Category: ECONOMICS_MN

In recent years, BlackRock has become one of the most prominent voices in support of investing in accordance with environmental, social and corporate governance — or E.S.G. — principles. That approach has drawn support from environmental activists, as well as growing political blowback, largely from Republican politicians and activists who accuse the firm of imposing progressive policies on state funds.

The climate summit just concluding in Egypt ran hard into one of the world’s greatest structural problems: most of the money is in the Global North, but most of the need is in the Global South. Nearly three hundred years of burning fossil fuels have produced much of that northern wealth, and now the resulting greenhouse gases are heating the planet and producing much of that southern need.

Major oil and gas companies have raked in multibillion-dollar profits at unheard-of levels. Households around the world are reeling from soaring energy prices, while governments are struggling with outsize spending and slowing economic growth.

The majority of humans on the planet are now feeling the effects of climate breakdown. With the planet 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels, devastating wildfires, heat waves, floods, droughts and storms are increasingly affecting the everyday lives of people and communities across the globe. Scientific analysis shows that these climate-related disasters, whether sudden, like hurricanes, or gradual, like sea-level rise, will intensify in the years to come.

Amid the general chaos and tension of this climate summit—exacerbated by the fact that Joe Biden is speaking today—I sat down for a quiet twenty minutes with Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey. He’s arguably done as much as any person in these halls to reinvigorate the climate fight, for it was the Green New Deal that he and and AOC introduced that eventually—shrunken and warped by Joe Manchin—emerged as the Inflation Reduction Act; without its passage this fall, this COP would be a much less hopeful place.

The city of Clearwater has set out to understand how it will be impacted by climate change, sea level rise, and the devastation of tropical storms and hurricanes.

When it comes to building more clean energy, there’s good news all around. New wind and solar generation surged 22 percent this year, which is part of a longer-term trend. Environment America found that the United States generated three times as much power from wind and solar as it did in 2012. This shift is also global: A report analyzing data from dozens of countries finds that wind and solar account for most of the growth in new electricity generation.

The lesson we can take from this special print issue is the need for everyone in the sector—investors, regulators, lawmakers, and developers—to be braver.

President Biden knows the political power of the price of gasoline. About two weeks ago, fearing what an uptick in gas prices might do to Democrats at the ballot box in the midterms, Mr. Biden announced the release of 15 million barrels from the United States’ emergency petroleum stockpile in an effort to drive down prices. A gallon now costs $3.78 on average compared with $5.03 five months ago, but that is still higher than what Americans want to pay.

From the moment in the early 1990s when nations began grappling with the threat posed by climate change, money has been at the heart of discussions.