On Monday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Ana Cabrera Reports,” Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry stated that green transition investment has been undercut by the fact that money managers “have a fiduciary responsibility, an obligation to the people they manage it for not to lose the money, but to produce returns on that investment.” And the fact that pension funds “are very careful about those investments in order to make certain they have the money to pay out to the pensioners who work for that money all their lives.” Kerry also said that he has urged those who manage large amounts of money that they have “got to help us create the structure” to spend on climate.
Kerry said that President Joe Biden and King Charles were briefed “on the way trillions of dollars could begin to be deployed into the private sector to accelerate this transition so we are not putting greenhouse gas emissions up into the atmosphere to the detriment of every human being.”
Host Ana Cabrera then asked, “What’s preventing those trillions of dollars from trickling into the solutions right now?”
Kerry responded, “What’s preventing it is, to some degree, fear, uncertainty about the marketplace. People who manage very significant amounts of money have a fiduciary responsibility, an obligation to the people they manage it for not to lose the money, but to produce returns on that investment. Pension funds, many of them, are very careful about those investments in order to make certain they have the money to pay out to the pensioners who work for that money all their lives. So, there are tricky components of making sure that you have taken the risk away from these investments. And energy, which is what the climate crisis is all about, it’s about energy, it’s about how we fuel our homes, how we heat our homes, how we light our factories, how we drive and go from place to place.”
He continued, “What’s happening is, the emissions from the burning of fossil fuels [are] not being captured, it goes up into the atmosphere, and it’s warming the planet, increasingly more and more and more dangerously. So, you either capture those emissions or you don’t create them in the first place. That was the discussion this morning. And the discussion with these people who manage huge sums of money was, we want to help, we want to deploy the funding, but you’ve got to help us create the structure for which we can do that.”
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