On today’s program, Marie Clara Buellingen, Head of Sustainable Finance Americas for Societe Generale Corporate & Investment Banking, one of the largest foreign banking organizations in North America, talks  about approaches to clean energy technology solutions she has seen work across multiple sectors of the global economy.

Paul Ellis: What differences do you see between the United States and the European approaches to incorporating sustainability considerations into financing and capital allocation decisions?

Marie Clara Buellingen: I just spent 10 days in Europe, and it really struck me how omnipresent the climate discussion is in public discourse, in private conversations, in election campaigns. It’s visible within the first hour of being there, you really see the public infrastructure that has been invested in, through that climate lens, transportation, electricity and so forth.

That being said it creates a very top-down approach, right? it’s very different than the bottom up market driven approach that you have in the U.S.

I think it’s also important that while there’s a lot of good that comes with having very stringent regulation driving compliance, it’s very different from a market driven approach,  where it’s really focused more on innovation. I think absent a price on carbon that innovation piece is so critical.

PE: How can corporates and project sponsors incorporate climate risk considerations into their work with your sustainability team at Societe Generale?

MCB: The typical financial planning horizon for a U.S. corporate is five years, so if you think about some of the key decarbonization challenges needed to be addressed a lot of them lie outside the five-year time horizon. So how do you start thinking about incorporating them when you make those decisions today? How do you start thinking about making decisions that incorporate the maximum amount of flexibility.

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