Wall Street Journal’s Amrith Ramkumar on Financing the Clean Energy Transition
There’s no doubt the financial markets are going to have a big impact in the fight against climate change. Our guest in this episode of Path to Zero covers how investors are financing the transition to clean energy for the Wall Street Journal. Amrith Ramkumar is the climate finance reporter for the Journal.
His stories include deals and fundraising rounds tied to green energy and sustainability as well as trend pieces exploring how the shift away from fossil fuels is rippling through the private sector and Wall Street. He also writes about environmental, social and governance—or ESG—investing.
Ramkumar previously was a Journal markets reporter who wrote about special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, when SPAC mergers were a popular alternative to traditional initial public offerings for many clean-energy startups and other companies. He also previously wrote about stocks and commodities, including battery metals such as lithium and cobalt.
Clean Energy Investment Trends
Ramkumar tells Tucker about how incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) have changed investment trends. “The IRA has made things like hydrogen and carbon capture the next generation climate sectors and much more investable and financeable,” says Ramkumar. “There are these climate mega funds that are sitting on billions of dollars of private money, so they’re pumping money into those startups.”
Ramkumar says investors are still pumping money into more developed technologies, like wind and solar despite the turmoil hitting the stock market.
A Wall Street Journal photo from Amrith Ramkumar’s recent story on how battery recycling has picked up after the Inflation Reduction Act. Shredding old batteries is seen as an attractive source of raw materials because of the environmental damage caused by new mines and processing.