I think the way to look at it would be to imagine that you are optimizing some utility function which incorporates some mean and some variance.

The risk of going for a clean energy project is massive. It can fail completely, it could work but not return much profit, there are lots of ways it can go wrong.

However - the problem here is that the 'do nothing' state is not static utility. Do nothing results in everything going to shit, with very little variance.

Our capitalist systems aren't really set up to deal with that, it's a tragedy of the commons. That's why you need things like taxes on oil - to force the utility function to accommodate bad things.