It sounds nonsensical at first. To help decarbonize the global economy, Carlyle, one of the world’s largest private equity funds, is doubling down on its most carbon-intensive businesses, not divesting from them. “We didn’t...want to make [decarbonization] someone else’s problem,” the company’s head of impact told me. Does it make sense?
On its face, no. “We are hurtling towards disaster, eyes wide open,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said earlier this summer, as yet another report laid out the doomsday scenario on global warming. “Current policies are taking the world to a 2.8-degree temperature rise by the end of the century,” he said. “That spells catastrophe.” Averting the worst-case scenario means stopping making investments in new fossil fuel supply projects, divesting from fossil fuel interests, and stripping out fossil fuel assets entirely from investment portfolios.
