From the OECD Forum on Green Finance and Investment – the need for a major pivot 

During the recent OECD Forum on Green Finance and Investment (7th to 8th October 2025, https://www.oecd-events.org/oecd-forum-on-green-finance-and-investment-2025),

Anne Mettler, co-chair of the Energy Resilience Leadership Group, in a challenging and direct keynote speech, outlined three trends that could be identified within green financing and green investment.

The first was that the much vaunted “energy transition” was more of an “energy transformation”. By this, she described how while renewables such as wind and solar have been growing in their importance and in their very real economic feasibility, CO2 emissions have kept rising with the increasing amount of energy produced by fossil fuels, which still accounts for around 80% of global energy production today, compared to 85% in 1980.

The second point was the observation that the primary drivers of moving towards clean energy are not as much about mitigating climate change as had been the motivation but rather issues around energy sovereignty and energy resilience. She pointed out the large proportion of Europe’s energy which is imported as fossil fuels, some 54%, which in fact is even greater than the case 20 years ago. She contrasted this situation with China, which, as a petroleum-poor nation, has made it a point of state policy to exploit its rare earths, not only in terms of extraction, but also in their processing (a factor which has been a significant factor in recent trade discussions between the US and China), while setting out to attain energy self-sufficiency and an extensive manufacturing base that sees it dominating many areas, including rare earths, and using such dominance as a means of coercion.

The third trend involves how the poorer global south is, in fact, besting the wealthier north in terms of innovation, and developing and meeting their energy needs from renewables. A major factor here is the question of why they should spend their foreign currencies on foreign fossil energy supplies when they can exploit their own, frequently cheaper, renewable resources.

This last point has been further shown by what Anne described as the greater openness and eagerness of poor countries to progress, in contrast to, as she colourfully put it, the “sluggish, over-governed, and legacy-heavy north”, which far too often has “regulated itself into paralysis and inertia”.

She went on to describe how clean and good are no longer sufficient motivations, especially as green tech will see a market of the order of 2 trillion dollars by 2035, compared to 700 billion today. What is apparent is that the need to scale such a “transformation” is much too big for the public sector alone. And at the same time, if companies cannot turn a profit, then such changes will not progress as quickly or efficiently as needed. Therefore, as Anne says, there is a need for a “public sector enabled, private sector driven transition”. This in turn sees the traditional VC-only model, which, while being highly successful in the software domain, needs to be rethought, given how avenues like hardware and advanced manufacturing have a much greater focus in such a climate. This calls for an increased drive towards strategic partnerships between the public and private sectors, which, sadly, raises great challenges for the fragmented public sector.

Anne called for the desire, the need, to “build big”, not just “talk big”. We need to move, she says, beyond pilots and establish systems of the “nth kind”, where the necessary infrastructure is built to support the sustained growth of the clean economy. And, if one were to challenge this, given the expense involved in establishing such systems, they need to realise that such investments will pay off later, as opposed to the frequent case of cheap now, but more (much more) costly later. All of this leads to the simple to say, but difficult to achieve, diversification, where there is no longer a strong dependence on one country or entity to fulfil a nation’s energy needs.

How can democracies, with their messy allotments of conflicting agendas, competing stakeholders, and election-cycle mentality, undertake this “transformation” where a longer-term strategic vision is needed? It is here where she closed by calling on the need “to pivot”. “To pivot”, to “completely change the way one does something”, where, while the ultimate aim, a clean economy, remains our vision, the path to reach it has changed, is changing, and will change in the future. Anne’s final call was for the use of hindsight, the observation of global trends, and using such knowledge and the resulting insights to rethink the trajectory needed to pursue the aims of attaining a clean economy.

All of Anne’s statements, and this article is only the briefest of summaries of her thoughts and advocacy for changing attitudes, is echoed by ISG’s brief of reviewing, identifying, supporting, and understanding what is needed for sustainable development, including a just energy “transformation”, which must also take into consideration ESG issues, the core of the efforts of ISG.