Climate interest rates are real, after my climate inflation post
Tom KirkmanIndependent Project Manager
Those darn Climate Interest Rates keep rising.
Earlier this morning I put together a silly post and a silly meme about “Climate Inflation” and how Bidenomics could conquer it.
As per my wont recently on my un-serious weekend posts here, I tried to make it as absurd as possible, with a deadpan delivery.
And just now I ran across this serious article about “Climate Interest Rates”.
Really.
Oh, and pay attention to the very last sentence quoted below from the article.
=========================
“Climate projects around the world are sinking because of high borrowing costs driven by interest rates — jeopardizing a major plank of the international effort to prevent the most catastrophic damage from warming temperatures.
Many of the nations gathered at this month’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai, including the United States, have set a goal of tripling global renewable energy capacity by the end of this decade.
Such a pledge could be one of a handful of substantial climate actions coming out of the talks, which are embroiled in a standoff over whether governments should commit to phasing out fossil fuels.
But rising interest rates have imperiled these goals.
Interest rates were one reason developers gave for canceling major offshore wind projects in recent months, including two projects near New Jersey by the Danish company Ørsted and a Swedish business’ project in the North Sea. In September, no bidders turned out for a September offshore wind energy auction in the U.K., also related to the effects of higher borrowing costs.
●●●》“It’s a very under-appreciated fact how critically, how badly interest rates are impacting our global climate change efforts,”
said Sumant Sinha, CEO of the Indian renewable energy developer ReNew Power.
●●●》“It’s an innocent bystander in this whole managing the economy and controlling inflation, and people don’t realize that.”
… The economic climate is also making it harder to wean the world off fossil fuels. Rising rates have made it infeasible to do the debt-refinancing needed to decommission carbon-spewing coal plants, said Joseph Curtin, power and climate managing director at the Rockefeller Foundation.
… Shaky financing for renewables is therefore delaying the aggressive clean energy deployment the scientists say is necessary to combat climate change. The rates are a key driver of that newfound instability.
… “The renewable business is completely different than the traditional energy business,” Ramon Mendez, Uruguay’s former energy secretary, said at a news conference Wednesday.
●●●》“Renewables is just the finance business.”