commission. (2023, October 24). Immediate actions for the European wind power industry [Pressrelease]. https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_5185 European Commission
OECD. (2002). Working together towards sustainable development: The OECD experience (Figure 2.1, SO₂ emissions trend). OECD Publishing.
Reuters. (2024, July 4). Years-long wait for permits blocking European wind farms, industry says.
Reuters. (2025, May 20). Google brings AI to grid teams, slashing . connection times.
WindEurope. (2023, May 4). Europe still takes too long to permit wind farms – “Simplify and accelerate is the way forward”. WindEurope Newsroom.
World Bank. (2025, February 19). An evaluation of the World Bank Group’s support to electricity access in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2015-24 (Approach Paper).
OECD. (2020). Environment at a glance 2020 (pp. 28–31, Fig. 5 “Air-pollutant emissions have been decoupled from economic growth”). OECD Publishing .
*Please note all content reflects the opinions and views of the author alone, not necessarily those of European Liberal Youth
Harnessing Business-Led Innovation for the Green Transition: Why the Sustainable Development Goals need entrepreneurs as much as diplomats