News: China tests green Munis / Koch-funded study confirms CC science / Green Climate Fund thaw

> China Green Munis: As a market test, the Chinese Govt has announced it will allow 2 cities and 2 provinces to issue local govt bonds for environmental projects. See http://goo.gl/OKaPh and http://goo.gl/uIG0H. That's right, green and climate bonds, as foreshadowed in a number of mayoral speeches over the past year. It's still unclear whether overseas investors wanting to have an exposure to Chinese debt will be allowed to buy.

> UN GCF progress: had a chance to catch up in Barcelona with a country-level participant in the Green Climate Fund negotiations today. It seems lots of progress has recently been made on the grant vs leverage question, with G77 countries reluctantly accepting there will be little grant cash. The question now is how to best engage the private sector – there is deep suspicion of the commercial banks. Enter squeaky clean institutional investors? And if you've missed the debate about leverage read this useful options paper from Katherine Sierra at the Brookings Institute. Then read NEF-Bloomberg CEO Michael Liebreich's very interesting proposal for a Framework not a Fund.

> Huge study confirms climate science. The Koch Brothers are famous for funding Tea Party activists and climate change deniers. They contributed $150k to a project led by sceptic Dr Richard Muller with science centre Novim and Nobel prize-winner Saul Perlmutter, to open source and review 1.6 billion climate data records to see whether the world was really warming. Climate Bonds director Bryan Martell helped put together the project. Project’s founder and sceptic Richard Muller, said in the statement: “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously. This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change skeptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.” Surprise! It’s all in the Economist - http://www.economist.com/node/21533360

+ Climate Bonds also made The Economist (today). Of course it doesn't mean any new climate bonds have been issued yet. Yet.