Lhe European Central Bank (ECB) is not remaining inactive in the face of rising climate risks, aware of their consequences on financial stability and inflation, the two areas at the heart of its mandate. But the measures it is implementing today remain very limited given the enormity of the issue. Going further is difficult for him and forces him to be cunning, to look for any possible gap in the very text of the mandate formally given to him by the European treaties.
It is time for it to have political support to further introduce the climate dimension into its action. This is why we must welcome the fact that a European leader is making explicit mention of it for the first time. In his April 25 speech at the Sorbonne, President Macron declared that“it is a question of integrating into the objectives of the ECB at least one growth objective, or even a decarbonization objective, in any case climate”.
Today, the ECB has a few tools: preference for “green” securities in its portfolio and collateral operations, requirement for disclosure of climate risks carried by banks, stress tests based on extreme climate scenarios. It wishes to go further, but to date it has stumbled on the most decisive step and which many consider the most effective, namely modulating the cost of banks’ credit activity according to its more or less green nature.
More flexibility to green investments
Two modalities exist in this regard: a more or less heavy capital charge imposed on bank balance sheets, or a more or less low refinancing rate depending on the green or brown nature of the loan. Several NGOs and academics have called for this second option in a “Open letter to President Macron” published by The world in December 2023, and which perhaps found an echo in the Sorbonne speech.
Both of these measures would be likened to a sort of bonus-malus, very close in their effects to a carbon tax, except that they would affect the financial costs rather than the operational costs of the companies. companies and, it should be noted, in a quieter and probably better politically tolerated manner than the carbon tax.
In both cases there is an advantage of flexibility in encouraging a company to green its investments, preferable to the binary pattern that we see today consisting of brutally “definancing” them as soon as we judge (who? according to what mandate?) their activity too mixed with carbon.
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