Green Banks Are Here to Fund the Clean Economy
April 5, 2024
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund will help serve marginalized communities and finance clean energy technologies.
The Roosevelt Rundown features our top stories of the week.
(Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images)
A Big Week for US Green Banks
On Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced $20 billion of awards from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund created under the Inflation Reduction Act. The funds, which will go toward entities financing clean energy investment, prove that the once-lofty idea of green banks is becoming real at a larger scale, writes climate expert Ilmi Granoff for the Roosevelt Institute blog.
“It’s the end of a decade-long effort to mainstream the concept of green banks—public development banks designed to finance the net-zero economy,” Granoff writes. Green banks fit in where the market fails: They can fund marginalized communities that are ignored by private financing and demonstrate the viability of new technologies that private financing has been slow to invest in.
“This capital will work for underserved communities where bankable clean energy projects are overlooked because of historic injustice, and it should work to bring near-frontier clean technologies to adoption,” Granoff writes. “Green banks will unlock clean energy financing everywhere.”
Read more in “The End of the Beginning for US Green Banks.”
Tax Policy as Antitrust Policy
As personal wealth concentration has grown, so too has the market power of a few large corporations. In a brief released in March, Niko Lusiani and Emily DiVito explored how reforming the tax code could help curb the power of billionaire-owned businesses.
“Tax policy remains overlooked both as a driver of current levels of market concentration and as a possible tool to remedy this problem,” Lusiani and DiVito write. “Decreasing the intensely concentrated personal returns of the individuals controlling the business strategies of some of the country’s most dominant firms could help disincentivize the drive for market concentration.”
The brief is the latest addition to Roosevelt’s Taxing Monopolies series, which explores how the broken US tax code encourages market concentration and why tax code reform is a valuable addition to the antimonopoly toolbox.
On April 18, experts Kimberly Clausing, Sandy Brian Hager, and Reuven Avi-Yonah will join Lusiani to discuss the ideas of the series during our webinar, Tax Policy as Competition Policy: Reimagining How the US Tax Code Can Foster a More Equitable and Participatory Economy.
Join the Roosevelt Institute Team
The Roosevelt Institute is hiring! If you’re interested in joining our community of thinkers, advocates, and champions of a more democratic economy, check out our latest career opportunities:
- Managing Director, Partnerships and Appointments
- Director of Race and Democracy
- Donor Engagement Manager
What We’re Talking About
Fast food corporations have the ability (and the profit margins to show for it) to pay for the increased wages.
The myth that increased wages = increased prices is just that, a myth.
— Roosevelt Institute (@rooseveltinst) April 3, 2024
What We’re Reading
California’s Fast-Food Workers Are Now the Highest Paid in US with New $20 Per Hour Wage – feat. Roosevelt’s Alí R. Bustamante – CBS News
Experts Say the Economy Is Getting Better, but Consumers Don’t Feel That Way. Here’s Why – feat. Roosevelt’s Elizabeth Pancotti – Alaska Beacon
Steele on What’s Needed after SVB, Biggest Threat to Banks, M&A Policy – feat. Roosevelt Fellow Graham Steele – Banking with Interest [podcast]
Employers Added 303,000 Jobs in March, Soaring past Expectations – Washington Post