Less coal, more trees. A brake on methane, more renewables. It's a promise: no more C02 in the air. When? Well, the date is to be determined. Perhaps 2030, the most daring goal. Or 2060, suggested by China. Maybe 2070, as the Indian Modi ventures, aware that, as Keynes said, in the long term we will all be dead. The leaders of the world, after the event between TV, roundabouts and selfies with Greta Thunberg, they left Glasgow passing the word to the technicians, the sherpas who will have to translate the agreements in principle and good feelings into more precise and demanding protocols.
The stage is emptied, however deserted by protagonists such as Xi Jinping and Putin, and, with a touch of cynicism, comes the suspicion of having lived "a useless evening", to quote Ornella Vanoni. Or the re-edition of the solemn commitments of Paris 2015, when the then French president François Hollande spoke of "a revolution for the planet" clashing with the opinion of the Nobel Prize winner Jean Tirole for which "the ambitious announcements of abatement by governments and supranational organizations mainly serve to appease public opinion and avoid international pressure but achieve little in the way of furthering set goals national interests are more indicative of easy promises.
It's hard to blame the economist, given how things have gone in recent years, rich only in unfulfilled commitments (starting from the 100 billion dollars promised to poor countries). And above all, in the face of today's data: the coal, the polluter par excellence, it surpasses nuclear power and ranks behind oil among the most widely used sources of energy; the surge in natural gas, combined with the failures of a dramatic year for the climate (floods in China, drought in California, various calamities in Europe) have caused many governments' good intentions to be put back on the shelf, starting with taxes to finance green transition.
And what about the goodwill of the leaders? You have to believe the Joe Biden who plants trees or who tries to get the sheiks to pump more oil to keep gasoline prices down at home, knowing that no president has been re-elected for prices above $4 a gallon? In short, the criticisms are well founded. But cynicism risks losing sight of the innovations which, beyond the results that will be produced in Glasgow, have now profoundly changed the market sensitivity.
In short, good intentions now intersect with facts. There are now more than 600 sustainable ETFs globally compared to just 30 a decade ago. But the picture will need to be quickly updated after Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England, announced Gfanz's mission, i.e. the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, a pact between the big names in finance, insurance banks, investment funds and pension funds, private companies and other big players in the market, with one goal: to eliminate CO2 by 2050.
“This time we have no excuses – said Carney – because the money is there”. That is to say 130 trillion dollars put on the table by 450 groups based in 45 countries willing to allocate 40% of world monetary resources to the fight against warming over the next three decades. It's like fielding the equivalent of ten Marshall Plans for one generation. The cornerstone of the strategy was explained by Carney himself: "We now have the necessary equipment to move climate change from the margins to the forefront of finance, so that every financial decision will have to take it into account".
In short, none of the protagonists of the market will be able to do without dealing with the business of the future, under penalty of the risk of ending up out, struck by the ostracism of large and small investors as well as by the elite of the market because alongside Carney, the only able to hold a candle to the charisma of Mario Draghi, at the top of Gfanz are among others Michael Bloomberg e Larry Fink, Black Rock's number one. Will the formula work? Will it be the right engine to push governments on the road to sustainability? There is no shortage of skeptics, also because the undertaking is titanic. But some steps, such as the formation of theInternational Sustainability Standards Board (or ISSB), which will have the task of developing common sustainability principles aimed at financial markets, have already been launched.
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In short, the path is narrow and impervious. Lawrence Fink himself yesterday warned against too rapid processes, perhaps in the name of fashion: eliminating the search for new oil fields, as requested by the International Energy Agency, risks not only handing over the monopoly to Arabia Saudi Arabia and Russia but also to favor takeover bids, painted in a false green colour. But, given the stakes, it's worth a try.
There are, as former Treasury Minister Domenico Siniscalco noted, at least three new items emerged in the private sector that shed a positive light on the prospects of the climate crisis. The first is the change in the preferences of citizens, particularly of the younger generations. The second element is the availability of technologies that use less energy and fewer natural resources. The third is precisely the growth of sustainable finance (or ESG): today in Europe and the United States, bonds that finance exclusively environmental, social or governance projects have grown by more than 25% and have reached 500 billion dollars, while symmetrically capital flows with increasing difficulty to energy-intensive projects that no institutional investor seems to want to finance anymore.
