The Beaver is shocked, shocked!

The UN-convened Net-Zero Banking Alliance looks to be about as effective at making bank lending “green” as UNRWA is at weaning Palestinians from terrorism.

A new study coauthored by MIT Sloan finance professor Emil Verner titled “Business as Usual: Bank Net-Zero Commitments, Lending, and Engagement,” blows raspberries at the 138 banks that made net-zero commitments to the UN global elites.

Why? Because they’ve done absolutely nothing to divest from energy companies that keep civilization running. Nor did they ramp up their private investments in “sustainable” energy programs that can’t be sustained without government subsidies. Yet they still saw their ESG scores go up.

What’s a central planner to do?

McKinsey & Co. (2022) estimated that the net-zero transition will require $9.2 trillion per year in investment for energy and land use systems between 2021 and 2050. That’s $267 trillion dollars!

As taxpayers tire of watching energy prices soar, much less face the prospect of rolling brownouts as fossil fuel power plants are replaced by intermittent wind and solar, the political appetite for subsidies might start to wain. But all that money has to come from somewhere.

Banks have money, don’t they? Voilà, get it from them!

As explained in Sloan Ideas Made to Matter, time is running out. Voluntary commitments aren’t working. Punishments are in order.

“Maybe we need government policy to drive behavior,” explains the good Professor Verner. Policies designed by the right Experts™. Look how well the Experts™ got us through the Covid crisis without fracturing the global economy.