Net Zero’ Will Make Wall Street Richer at Main Street’s Expense – Follow the money…on who benefits from creating an artificial demand for renewable energy’

The finance industry’s palpable excitement is electrifying to climate activists and the politicians who cater to them. Wall Street is now squarely on their side. Yet the enthusiasm of asset managers and banks is hardly surprising. Any government mandate that a large amount of capital must be swiftly retired and replaced creates a tremendous opportunity for financiers, no matter the underlying reason.

Suppose a government announces that all machines of a certain color, say brown, must be destroyed and replaced with machines of a different color, say green. Owners of the brown machines aren’t happy, but those who can finance the new green machines will profit handsomely. This artificial demand distorts the efficient allocation of capital and comes at a great cost to economic prosperity.

This thought experiment isn’t so different from current developments in the energy industry. Government mandates and incentives are artificially driving demand for renewable energy. The political desire to cater to climate concerns is increasingly benefiting large financial companies, which have been quick to lend their support. Institutional investors have been preparing by reducing their fossil-fuels exposure.

To be sure, private capital is better suited to fund energy investments than overstretched government budgets. Public investment is highly susceptible to inefficiencies such as project delays, cost overruns and politically-driven investment decisions. (Remember Solyndra?)

But it isn’t true, though it’s asserted often, that the benefits of energy transition investments make their ultimate net costs minimal or zero. The boosters of the energy transition are ignoring the opportunity costs of replacing existing energy production with renewables.

Government mandates and incentives steer existing capital, including natural gas and nuclear plants, to retirement for being “dirty,” rather than for age or obsolescence. These still-productive assets must then be replaced. This is on par with trying to get wealthier by breaking one’s own windows—the classic fallacy that holds that the necessary repairs would help the economy, not recognizing that the funds that must be spent on repairs now can’t be spent on efficient production.

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President Eisenhower famously cautioned about the “military-industrial complex.” Today, an emerging coalition of governments and environmental activists singularly focused on net zero are empowering a “finance-industrial complex” eager to affirm the activists’ goals—and get rich doing so.

Mr. Rauh is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Mr. de Zeeuw is a senior research analyst at Hoover.