Some failed presidential candidates retreat to their mansions plotting their revenge on the world — and the Constitution.

And then there’s John Delaney.

His 2020 campaign kicked off three years ahead of the election but didn’t ignite. In the two years since the election he’s had more success joining a wave of other White House wannabes dedicating their lives to eradicating the effects of climate change.

(President Joe Biden’s international climate envoy John Kerry, and billionaires Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg are the others.)

Today Delaney is running Forbright Bank, from Chevy Chase, Maryland, which aims to be the first green “full-service bank.”

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You’re running a “green bank,” and that could mean different things to different people: How do you see it?

I mean a full-service bank that can not only finance a community solar project, or finance residential solar, or other types of sustainable infrastructure, but a bank where a restaurant can actually go and do its banking business. Or you could go and get a mortgage on your home, wherever you live.

What we're really trying to do, very simply, is create the first bank that does that, and we think we can deliver market returns.

What does your future competitive landscape look like?

If you do deliver market returns other people will copy you: And that's a good thing.

It wouldn't surprise me that in the next five or 10 years you see banks building very large, dedicated businesses focused on this as an asset class. We are the pioneers of that.

We have potential to not only solve this big problem [climate change], but be enormously positive in terms of how we reshape our economic systems. Things like reshoring will play into this sustainability march. It’s also manufacturing, it's agriculture, it’s building things, it’s transportation that will be reimagined.

Where do you see the private sector role versus government stepping in? 

It's going to have to be mostly private sector-led. Governments and NGOs can do a trillion, and the private sector: Call it $2 trillion to $4 trillion.

Together that’s $3 trillion to $5 trillion that the world's got to spend each year between now and 2050 to 2060 to decarbonize. It’s the greatest capital deployment project in the history of humankind.

Government clearly plays a very important role in terms of setting incentives, and that's why the Inflation Reduction Act was so positive, because it did in fact rate a lot of those incentives.

The Texas attorney general and others want to punish companies that have ESG efforts. Will that affect how you offer services? 

Forbright is a relatively small bank in that we have $6.5 billion of assets. So it's very easy for us to say we have no carbon exposure: We can say not a nickel of our funds go to finance fossil fuel infrastructure. We are also committed that over time 50 percent of our assets will directly finance decarbonization or sustainability. So we're not only operating a negative screen, but we're allocating capital.

Contrast this with Bank of America, which has a large business financing the fossil fuel industry. They can't get out of that right away and nor, quite frankly, should they: This is an energy transition, after all. Seeing what's happening with Europe in Ukraine, we clearly need fossil fuels.

So I think some of the big banks are getting some unfair criticism, because they can't just get out of these businesses, nor does the world nor do we want them to get out. But that doesn't mean that they can't be applying more of their capital to financing decarbonization.

The Texas attorney general can do whatever they want, but if someone's building new capabilities in Texas, the businesspeople making those decisions are going to build it in a low-carbon way.

A lot of big VC players have tended not to fund the big scientific challenges of our time. Can your bank impact how other finance firms, like VCs, operate?

This is an interconnected ecosystem, and everyone has a role to play. Everyone's got a position to play on the team. And everyone's got to play that position really well for the team to be successful.

So a regulated bank like us operates with a safety-and-soundness mindset, as we're required to do by our regulators.

But an increasing number of venture capital firms are just focused on decarbonization, and one of them is an investor in Forbright: a firm called Galvanized Climate Solutions founded by Tom Steyer. So we can be in the middle of all that stuff.

Very predictable, relatively low-cost capital, is really important because so much of decarbonization is about infrastructure. While we need breakthrough technologies to change the world, we also need a few old-fashioned JP Morgans, to actually finance all the infrastructure that's needed.

For example: We need low-cost, low-carbon cement. If the cement industry were a country it would be the third largest emitter of CO2 in the world. The important role for banks to play is financing the backbone of all this stuff.

So how will it work — funding the American heartland to be part of this green transition? 

There’s a reshoring and re-industrialization going on in the West right now. And that's a good thing, given the East and the West aren't getting along so well. That’s causing Western countries to say we need to re-industrialize a lot of our heartlands so we're more resilient, and that’s all interwoven with doing that in a more sustainable manner whether you're in Texas or whether you're in California.

Scientists say we may not keep warming to 1.5 degrees celsius. That the good work won’t scale in time. How do you react to that? 

I'm actually very optimistic about the United States right now.

Although I'm feeling really bad about the climate data, because we're clearly lagging, and the geopolitical situation creates a big headwind for all this stuff, I think it’s amazing that we got the Inflation Reduction Act.

I wanted more, but I thought we were gonna go through this president's first term and get nothing, which would have been so depressing.

I think change can happen faster than people think when you get the innovation. So there will be opportunities to accelerate and catch up.

Look at Tesla — putting aside Elon Musk for a second — Tesla did change the global auto industry. And they made every auto company adopt an EV strategy. Not because the Tesla cars were so great: They did it because Tesla became so valuable. And they wanted to copy that.

Our own little humble spot of this continuum is we want to go to other banks and say, “Listen, you can do this, too. We need more partners. And by the way, it's really good business.”

As they age, today’s young folks are going to drive more and more of these decisions. That's why I'm optimistic: They clearly want this.

GAME ON — Welcome to the Long Game, where we tell you about the latest on efforts to shape our future. We deliver data-driven storytelling, compelling interviews with industry and political leaders, and news Tuesday through Friday to keep you in the loop on sustainability.

Team Sustainability is editor Greg Mott, deputy editor Debra Kahn and reporters Jordan Wolman and Allison Prang. Reach us all at [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected].

Want more? Don’t we all. Sign up for the Long Game. Four days a week and still free!

— Eight of the 10 largest ESG funds did worse than the S&P 500 this year, Bloomberg points out.

— Looking for cheap real estate in California? Try offshore — five wind power leases sold for $400 million yesterday, a bargain compared with the East Coast.

— The World Bank is creating a database of offset registries to help countries buy credits more easily, Reuters reports.