ESG & Investing

The UK Has an Answer to Biden’s Massive Climate Bet

The City of London is blessed with bankers, investors and insurers able to structure deals to support the move away from fossil fuels.

A Source electric vehicle charging point in London

Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
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The UK may not have the appetite or capacity to directly match President Joe Biden’s unprecedented funding for the US energy transition, but it does have a secret weapon of its own in the race to finance the low-carbon economy: a bounty of financial engineers.

The City of London is blessed with bankers, investors and insurers able to structure deals to support the move away from fossil fuels, according to Rhian-Mari Thomas, a former leveraged finance banker at Barclays Plc who now runs the UK government-backed Green Finance Institute (GFI).