Journalists from Benefits and PEnsions Monitor updated the readers about the efforts that EDHECinfra is doing to support four environmental groups who launched legal action against the inclusion of gas in the EU taxonomy. In an open letter to environmental law charity ClientEarth, the European Policy Office of the WWF, NGO Transport & Environment (T&E), and the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND), Noël Amenc, associate professor at EDHEC Business School and director at Scientific Infra, and Frédéric Blanc-Brude, director of the EDHEC Infrastructure Institute, express their strong support for the legal action against the European executive to prevent fossil gas from featuring in the European Union’s sustainable finance taxonomy. They also refer to the paper ‘The Cost of Capital of Brown Gas’ ‒ in which Dr Amenc and Dr Blanc-Brude argued that the European Commission’s decision to include natural gas in the EU Green Taxonomy could have very unfavourable consequences for investment in renewable energy. Their research note shows that excluding natural gas generation from the EU Green Taxonomy would not increase its cost of capital and thus not create any risk of underinvestment in natural gas, the ‘transition fuel’ of choice. Conversely, including gas in the taxonomy creates a genuine price distortion and a perverse incentive to limit future investments in renewable energy technologies.

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