Transition Finance Weekly - 5/8/2025
U.K. Raises the Climate Bar, Electrification Is Cheaper, Secret Dealings in Georgia
1. The Key to a Safer, Faster Rebuild in L.A.? Electrification
The case for going all-electric grows.
A new report from UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, & the Environment undercuts claims from officials like L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom, who have waived electrification rules to “speed up” rebuilding. Berkeley finds that not only is all-electric safer and more resilient in the face of growing climate risk, it’s faster and cheaper, too.
The report cites a 2019 study that estimates building a new all-electric home in most parts of California costs about $3,000 to $10,000 less than building a home that’s also equipped with gas. Some reasons:
You’re installing electricity anyway! Not installing gas means you spend less.
Electrification reduces the risk of future stranded assets as gas appliances and infrastructure go out of use over time.
Electric appliances and other home components are easier to connect.
Electrification is the future: waiving all-electric building requirements in the short term won’t prevent future homeowners and builders from designing all-electric. It’ll just put a vulnerable segment of the public on the hook for crumbling fossil gas infrastructure that has fewer and fewer customers over time.
Jonathan Parfrey of Climate Resolve: Losing one’s home to fire is “an enormously traumatic experience, and the first impulse that you have after that terrible loss is a return to normalcy. . . [Instead] there’s the possibility for creating something even superior to what you had before.”
2. U.K. Raises the Bar on Climate Risk Regulation
This is what real climate leadership looks like.
The Bank of England is stepping up expectations for how banks and insurers manage climate risk. Updates to its 2019 regulatory framework will require climate scenario analysis and more robust climate-related risk metrics. They particularly call out insurers, noting that the companies often operate in the dark: they don’t have sufficient information to “measure and monitor their climate exposures against risk appetite.”
Bank of England officials emphasize these updates are essential to building a resilient financial system capable of withstanding growing climate shocks.
These steps U.K. regulators are taking to manage systemic economic risk sharply contrast with rollbacks of climate risk mitigation policy under the Trump administration, which has moved to allow companies to conceal material financial risk from investors and regulators.
David Bailey, the Bank of England’s Executive Director of Prudential Policy: “Effective risk management at firms will help create a more resilient financial system that can withstand the increase in the frequency and severity of climate events that we are experiencing and any changes in the transition pathway.”
3. Trump’s Legal Crusade: Protect Polluters, Punish Proactive States
The DOJ files suit against states moving to act on climate risk.
Aspiring to new heights of overreach, the Trump administration is suing New York, Vermont, Michigan, and Hawaii over their climate accountability laws as part of a broader campaign to kneecap state-level climate efforts. The lawsuits follow a recent executive order directing the DOJ to crack down on state climate policy, singling out New York, Vermont, and California. Such preemptive action is “highly unusual,” says one legal expert.
The administration already has New York in its sights for its congestion pricing program. The new lawsuit is an unprecedented escalation that effectively turns the DOJ into in-house counsel for the fossil fuel industry. Fortunately, AGs from targeted states are expected to fight back in court.
Meanwhile, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is reportedly working to undo the federal finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health, undercutting the very law (the Clean Air Act) the administration is invoking to justify these lawsuits.
Michael Gerrard, founder and faculty director of the Columbia University Sabin Center for Climate Change Law: “It’s an intimidation tactic, and it’s telling the fossil fuel companies how much Trump loves them.”
4. Georgia Power’s Secret Energy Plan
Why their new IRP is raising alarms over the future of clean energy.
Georgia Power’s new Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) is out, and it’s not great. It proposes keeping coal power plants online for even longer past their original closure dates and calls for a 9.5 GW increase in generating capacity by 2031, without a plan for how to achieve it. The utility’s secretive IRP process could enable it to push through a gas-heavy plan with minimal public input, despite years of pressure on the Public Service Commission by advocates for clean energy.
The IRP’s fossil fuel favoritism doesn’t just make the path towards decarbonization steeper — it ignores how clean energy is benefiting Georgians. A new report from Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock says clean energy has brought 42,000+ jobs and $52 billion in investment to the state, largely thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act.
For the first time in years, Georgia voters will soon have PSC commissioners on their ballots. The commission has been criticized for being a "rubber stamp" for Georgia Power and has faced legal backlash for election practices that dilute Black voter influence.
Bob Sherrier, staff attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center: “How can the public meaningfully engage with Georgia Power’s proposed data center plans without any insight into what’s coming?”
5. Trump Commands Us to “Mine Everywhere”
Public lands across the nation are at risk.
In case you missed it, today’s public lands are now tomorrow’s mining sites. Trump’s new “Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production” executive order directs the Secretary of the Interior to identify a list of federal lands that can be mined for “critical” minerals essential for clean energy technologies, high-tech manufacturing, and electrification.
This isn’t the first time this year Trump has opened public lands for mineral exploration. In April, Trump opened part of the Mojave Desert for rare earth exploration near the Mountain Pass mine, despite little evidence that high-grade rare mineral deposits exist there.
Clean energy infrastructure does require mineral mining, but tearing up public lands is the wrong way to do it: rural communities will pay the price, while foreign-owned mining corporations will reap most of the benefit.
From the Center for American Progress: “While the United States does need to identify sustainable mineral sources for the clean energy transition, it must do so with intentional protection of communities and the environment, rather than brazen development on some of the nation’s greatest natural assets.”
SPOTLIGHT: Live Bill Tracking in the States
With state legislative sessions wrapping up in just a few weeks, Pleiades is keeping our Live Anti-ESG State Action Tracker updated. Right now, we’re tracking 103 bad bills under consideration in 31 states.
Only 5 have been signed into law so far. The cost of these anti-ESG measures is generating some pushback, and some bills are seeing amendments that weaken their impact. Oklahoma legislators are trying to amend their ESG law to exempt municipal borrowing, after a study found that it cost municipalities $180 million in higher borrowing costs in 18 months. In Arkansas, legislators created cost-saving loopholes in the anti-ESG law they passed (HB 1507).
Meanwhile, as we predicted in January in our 2025 State Policy Outlook, proponents of anti-ESG bills are pretending they’re on the side of small farmers by pushing versions of the Heartland Foundation’s “Farmer Protection Act” (like Florida’s H651/S700 and North Carolina’s H62/S554), which amount to major boons for Big Ag that don’t benefit climate-buffeted small farmers at all.
