The New Economics of Climate Change
When most people think of the global financial system, they think of the investment banks, the hedge funds, and the distressed-asset investment firms. These are the frenetic first-movers in the market, the players who most profit from uncertainty and panic. Pension funds prefer much longer time horizons. They eschew long-term uncertainty, and in this they are the most obvious financial allies of those who are working to curb climate change.
.. Last year, a coalition of larger and more forward-looking funds, including BlackRock, CalPERS, PensionDanmark, and Cathay Financial Holdings, representing twenty-four trillion dollars in assets, issued a statement calling on government leaders to provide “stable, reliable and economically meaningful carbon pricing that helps redirect investment commensurate with the scale of the climate change challenge,” as well as develop a plan “to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels.”