Welcome, readers, to Green Inc., a daily churn of insights, observations and dispatches from that often contentious place where business, politics and the environment meet.

For those of you who came looking for The International Herald Tribune’s Business of Green blog, fear not. Green Inc. is not replacing that publication — you’ll find the full archives here — so much as it is embracing and expanding the global dialog that the IHT has nurtured for the last year and a half.

Indeed, regular readers of Business of Green are already familiar with James Kanter, who will now contribute dispatches to this space from his perch in Brussels.

Joining James is Kate Galbraith, formerly of The Economist and now one of The Times’s growing contingent of energy reporters.

And of course, you will also be hearing from me.

In contemplating the creation of a new blog devoted to “Energy, the Environment and the Bottom Line” (see our tag line above), folks here in the newsroom were in full agreement that a forum for tracking the inexorable changes now facing every citizen of the planet — corporate and private — was long overdue. After all, our colleague Andrew C. Revkin has spent years highlighting the growing climate crisis, both in the paper and, more recently, on the Dot Earth blog.

And our team of energy and environment reporters — Jad Mouawad, Matthew L. Wald, Clifford Krauss and Felicity Barringer, to name just a few — have been documenting the business and policy challenges facing a global economy both invigorated, and imperiled, by its dependence on fossil fuels.
But with oil prices reaching record highs and solar and wind power upstarts luring hundreds of millions of investment dollars; with car companies, compelled by Congress, struggling to develop more fuel efficient cars; with both Democrats and Republicans supporting increased domestic drilling; and with businesses from every sector scrambling to cut their energy costs and burnish their public images with a green veneer, it seemed high time for us to create a venue where our journalists and our readers could discuss trends as they unfold.

At its most fundamental level, humanity’s demand for energy in order to grow and prosper is set hard against the realities of climate change and the impacts of business-as-usual on the environment. How — or whether — those tensions are resolved will depend in large part on what policies are pursued now, and where the money will flow.