outside of being an assistant professor in finance and real estate at american university, paul yoo, ph.d., is helping write an amicus brief on behalf of the inflation reduction act.

after president donald trump’s administration froze ira funds intended for green banks through the greenhouse gas reduction fund, climate united, a national investment fund supporting clean energy projects, challenged the freeze in court. green banks are organizations using public and private capital to fund clean energy projects such as those including solar.

the lawsuit involves the plaintiffs the environmental protection agency and citibank, the financial intermediary for the funds, and addresses the justification and structure of ira funding for green energy initiatives. 

read the interview with yoo below.

the interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

maggie rhoads: walk me through how the opportunity to write the amicus brief came up. how did you get involved? 

paul yoo, ph.d.: it came up through an organization called the coalition for green capital — in short, cgc. my co-authors and i were trying to answer a research question about whether or not these entities called green banks were trying to allocate capital into projects that are more green, more responsible, more sustainable.

so we were trying to answer those questions, and we wanted some sort of data, and these green banks’ data, if there is any, would have been stored by this organization called coalition for green capital. so we reached out to them. they told me the data wasn’t really there, but happy to kind of coordinate whatever becomes available. 

mr: how long ago was that connection?

py: it was, like, a year and a half or two years ago, i cannot recall. so they knew about my research interest in this area.

mr: and how did that lead to the amicus brief?

py: the coalition was heavily involved with applying to get this funding from the inflation reduction act, or ira. there is a part of the ira that is the greenhouse gas reduction fund, or ggrf, and they’re trying to apply for a portion of that fund as a group of green banks, and they got it. but now, after mr. trump got appointed as president, that fund is now frozen. and because of that, they went into the court for arbitration, and for that they reached out to me to see if i could serve as an expert contributor to the amicus brief. 

mr: what courts are these for?

py: to the best of my knowledge, they went to the appeals court. they recently lost by the panel of three judges by two to one, and then they are recommended to go through this special court called the court of federal claims.

they’re now going in that direction, which i think is asking all the juries in d.c. [for] their opinions, and if that doesn’t go well, or doesn’t go in favor of the plaintiffs, what i understand is they will then go to the supreme court for the final arbitration. so i would expect myself to be involved throughout that whole process until the end.

mr: how specifically are you involved besides writing the brief? what kind of expert advice do you give?

py: one of the biggest points that these lawyers are trying to make to the judges is that the ira money and how that money is dispersed to the grant recipients of these green banks, the format of how this money will flow, is a little different from the traditional grants from the department of energy or the epa. it actually has a different form. this ira money that goes to the green banks will not be a grant that is reimbursement-based. 

mr: can you explain the difference in simple terms?

py: a lot of grants that are given by the federal government say, “go ahead and spend this amount, but after you spend that amount, come back to me and get reimbursed.” so that money doesn’t sit with the account of the grant recipient until they get this thing reimbursed.

ira money, the ggrf money that cgc and climate united received, [was] taking a different form. even before they actually spend [the money], it will come to their account balances, like, as a personal account balance.

so now the lawyers are trying to argue that this kind of different form of capital flow that is giving more freedom and authority to these plaintiffs is justifiable, or that it has economic sense, because of the fact that there [is] very well-established research showing the scope of what you can do to use those funds efficiently for different projects when you actually have those assets in your balance sheet. you have full authority to allocate such funds to which[ever] projects, which gives more efficiency, and more likelihood of effectively unlocking private capital.