Federal bankers deserve an F on climate threat
By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion
The people whom President Donald Trump has picked to protect America’s money keep insisting a heating planet won’t set that money on fire. But it’s already burned trillions of dollars and threatens to burn exponentially more. Many of these losses could become permanent.
Former Federal Reserve Gov. Kevin Warsh, Trump’s choice to run the central bank after Jerome Powell, has said the Fed should ignore climate change, dismissing concern about it as a “bandwagon” that is “fashionable” and “fleeting.” He also called it “contraband,” which, in my opinion as a professional English user, is not a proper use of that word because it isn’t illegal to care about climate. For now, anyway.
And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently called climate change an issue that had “no clear nexus to safety and soundness” for banks. In a congressional hearing last week, he sniffed that the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s work on climate “has been discredited.”
The only thing discredited at this point is that kind of rhetoric. Climate policy is financial policy, something most of the world’s other chief central banks have recognized. The European Central Bank, the People’s Bank of China, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and many more have strict rules for banks on managing climate risk.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-federal-bankers-deserve-an-f-on-climate-threat/