NEW YORK — The world’s largest investors today issued a statement calling on the United States and other governments to ‘act now to catalyze development of a low-carbon economy and to attract the vast amount of private capital necessary for such a transformation.’ The U.S., European and Australian investor groups, who together represent $13 trillion in assets, called for ‘a price on carbon emissions’ and ‘well-designed carbon markets’ to provide ‘a cost-effective way of achieving emissions reductions.’ The statement was announced at the Investor Summit on Climate Risk, a meeting of 450 global investors at the United Nations that includes U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern, billionaire investor George Soros and former Vice President Al Gore. The investors said while some progress towards a global agreement limiting greenhouse gas emissions was made at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in December 2009, ‘we cannot wait for a global treaty.’ ‘Policymakers made only incremental progress in Copenhagen, leaving a great deal of work to be done to address the risks that climate change presents to the global economy and to investments,’ they said. They said, ‘we underscore the importance of concluding a legally-binding agreement […]