Finance and Climate Change Panel
The plenary panel on Finance and Climate Change features two academic experts – Professor Lars Hansen from the University of Chicago and Nobel prize laureate, and Professor Catherine Wolfram from MIT – alongside industry expert Mr. Andrew Blease from Moody’s. The panel will explore the role of financial markets in addressing climate change, including topics such as carbon pricing, financing technological innovation, and the challenge of uncertainty and its implications for early action. The potential influence of central banks and rating agencies will also be discussed.
Panelists
Andrew Blease
Andrew Blease is an Associate Managing Director in Moody’s EMEA Infrastructure team, stationed in Paris. He leads a team of analysts focused on transport infrastructure and utilities in the EMEA region. Since joining Moody’s in 2000, Andrew has been involved in the analysis of a diverse array of infrastructure, utilities and project finance issuers.
Andrew is a recognized speaker at industry conferences and has served as an expert witness for various government inquiries throughout his career at Moody’s.
Before his tenure at Moody’s, Andrew built his career in international banking, engaging in advisory and debt-arranging for project finance transactions, especially in the PFI and transport sectors. He studied finance at London Metropolitan University and is a member of the Chartered Institute of Bankers.
Lars Peter Hansen
Lars Peter Hansen is the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor and the Director of BFI’s Macro Finance Research (MFR) Program at the University of Chicago. He is the leading expert in economic dynamics who works at the forefront of economic thinking and modeling, drawing approaches from macroeconomics, finance, and statistics. Hansen has made fundamental advances in our understanding of how economic agents cope with changing and risky environments. He is the recipient of the 2013 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
Catherine Wolfram
Catherine Wolfram is the William Barton Rogers Professor of Energy Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She previously served as the Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. From March 2021 to October 2022, she served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Climate and Energy Economicsat the U.S. Treasury, while on leave from UC Berkeley. Before leaving for government service, she was the Program Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Environment and Energy Economics Program and a research affiliate at the Energy Institute at Haas. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Harvard. Wolfram has published extensively on the economics of energy markets. Her work has analyzed rural electrification programs in the developing world, energy efficiency programs in the US, the effects of environmental regulation on energy markets and the impact of privatization and market restructuring in the US and UK. She is currently working on projects at the intersection of climate, energy, and trade, including work on oil market sanctions. She received a PhD in Economics from MIT in 1996 and an AB from Harvard in 1989.