Ceres CEO and President Mindy Lubber testified last week in support of proposed legislation to create a climate bank designed to foster financial innovation to invest in climate mitigation and resilience projects and accelerate the deployment of clean energy projects across the Commonwealth. Lubber urged members of the Massachusetts Legislature’s Joint Committee on Financial Services, in both written and oral comments, to advance the legislation, known as the Act Creating a Climate Bank in Massachusetts (H.3937 / S.786).
“Private capital is one of the last largely untapped financial resources in Massachusetts for funding the transition to a cleaner energy economy and building resilience,” Lubber wrote in her written testimony. “The Climate Bank would leverage public and private investments to provide low-interest loans, credit enhancements, and other financial products. Homeowners, small businesses, and other beneficiaries across Massachusetts could use this innovative financing to combat climate change, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promote clean energy, and facilitate climate resilience across the state.”
Lubber also underscored that the proposed climate bank follows a well-established model. There are 40 other state and local climate banks in the United States. By using public seed monies to leverage much larger sums of private capital, these state and local climate banks collectively invested $10.6 billion into clean energy projects in 2023 alone. She also offered recommendations to the proposed legislation to ensure that environmental justice communities, as defined by Massachusetts state law, should be a priority for lending, in addition to the rural and coastal communities already identified.
Read Lubber’s full written testimony here.
