For a minute last week it looked like the New York Times was heeding CTC’s summons to tax carbon emissions as a way to make faltering clean-energy projects profitable.
NY Times op-ed by David Wallace-Wells, Jan. 10, 2024. His “missing profits” aren’t the same as ours.
The mirage appeared in the headline for an opinion piece, Missing Profits May Be a Problem for the Green Transition, by the Times’ climate columnist David Wallace-Wells. MISSING PROFITS! Was Wallace-Wells pursuing the idea I floated in a CTC blog two months ago, that a U.S. carbon tax could lift the prevailing price of grid power by enough to offset the cost creep that has killed off East Coast wind and solar projects along with an innovative nuclear power venture in Idaho?
Not quite. The “missing profits” in the Times column referred to collapsing returns inflicted on renewable energy projects by higher interest rates, stretched-out schedules and cost escalation endemic to first-of-a-kind projects like 900-foot-tall offshore wind turbines (East Coast) and small modular reactors (Idaho). The phrase in the Times column did not denote the revenue boost that carbon-free power projects deserve but don’t get for the climate benefit they create by keeping fossil fuels in the ground.
Nevertheless, “missing profits” is a keeper phrase. Though less poetic than “gainsharing,” the term we deployed in that Nov. 10 post (Gainsharing: Carbon Taxes Can Put Clean Energy Back in the Black), the phrase is clearer and more to the point: The lack of robust carbon pricing manifests as missing profits that beset every project, policy and gesture that promises to reduce use of fossil fuels and, thus, to avert and reduce carbon emissions.
Leave the idea, take the expression, “Godfather” movie character Pete Clemenza might have said.
What was the idea, then, in Wallace-Wells’ Times column? Mostly that the prospective profits from wind and solar projects are downright meager compared to returns on oil and gas supply investments.
True enough, and unsettling. But the antidote advanced in the column is almost diametrically opposite ours. CTC wants a robust U.S. carbon price “to put clean energy projects back in the black.” In contrast, Uppsala University (Sweden) geographer Brett Christophers, the avatar of Wallace-Wells’ column, wants “public ownership of the power sector.”
Yes, but which price is wrong? Christophers writes in his forthcoming book that renewables cost too much and need public investment. We say *fossil fuels* are priced *too low* and require carbon pricing.
I haven’t read Christophers’ new book, The Price Is Wrong — its publication is set for March. But its contours seem clear from Wallace-Wells’ column and from Christophers’ own NYT guest essay last May, Why Are We Allowing the Private Sector to Take Over Our Public Works?
In that essay, Christophers took dead aim at the Biden administration’s signature climate achievement, the Inflation Reducation Act. “The I.R.A. will help accelerate the growing private ownership of U.S. infrastructure and, in particular, its concentration among a handful of global asset managers,” he wrote.
“It is wrong,” Christophers continued, to cast the I.R.A. and other Biden legislation as “a renewal of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal infrastructure programs of the 1930s.”
The signature feature of the New Deal was public ownership: Even as private firms carried out many of the tens of thousands of construction projects, almost all of the new infrastructure was funded and owned publicly. These were public works. Public ownership of major infrastructure has been an American mainstay ever since. [I]n political-economic terms, Mr. Biden, far from assuming Roosevelt’s mantle, has actually been dismantling the Rooseveltian legacy. (emphasis added)
Wallace-Wells summarized the challenge of green power’s newly spiking capital and interest costs as follows:
For Christophers, this is a challenge that implies its own solution: public ownership of the power sector. If all that stands between our bumpy “mid-transition” status quo and an abundant clean-energy future for all is an initial hurdle of investment, why strain to extract that investment from private investors who’d prefer to invest elsewhere?
But what if renewables’ “missing profits” aren’t solely their upfront-cost hurdle? What if the findings touted by Wallace-Wells and hundreds of others, from the International Energy Agency and Bloomberg New Energy Finance, that new wind and solar arrays pencil out cheaper than equivalent electricity generated with coal or methane, are simplistic or even wrong?
To his credit, Wallace-Wells allowed in his column that U.S. public power agencies traditionally have been “obstacles to a rapid transition [from fossil fuels]” rather than “models of hyperdecarbonization.” But it’s also true that some entities of government, including New York State, have strong traditions of positive public works. Indeed, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s tenure as governor served as a testing ground for ideas such as unemployment insurance and old-age pensions that his presidency made foundational to the New Deal.
Chart, reprinted from our Nov. 2023 “Gainsharing” post (link in text), has back-of-the-envelope estimates of the “missing profits” clean-energy projects could capture under carbon pricing.
In this light, CTC finds much to like in New York’s new (2023) Build Public Renewables Act, which authorizes the NY Power Authority to build and own renewable power projects. At the same time, we’re mindful that public financing of clean power constitutes a subsidy, albeit an indirect one, and that the U.S. tax code already provides considerable subsidies to wind and solar power — subsidies that the I.R.A. extended to the entire electrification effort (EV’s, batteries, transmission, manufacture) of which wind and solar are key components.
The virtues and pitfalls of public investment in clean power are worthy of public conversation, not just in the U.S. but “in the poorer parts of the world,” as Wallace-Wells notes, where hundreds of millions lack access to electricity of any stripe, in part because “capital costs of new infrastructure can be prohibitively high even in the absence of supply shocks and global inflation conditions.”
CTC’s focus, though, is the United States, home of the world’s most inventive entrepreneurs and its most efficient capital markets. Without shutting the door against public investment, we are tantalized by the possibility that clean power’s cost hiccups can be overcome through robust carbon pricing. Unlike subsidies, carbon pricing won’t “accelerate the growing private ownership of U.S. infrastructure and, in particular, its concentration among a handful of global asset managers,” the specter raised against the I.R.A. by Brett Christophers in his May 2023 Times guest essay.
