World Bank “green bond” a good act to follow
Tuesday, January 6th, 2009Ontario Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman has told me he is looking into launching a “green bond” in the province that would, at the very least, help finance community-level renewable energy projects. He’s been investigating the idea with Finance Minister Dwight Duncan and I expect, if they go through with it, they’ll launch something early this year. The question: How big will they go? Will they limit it to smaller community projects or open it up as part of a major stimulus package to help finance larger green infrastructure projects?
Clearly, the green bond idea has merit. So much so that the World Bank launched its first green bond back in November with Scandinavian bank SEB. “Tackling climate change is going to take immense resources that will only come from a well-orchestrated flow of public and private finance,” said Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank Group. “This transaction is an important early effort to show one way in which this can be done. We hope it demonstrates that private citizens can safely and profitably invest their savings today while also helping provide a better world for their children.” (more…)
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca