FINANCE

OUT LOUD ON WALL STREET had become faintly embarrassing, the verbal equivalent of clapping when the plane lands. The three letters that boardrooms once wore like a lapel pin were struck from fund names, dropped from earnings calls and disowned by the very financiers who had spent a decade preaching them. Larry Fink, who did more than anyone to make ESG the market’ s favourite acronym, had stopped saying them out loud.“ I’ m ashamed of being part of this conversation,” the BlackRock boss told the Aspen Ideas Festival, of a term he said had been“ weaponised” by the far left and the far right. The Net-Zero Banking Alliance, once the proudest club in climate finance, voted itself out of existence, and more than half of companies, by one South Pole survey, had taken to“ greenhushing”, burying climate goals they still held like a guilty secret. It was a lovely wake, and the mourners were sincere. They were also, it turns out, at the wrong funeral.

This year the world will spend a record US $ 2.2tn on clean energy, according to the International Energy Agency, close to double the US $ 1.2tn going into oil, gas and coal. For the first time in history, the low-carbon economy is out-raising the fossil one by nearly two to one. ESG the slogan is in a hospice. Green investment the trade has never been richer.

Follow the money to Toronto If sustainable finance still has a pulse, you can take it at Brookfield. In June the Canadian asset manager closed the largest private fund ever raised for the energy transition, US $ 20bn, eclipsing the US $ 15bn record it had set with the fund’ s first outing. In August its listed arm, Brookfield Renewable, reported record quarterly cash earnings while agreeing to buy the American battery-storage developer Aypa Power for around US $ 3bn. Brookfield has cast the buildout as the most bankable trade of the decade, and its clients, among them sovereign wealth funds, pension giants and insurers, have signed cheques to match.

92 September 2026