Carbon pricing isn’t targeted and isn’t game-able. It’s ecumenical, technology-neutral and pervasive. It raises all boats — energy efficiency and conservation as well as renewables. Whether it can actually restore profitability to carbon-free power projects is an urgent question we at CTC intend to explore this year.
Most businesses that decide to act on their net-zero targets reach the same point of friction. Buying carbon credits has meant tracking down brokers, sitting through sales calls, and requesting a quote just to learn a price, sometimes with limited proof of what you are buying.
The earnings calls that quietly reframed climate from sustainability question to operating risk.
Three earnings calls in the last 18 months tell the story without any help from a press release.
Hershey, May 2024: cocoa price exposure compresses margin, and the company attributes part of the cost shock to West African weather. Olam, July 2024: coffee climate exposure quantified in the annual report. JBS, January 2025: supply chain climate disclosures expanded materially in response to investor pressure and regulatory expectation. None of these companies issued the announcement as climate news. They issued it as financial news. The climate-linked supply chain risk did not arrive with a sustainability framing; it arrived as a P&L line.
You are probably reading this article because you suspect the same thing is happening to your business. This piece walks through what is showing up on which earnings calls, how procurement and finance leaders are quantifying the exposure, and what serious corporates are doing about it before the regulator asks.
Where climate risk has already appeared in earnings
The pattern is consistent across resource-intensive sectors. A weather event compresses supply, the price spikes, the cost flows through the income statement, and the analyst on the call asks whether the event is anomalous or structural. Increasingly, the honest answer is the second one.
Cocoa is the cleanest example. The 2023 to 2024 West African harvest fell sharply on the back of erratic rainfall and disease. Cocoa futures more than tripled. Companies with concentrated West African sourcing absorbed the cost; companies with diversified sourcing absorbed less. The exposure was not climate as ESG topic. It was climate as cost of goods.
Coffee follows the same pattern. Brazilian and Vietnamese harvests have moved on weather more sharply across the last several seasons. Roasters with long-tenor supplier relationships and origin diversification have managed the volatility; roasters with spot-market exposure have not. Wheat, sugar, palm oil, beef: the same dynamic in different commodities, a pattern the IPCC AR6 Working Group II report projects will intensify across agricultural systems through mid-century.
What this means: climate risk is no longer a footnote in the 10-K. It is a line item the CFO has to explain on the call.
The three commodity exposures that hit margin first
For most companies with material Scope 3 exposure, three exposures dominate the near-term P&L risk.
- Concentrated single-origin sourcing in a climate-vulnerable region. If your tier-one supply for any material commodity sits in one geography, you have a concentration risk that climate amplifies. Diversification across origins is the obvious hedge, but it takes years to build and requires relationships you cannot acquire by tender.
- Supplier financial fragility under climate stress. Smallholder farmers, who supply a large share of the global cocoa, coffee, and palm oil market, do not carry the balance sheets to absorb yield shocks. When yields collapse, they exit. When they exit, your supply base shrinks, and the surviving suppliers raise prices. The risk is structural, not cyclical.
- Logistics and storage exposure to extreme weather. Hurricane disruptions to Gulf shipping, drought-driven Panama Canal restrictions, flooding in European inland waterways: each of these has moved input costs in the last three years, a pattern documented in Munich Re’s natural catastrophe data. The exposure shows up as a one-quarter event in the financial press but accumulates over time on the cost line.
TCFD and ISSB disclosure changes
The disclosure architecture has now caught up with the risk. The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, whose recommendations are now embedded in the ISSB’s IFRS S2 climate standard, requires companies to disclose climate-related risks across physical and transition categories, with quantification where possible.
For physical risk specifically (the climate-linked supply chain risk you are reading about), the disclosure must address both acute exposures (extreme weather events) and chronic exposures (gradual changes in temperature, precipitation, and growing seasons). The disclosure must address the time horizon over which the risk is material, the parts of the value chain exposed, and the financial impact under different scenarios.
The CSRD imposes similar requirements under European law, with double materiality (both financial and impact materiality) embedded in the assessment. The practical effect: your auditors and your investor relations team now need a defensible answer to the climate-linked supply chain risk question, and the answer needs to be quantified.
What procurement and finance can do now
Three actions matter near-term.
Map your exposure. Most companies do not have a clear view of which tier-one and tier-two suppliers sit in which climate-vulnerable geographies. Without the map, you cannot quantify the risk, and without the quantification, you cannot disclose it credibly. The map is the foundation, and World Resources Institute climate risk research provides useful public tooling to start.
Diversify and deepen, in that order. Diversification across origins reduces concentration risk, but the deeper move is to invest in the resilience of the suppliers you already have. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, soil health interventions: these reduce yield volatility under climate stress and protect your input cost trajectory.
Embed the climate spend inside procurement, not outside it. Treating climate risk as a sustainability cost line subordinates it to the ESG budget. Treating it as a procurement and resilience investment puts it in the budget that matters, which is the cost-of-goods budget that the CFO defends quarterly.
Nature-based supply chain investments are the asset class designed for exactly this purpose. They sit inside the value chain, they reduce climate-linked supply risk, they generate verifiable Scope 3 reductions, and they produce the documentation an auditor and a regulator can both test.
If you are quantifying climate-linked supply chain risk in advance of the next earnings cycle or the next disclosure period, the carbon and sustainability experts at Carbon Credit Capital can help you map your exposure and structure a Dual-Value Model response that addresses reduction, resilience, and disclosure-readiness in a single program. Schedule a consultation.
More and more small and medium-sized businesses are hearing the same question from their larger customers: What is your carbon footprint? That question now travels down entire supply chains, and it arrives next to tender requirements, certification criteria, and rising customer expectations.
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