Climate Change

TAKEAWAY: CLIMATE CHANGE

HENRY:
Hi, Brian. [a question from] Linda Henry from the Boston Globe: Bank of America has taken a really interesting and exciting leadership position on climate change. Can you talk to us a little bit about what you’re doing and why this makes so much sense for the bank to be doing it?

MOYNIHAN:  
Well, at the end of the day, we believe we have to make the transformation from the current fossil fuel environment to a new energy environment which doesn’t include fossil fuels. It takes a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of science, a lot of people’s work, a lot of policy. So, what we add to the equation is financial knowledge and understanding how to bring more money to the task. And then we add a bit of how we behave as a company. So, why it’s important to us is we think it’s a major issue for society.

I had an interesting dialogue with somebody standing in my office. We were talking about the pipeline to fuel the power plants—that Thomas educated me over the years that we need that to avoid burning coal and the grid’s unstable and all the stuff and—not go into all that. This was somebody from Rhode Island. I was talking to the person. I said, you know, we need to figure out how we get some of this New England energy stability. The person said, well, the environmentalists think—they look down at Boston Harbor and said all the water’s coming over. And I looked out, and one of the big tankers was coming up the harbor. I said you think we’re going to power ourselves using those things? We got to get this.

So there’s steps that you have to take here. We believe that you can’t switch it on and off overnight. Our job is to help people understand the duration. So we wrote in a letter that they should have stayed in Paris, because the world agreed to try to do something. It wasn’t enough, but they agreed to try to do something. We're on record with that. What will happen we’ll see play out over the next four or five years. But, the good news behind that—the countries of the world have all agreed there’s a problem. So, they were acting more in unison to try to bring—to the task. So, we go to the G20 in a couple weeks. It’ll be a lot about bringing money to the task and new financing structures and blended finance and all these wonderful words.

But the reality is the corporate world knows that they have to help drive this—how they use energy. And it’s also in our best interest, and it’s also—their teammates are driving. You know, if you have a bunch of teammates working for you and you don’t understand how absolutely committed they are to change this—we’re 50 years past Earth Day. This is not a new concept. So, we do it because our teammates want it. We do it because society needs it. And we do it because we have a special—we have money—lawyers, guns, and money, as Warren Zevon said. We have money, and other people have other stuff to bring to the table. And our job is to bring the money and the financial thinking, which is really the guns analogy, to help figure out how to structure a lot more finance into it. But this goes back to that idea that we have to share our success with communities, and one way you do it is share that financial acumen and that money to help drive it forward.