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Economies are growing rapidly across the developing world, which is producing a dramatic increase in energy demand. A central challenge facing leaders is how to meet that growing demand — and deliver electricity to the nearly 1 billion people who still lack it — while also phasing out the power source that is a primary driver of climate change and a major cause of sickness and disease: coal plants.
Meeting the challenge will require enormous amounts of new public and private capital to finance clean energy projects. If we hope to win the fight against climate change, the best estimates indicate that by 2030, which will arrive before we know it, global investment in clean energy must be at least four times investment in fossil fuels and gradually take over completely, with much of that investment directed to the developing world. Right now, we’re nowhere near that level.
But there’s reason to be hopeful, because businesses and investors increasingly recognize the risks of inaction — and the opportunities that the clean-energy transition presents. For instance: Through the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, more than 550 firms in some 50 countries have committed to cutting emissions across their portfolios to net zero. But they often don’t have the data they need to fulfill those commitments. And their will to invest in developing countries often runs up against perceived risks, antiquated policies and lack of investment-ready projects.
These problems are largely fixable, andBloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies are contributing, in different ways, to three steps that can yield important progress, all of them centered on an idea at the heart of managing nearly any problem: data transparency. First, with a collection of partners that includes Mark Gallogly’s Three Cairns Group, we launched a new effort to standardize and strengthen voluntary carbon markets.
—Bloomberg