I was sitting in a Starbucks on a late Saturday afternoon in mid-November, next to one of my regular HK haunts — the Page One bookstore in Times Square at Causeway Bay — catching up on HK local news & reading the South China Morning Post….. when one of their reporters approached me. And that’s how I ended up in a front page story in the next day’s edition of the SCMP about Hong Kong’s “potential net migration index” (i.e., the number of people who would like to leave the city compared with those who want to move there). I told the reporter that I worked on environmental issues, and he concluded his article as follows:

SCMP, 15 Nov. ’09

That’s right, they should. I agree with that guy Robert.

My visit to HK was really part of a Shenzhen/Bangkok trip, but it allowed me to catch up on things with a number of colleagues & friends – including Simon Powell and Charles Yonts of CLSA. They went far beyond the call of duty, coming out to join me for coffee on a Sunday morning – an especially notable courtesy, since there had been a big party the night before welcoming Simon back to HK (after an extended stint in Taiwan). Charles was putting together a new CLSA ‘Clean & Green’ research report on climate change, and invited me to add a few words – so please check out the note on page 29 about ‘Copenhagen and emissions markets in Asia.’ And so you can see that it was really nice to be back in HK once again — despite any of that air pollution!