Ridhhima Yadav

Yet somehow, our lexicon of financing the climate transition grows.

The dollars?

Not so much.

If we are to truly work on this, we need integrity.

Absolutely.

But in our quest for perfection, we are losing out on the goal itself, on the goal of unleashing the largest commercial opportunity of our time.

Financing green requires greening finance.

And guess what?

In many cases, it actually makes you money, whilst reducing emissions.

For instance, many utilities around the world are realizing that it is more expensive to run coal plants than renewables because of the rapidly falling cost of renewables.

For investors, this is an incredible opportunity.

By buying up some of those coal plants and developing a strategy for an accelerated phase-out, investors have the opportunity to not just generate an attractive return, they can also reduce emissions as well as reduce costs for tax for ratepayers.

Why hasn't this happened?

The idea of working with heavy-emitting industries and polluters is incredibly uncomfortable for a lot of my climate activist friends, as well as some of the most sophisticated investors I've worked with, who have spent decades trying to understand the impact of their emissions on the planet's trajectory.

But not working with them is worse still.

Let me walk you through a concrete example, although I'll talk about steel.

Imagine you are the CEO of a steel company in India.

You have a decarbonization strategy in place, and you want to invest to reduce the emissions in your steelmaking process and reduce your reliance on coal and increase your capacity for renewables.

You go out to the capital markets to raise capital to fund that plan.

Great, everyone should love this, right?