By Jon Hay
17 Dec 2020
After four years of the US government noisily refusing to protect humanity from climate change and pushing back on responsible investing, sustainable finance supporters are full of hope that Joe Biden’s presidency will shift the US and the world in the right direction. Jon Hay reports
Capital markets players are convinced the US’s long wandering in the wilderness as the world’s chief renegade on climate change is coming to an end.
The election of Joe Biden as president though without control of the Senate, barring great luck for the Democrats in January’s Georgia run-offs has wrested power from the most aggressive enemy of climate policy among world leaders and given it to a candidate who knows the urgency of action.
By Jon Hay
17 Dec 2020
Transition bonds are likely to play a prominent role in labelled debt markets in 2021, after the market produced long-awaited guidance in December. As Jon Hay reports, the new market is bound to provoke disagreement but it will be a creative conflict.
Green bonds have become intensely popular and influential, even spawning broods of regulations in China and Europe now being copied elsewhere in the world whose effects go far beyond that product. But they have barely touched many industries with high carbon emissions, which need to go green most urgently.
That is about to change. “We are speaking to all the major oil and gas companies in our client base, as well as other transitioning sectors such as heavy industrials and the aviation sector,” said Arthur Krebbers, head of sustainable finance for corporates at NatWest Markets in London. “The discussion has ramped up significantly in the last two or three years, from them not wanting this as an age
Pressure from young climate activists is pushing investors to embrace so-called sustainable bonds, experts say.
December 14th 2020
“I don’t even feel 16 at this point,” says Aliya Hirji. “Climate action has aged me 20 years in a good way.” Photo provided
These days, as the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan decides where to invest its billions, every move it makes is green-tested by future investors environmental crusaders like Aliya Hirji.
At 16, Hirji, is younger than most organizers in her youth-led climate change advocacy group, Fridays for Future Toronto. She studies the financial markets and their intersection with climate change.
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