Welcome back to the Climate Nexus finance newsletter – a regular update that looks at the big stories and players at the intersection of climate change, finance, regulation, and energy, with tips for the week ahead.
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Carlyle’s hidden climate impact
The Carlyle Group is once again in the news, and no, that’s not just because they’re having trouble raising funds,bidding for a stake in Manchester United (booooo), or because its employees are among the biggest donors to the great friend of private equity, Senator Kristen Sinema. An upcoming report from the Private Equity Climate Risks consortium digs into its energy portfolio over a ten-year period and finds an astonishing array of risky and polluting assets, from the methane-heavy U.S. Permian basin to an offshore drilling company launched last year off Romania’s coast, bordering a warzone. This, from a company that portrays itself as a climate leader.
We’d love your help promoting the report. Please reach out if you’d like the social pack ahead of the release on April 27th.
Venture capital gets into the net zero game
More than 15 leading VC firms are forming a new group to help venture investors align with the climate transition and track progress towards net zero for themselves and their portfolio companies. The group intends to work closely with other sector-specific alliances under the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero to develop best practices and share expertise on climate solutions. The formal announcement is expected tomorrow.
Green bank gets going
The Environmental Protection Agency has laid out how it plans to distribute $27 billion in funding that the Inflation Reduction Act carved out for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which is designed to finance clean power generation, building retrofits, and electric vehicle deployment at the local level. Aiming to hit the administration’s pledge to allocate 40% of government climate funding to historically marginalized communities, the fund will split the money, sending $14 billion to two or three national nonprofits to distribute and another $13 billion earmarked specifically for low income areas, to be distributed by a handful of organizations. The decision represents something of a compromise between big national groups like the Coalition for Green Capital, which wanted to see the money distributed by a central organization, and local credit unions and community development banks, which argued for a more decentralized model.
Spot the similarities
We couldn’t help noticing a great visualization of where the anti-ESG movement is apparently gaining ground in this Bloomberg piece the other day. The map looked kind of familiar though. Can you spot the similarities?
Also, worth checking in on how these initiatives are landing in the finance world. At TD Bank’s AGM last week, an anti-ESG proposal calling for a commitment to continue to invest in and finance the Canadian oil and gas sector received an overwhelming 1% of support from shareholders, while three climate-related ESG proposals all received between 10.4 and 23.5%.
Apr 24: Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America Annual Meetings. Protestors angry at Citi, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America for financing the fossil fuel industry will hold blockades, sit-ins, and rallies a day ahead of the banks’ annual shareholder meetings. People from the Gulf Coast, who have difficulty recovering from floods and hurricanes and are facing a 397% increase in annual GHG emissions from proposed methane gas export facilities, demand banks end their dirty deals for fossil fuel expansion. The protests mirror unrest inside the shareholders’ meetings, and several resolutions are demanding banks phase out funding for fossil fuel development. Media contacts can be found here.
Apr 26: As part of the Earth Day to May Day week of action, climate activists will gather at KKR Headquarters in New York to demand the private equity giant stop investing in harmful fossil fuel projects. While KKR promotes itself as a responsible corporate citizen, it will soon take an ownership stake in Port Arthur LNG, a project recently approved for construction in Port Arthur, Texas, a city of predominantly Black and Latino residents who have endured polluting plants for decades. Reach out to Alice Hu, NYCC to learn more.
Apr 28: MIT Sustainability Summit 2023. Register here.
May 3: Union of Concerned Scientists JPMorgan Chase Corporate Accountability Webinar. Register here.