Two years ago the Cop 26 conference was told that more than $100 trillion in private finance was looking for investment opportunities in the transition to green energy. If so, it followed that the cost of capital for non-green energy would rise. The markets would make oil and gas exploration prohibitively expensive and force even legacy laggards into renewables. It hasn’t happened. Apart from occasional spikes, borrowing costs for fossil fuel energy companies have hardly diverged from those for the wider economy, the FT reports. (And returns on investment for the dirty brigade remain far higher than for renewable energy producers, who have unique supply chain bottlenecks to wrestle with.) The war in Ukraine is a factor. So is the war by certain US Republicans on ESG factors as criteria for allocating capital. Bottom line: the idea that private finance was going to ride to the planet’s rescue all by itself was hogwash. More state intervention on the scale of Biden’s IRA will be required. Meanwhile, CO2 emissions, which must fall by half by 2030 to keep Earth on track for 1.5 degrees of warming, are forecast to rise by 9 per cent instead.
