June 28, 2020
By Maria Gallucci
...One of the ideas Congress (click here) considered at the time was launching a national "green bank," a nonprofit institution that would use public money to help cash-strapped businesses invest in solar panels, wind farms, and energy-efficiency building retrofits. Green bank legislation gained traction that year, but it and other climate-related initiatives — most famously a cap-and-trade bill — ultimately never passed.
So green bank advocates turned their efforts to the states. Soon Connecticut, Florida, and Hawaii had launched their own specialized banks, using seed funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to issue loans and bonds to local projects. Together, those programs have spurred billions of dollars' worth of investments and supported tens of thousands of jobs, bank leaders say.
Today, as the COVID-19 pandemic catalyzes another economic meltdown — with an unemployment rate over 13 percent — the green bank concept is making a comeback. With nearly 600,000 clean energy positions lost in recent weeks, environmental advocates are among those again eyeing a recovery that includes significantly decarbonizing the American economy. And they say a federal green bank is a key element.
Sierra Club, for example, recently called for creating a National Climate Bank, as part of its green stimulus plan. The bank would invest $30 billion over its first five years to help boost renewable electricity capacity and add energy storage systems and transmission lines to the U.S. grid. At that scale, the bank could help create about 83,000 jobs per year, according to an estimate by the Political Economy Research Institute....
