Do the maths on Mark Carney’s $130tn net zero pledge stack up?

Do the maths on Mark Carney’s $130tn net zero pledge stack up?

Mark Carney’s eye-catching claim in Glasgow that $130tn of private sector assets was committed to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions came with high-profile endorsements from BlackRock’s Larry Fink and Jane Fraser of Citigroup.

Flanked by the two chief executives at the COP26 summit, Carney said that until now there had not been “enough money in the world to fund the transition” to renewable energy by 2050, but thanks to the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, or Gfanz, “we have all the money needed”.

Yet financiers, academics and environmentalists have asked whether the maths of the initiative led by the former Bank of England governor, now a UN special envoy on climate and finance, really stack up.

“The objective of Gfanz is good, the question is the pace . . . What we can’t end up with is 2050 commitments that are never implemented,” said Chris Hohn, the hedge fund manager who chairs The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation.

If its signatories do not set out credible near-term decarbonisation plans, “Gfanz will be nothing more than ‘greenwashing’,” Hohn said. “It’s not my expectation that voluntary commitments like Gfanz will solve the problem. It will require regulation.”

Ben Caldecott, director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Group at Oxford university, said