Mark Carney sees 'massive disconnect' in green finance rhetoric

financialpost.com:

There’s plenty of money to be made by investing in the green energy transition, and financial professionals who say otherwise aren’t paying attention to the facts, according to Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. chair Mark Carney.

There’s a “massive disconnect” between what some of the heavyweights of global finance are saying and the wave of money flowing into green projects, Carney, who’s a former governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, said on Jan. 17 at the Bloomberg House in Davos, Switzerland.

The comments follow a pivot in the messaging from bankers and asset managers, who have started using global summits to remind governments they’ll only back the green transition if there’s a profit to be made.

It’s a mantra that’s being repeated at Davos. Speaking at a panel earlier on Wednesday, hedge fund billionaire and Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio said “there’s this notion of ‘we should we should we should,’ but there’s the fact of who has the money, what is the size of it and what are their motivations.”

Carney said that tracking green investment flows shows there’s enough motivation among the holders of capital to back the transition. In 2023, investors plowed 1.8 times as much into clean energy as they did into fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. And the US$1.8 trillion that was spent globally on clean energy last year is expected to rise to US$4.5 trillion annually by the early 2030s, the IEA estimates.

“That 1.8 trillion is going to make a very good returns,” Carney said. “Not every single investment, but the whole thing will make a very good investment elevator pitch.”

Last year, many investors in traditional green assets lost money, as wind and solar producers were