The chief executive of the world’s largest asset manager has called on governments globally to treat climate change with the same urgency as COVID-19 by supporting private capital investment in new technologies, but warned capitalism alone could not solve this crisis.
BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink, who oversees around $10 trillion globally, said the pandemic had shown technologies can be developed quickly once the world recognises there is an “existential crisis”.
However, Mr Fink said capitalism had fallen short in its pandemic response with large swathes of the emerging world struggling with very low vaccination rates, which could allow the virus to mutate.
BlackRock’s Larry Fink has called for global collaboration to reduce the ‘green premium’. Credit:Bloomberg
“We did not have the resolve to invest in the manufacturing, so we could get the whole world vaccinated, so we don’t have to worry about the next variant and the next variant and the next variant,” Mr Fink said during an online sustainability forum hosted by Credit Suisse.
“We can see a really bad global execution on what capitalism did. So, we can’t afford technologies that are being developed through capitalism and having a bad governmental execution. We need to do this together.”
Mr Fink compared the inequalities exposed during the health crisis to the impacts of climate change. “Most of the developing world is around the equatorial part of the world, and it’s the equatorial part of the world that’s going to have the most severe impact from climate change,” he said. “It has a severe social impact.”
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BlackRock made global headlines in January last year after Mr Fink announced all actively managed thermal coal holdings would be divested as part of an escalated effort to act on climate change and reduce investment risk. Mr Fink said fossil fuels could be dumped immediately to create a “green world” overnight, but this would be highly inflationary and disruptive to emerging economies.
“We could abandon hydrocarbons today, which I’m not recommending, by going into more wind, solar, hydro, but in most cases it would be very expensive.
