Sustainable Finance Newsletter - Financial risks of heatwaves, renewable energy at Google and in Texas

I'm Virginia Furness and I cover sustainable finance for Reuters from London, which has thankfully cooled off from record-breaking heat in late June and early July. I'm stepping in to produce this week's newsletter for Ross Kerber, who is taking a well-earned holiday.

On heatwaves, I've been on a quest to find out how much attention banks and other finance types pay to extreme heat and whether they factor heat-related losses into investment decisions. You can read about that in my column below.

I've also got items on Google's efforts to procure renewable energy for its massive, and growing, energy use, and how Texas undermines Trump's arguments that wind and solar are bad for the U.S. electrical grid.

Please follow me on LinkedIn. Or get me via virginia.furness@thomsonreuters.com.

HEAT RISKS EASY TO IGNORE

Heatwaves, which climate change has long made more frequent and taxing in tropical and desert regions, are now becoming more common in Europe. This summer's heatwave killed 2,300 people across the continent in the days leading up to July 2.

Scientists confirm that global warming is making heatwave events more intense, more frequent and more widespread. Businesses from bakeries to museums have seen impacts from lower spending to forced closure, leaving profits wilting in the sun.

Increasingly, economists link extreme heat to economic losses visible in everything from falling agricultural yields to lower worker productivity and in some cases a shuttering of all business activity.

Why are banks and investors finding it so difficult to translate these economic impacts into financial losses?

COMPANY NEWS

Google signed the largest clean energy agreement of its kind, a $3 billion mega-deal to secure hydropower to fuel its massive expansion in energy use. The tech giant said last month its data centre electricity use had increased 27% year on year.

HSBC became the first British lender to quit a group set up to help banks meet net zero, following a mass exodus of U.S. lenders. HSBC says it remains committed to addressing climate change, but NGOs called the move "troubling."

Large U.S. employers may scale back healthcare benefits next year with many citing concern over the cost of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Novo Nordisk's NOVO_B Wegovy research by consulting firm Mercer shows.

ON MY RADAR

U.S. President Donald Trump says wind and solar are unreliable and expensive, justifying his bid to end most subsidies for renewable energy. But in Texas, the grid demonstrates that the opposite is true, with electricity prices below the national average and chances of blackouts well reduced.

Canada's climate-friendly Prime Minister Mark Carney has signalled his openness to the construction of a new crude export pipeline in the country where, my colleague shows, Canadian oil sands companies now produce some of North America's lowest-cost oil.