 The Global Green New Deal is a very ambitious plan to use clean energy investments as a platform to tackle climate change, poverty alleviation, job creation, and economic growth at the same time. It has a very strong connection with Keynesian or post-Keynesian economics, which argue investments, especially public investments, are necessary for economic growth, financial stability, and job creation. My name is An Li. I am an economics faculty member at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. I do research and teach courses in environmental justice, environmental economics, ecological economics, the climate change, and the energy transition. The sixth assessment report of the IPCC shows that global surface temperature will keep increasing in the 21st century, and global warming by 1.5 to 2 degrees will be exceeded by the end of the century if we don't take urgent actions. So we do need to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies quickly. And the energy transition would involve a range of clean energy products and services including energy generation, energy storage and transmission and distribution, energy system management, and advanced materials. There are a couple of challenges faced by the energy transition. The first one would be our global economy has been relying on fossil fuels for centuries, and it is pretty difficult to transition away from fossil fuels. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, in 2017, the global energy sector received $634 million of direct subsidies, and 70% of those went to fossil fuels, only 20% went to renewables, the other 10% went to nuclear and biofuels. The second challenge would be political or geopolitical. The fossil fuel corporations in the United States and many other countries have unmatched influence over politics. And in terms of geopolitical, the recent Ukraine war has impacted the energy transition because Ukraine is a global major supplier of industrial gases needed for the production of chips used in the renewable energy technologies. The third challenge would be the long lasting practices and ideologies of fiscal austerity, which has limited what the government can do in the energy transition. And the fourth challenge would be the financial market. Those on the financial market are more interested in short-term returns. They are not ready to support the energy transition in the long run through committed capital. Financial reform refers to the increasing dominance of the financial market in the global or national economy since the 1970s. Supported by deregulation and financial innovations, the financial market is able to extract more and more value from the rest of the economy while creating more and more risk and concentration of wealth and income in the economy. Financialization also happens to the non-financial corporations. After World War II, the U.S. non-financial corporations are very successful because they could return their earnings and reinvest in their employees and innovations. But since the 1970s, they adopted the new model of downsize and distribute. They are spending less and less on innovations and their employees, but they are spending more and more on buying and selling each other and distributing value to the shareholders. Financialization has turned corporate executives from product entrepreneurs into paper entrepreneurs. It is important to examine financialization in the energy transition process because it can take away money from energy transition and redirect the money toward the financial market. So in our latest research, my co-author Jingjing Wu from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and I examined the financialization of the non-financial clean energy corporations in the United States using the latest data, we found that the average CEO-to-worker pay in the sector has increased from 60 to 1 to 100 to 1 in the last decade. And this increase is largely driven by stock-based pay. So if you look at stock awards and stock options as a share of the CEO compensation, that share has increased from about 40% to about 60% in the last decade. When the CEO compensation is directly linked with the performance of the corporations on the stock market, the CEOs are more interested, they're more motivated to use company resources to distribute value to shareholders. So in the past decade, the average shareholder payout in the clean energy sector has increased from about $20 million to about $60 million recently. So this is the first dimension of financialization. Another important dimension of financialization is capital raising innovations. We know early investors in a company can make profits by selling their shares. Even the company is listed on the stock market. Recently, a new capital raising innovation called special purpose acquisition companies has become very popular. So early investors can form a spec and raise capital from the stock market. And they will seek to merge with the private company and bring it public. If the merger is successful, they can make profits by selling their shares. In many cases, they can sell their shares before the merger is completed. Recently, spec has become a quicker, easier, and lower cost way for people to extract value from the clean energy sector. In 2020 to 2021, about a third of all spec activities have clean energy-relevant targets. We can look at a case. In the case of the merger between Switchback, which is a spec, and ChargePoint, which is a provider of electrical vehicle charging services in the United States. The merger itself added $1.5 per share of net cash to ChargePoint's balance sheet. It is much lower than the $10 per share attributed to the merger. That means the remaining $8.5 per share would be extracted by the early investors. So without addressing this financialization, money will keep flowing away from the energy transition and toward the financial market. The same concern has been raised by scholars elsewhere, and we need stronger financial regulations and stronger industrial policies. The financial corporations and the non-financial corporations engaged in the energy transition process have to be more transparent and timely in reporting their transactions. We need higher capital gain tax, which will reduce the incentive to extract value from the clean energy sector and motivate more long-term committed capital investments. In terms of industrial policy, we need to lower or remove the subsidies received by the fossil fuel industry, and we need more public investments, which are more long-term oriented and can benefit the working class. The global green new deal is a very ambitious plan to use clean energy investments as a platform to tackle climate change, poverty alleviation, job creation, and economic growth at the same time. It has very strong connection with Keynesian or post-Keynesian economics, which argue investments, especially public investments, are necessary for economic growth, financial stability, and job creation. Many scholars have focused on how many jobs can be created from the global green new deals. This is very important, but we also need to focus on the quality of the jobs being created. In many developing countries, informal employment is the norm. These informal jobs are precarious, lower paid, insecure, and protected. If we do not address this informal employment and just spend money in the global green new deal, we will perpetuate or even expand informal employment, which will create inequality in the society. We have more access to data now, so it is important to use the data to produce evidence that can support energy transition policies.