What do you call sustainable finance targets and disclosures that are abandoned by companies because the government amended a law to crack down on greenwashing?

Well, you call them greenwashing lies.

Ian Bickis, reporting for the Canadian Press:

Canada’s largest bank said Tuesday that it has scrapped one of its flagship climate commitments and is holding back on publicizing other climate progress in part because of new rules around greenwashing.

In its latest sustainability report, RBC said that it has dropped its target of facilitation $500 billion in sustainable financing after finding issues with its methodology.

The bank said the findings, as well as amendments to Canada’s Competition Act that set expectations around environmental claims, led to it “retiring” its commitment.

RBC also decided not to disclose its energy supply ratio, an important measure of how its financing of high- and low-carbon energy compare, also citing changes to the act that require environmental claims be backed up.

The bank had last year committed to release its ratio following pressure from shareholders including the New York pension system.

It also said it won’t be disclosing how it’s making progress on its commitment to provide $35 billion to low-carbon energy by 2030.

The sustainable finance section in RBC’s latest sustainability report has only 4 paragraphs that talk about how they are giving up on their targets because they can’t substantiate their numbers. Incredible.

Someone should sue RBC for securities fraud.

Gina Gambetta, reporting for Responsible Investor:

The Business Roundtable (BRT) has called for the banning of environmental, social and “political” shareholder proposals.

The lobbyist association of CEOs of major US companies and financial institutions made the recommendation in a report published last week.

One of the most insidious effects that big corporations have on climate politics is through their lobbying efforts. Lobby groups like the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce have a knee-jerk opposition to any climate regulations. These CEOs don’t want to be regulated by democratically elected governments, but even Milton Friedman had to agree that they need to be accountable to their shareholders.

Being accountable is obviously no fun, so these CEOs decided to ask their regulator friends to stop their legal owners from asking tough questions about environmental and social promises they made.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because Exxon sued its shareholders last year to shut them up about climate change. Despite strong shareholder pushback, Exxon’s intimidation tactics worked.

Now the members of the Business Roundtable, including CEOs of ESG investing cheerleaders (the likes of BlackRock and JPMorganChase) and big-tech climate leaders (Google, Apple, Salesforce and Microsoft), are joining their esteemed fossil fuel colleagues (Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and of course, Exxon) in demanding less accountability.

Natasha White, reporting for Bloomberg:

Money managers who say BP still belongs in an ESG portfolio include Legal & General Investment Management, which added BP to its Climate Action Global Equity fund in September and has held on to the stake despite the company’s pivot away from its climate commitments.

“We’ve seen some backpedalling,” said Nick Stansbury, manager of the fund and head of climate solutions at Legal & General. “But that is in the context of an awful lot of backpedalling everywhere else.”

Stansbury said that “what matters isn’t only the absolute sustainability performance of a company, but its performance relative to other companies.”

A best-in-class approach can let fossil fuel “climate leaders” into a ESG fund. LGIM has a very ESG-sounding “Climate Action strategy”, and a very legal justification for being a SFDR Article 8 fund. But if you keep your stake in an oil major after it abandoned its energy transition plans, calling yourself a “climate action fund” is just a boldface lie.

Avinash Persaud, speaking with Bloomberg climate reporter Akshat Rathi on the Zero podcast:

So people think the line works that it’s a lack of integrity. These knaves are out there, these bad people doing bad things, and as a result, there’s no integrity. And because there’s no integrity, the price is low. No. It’s because it’s voluntary, and no one’s required to do it. So what is this marketplace? It’s someone who’s saying, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t mind buying some credits to offset my activity, and it’s voluntary, I’m looking around. I don’t have to do it and not be required to do it, and so I will buy the cheapest credit I can find.’

So the price of this voluntary market is very, very low. It’s about 2% of the price of the compliance markets. When the price is so low, there’s no money in there to do integrity properly. Because to do integrity properly, you need monitoring, evaluation. You also need to consider also what happens when the thing which was reducing emissions, stops reducing emissions. So you need a bunch of stuff that costs some money. And if there’s no money in this credit, because it’s so it’s voluntary and low priced, you’re not investing in integrity.

Christiana Figueres, discussing China’s economic leadership in climate solutions:

Several episodes ago, I can’t exactly remember which one, but several episodes ago, we talked about the possibility that the BRICS, for sure, led by China, would reinterpret global decarbonization to their benefit in their own way for the moment of development that they are in. And we said, if they do so, we actually may be in very good hands from a climate action perspective.

And this conversation leads me to at least have a sense, no guarantee, of course, but maybe, maybe that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing a reinterpretation of decarbonization moving away, as we said from the beginning, away from ideology, away from climate policy, away from protocol and international multilateral negotiations over to hard-nosed economics. What is going to help our economy? Where are we competitive? And let’s go for that.

John Paul Helveston, talking about China’s success with green industrial policy:

I think where China has had a lot of success is in areas where … It’s like the inverse of what the United States innovation ecosystem does well. China’s ecosystem is really driven around production, and a lot of that is part of the way the government’s set up, that local provinces have a ton of power over how money gets spent, and often repurpose funds for export-oriented production. So that’s been a piece of the engine of China’s economic miracle, is mass producing everything.

But there’s a lot of knowledge that goes along with that. When you look at things like solar, that technology goes back many, many decades for, you know, satellites. But making it a mass produced product for energy applications requires production innovations. You need to get costs down. You need to figure out how to make the machine that makes the machine. And that is something that the Chinese ecosystem does very well.

So that’s one throughline across all of these things, is that the technology got to a certain level of maturity where production improvements and cost decreases were the bigger things that made them globally competitive. I don’t think anyone would be considering an EV if we were still looking at $1,000 a kilowatt hour — and we were there just 15 years ago. And so that’s the big thing. It’s just production. I don’t know if they’ve been exceptionally good at just picking winners, but they’re good at picking things that can be mass produced.

Julian Spector, reporting for Canary Media:

Texas legislators have a new plan for their state’s famously competitive energy market, and it looks a lot like the government picking winners and losers.

On Wednesday, the Texas Senate passed SB 388, which would set a target for 50% of new power plant capacity to be ​“sourced from dispatchable generation other than battery energy storage.” An earlier version of the bill mandated that these plants ​“use natural gas.” Power plant owners and utilities that don’t invest their money according to this political directive would have to buy credits to comply with the new regulatory bureaucracy, raising the cost of doing business in the ERCOT energy markets.

If passed by the House and signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, the bill effectively would penalize renewables and reward a subset of dispatchable generators that politicians in Austin favor. Such a policy would upend the competitive system that has ruled ERCOT for two decades, one that empowers investors to build whatever power plants they think the market will reward. This design has made Texas a favorite place to do business for power plant developers, and unleashed innovative technologies and business models that are held back in other states by utility monopolies and restrictive regulations.

SB 388 could be particularly impactful because Texas has established itself as the most dynamic clean energy market in the country. Renewables and battery developers have thrived thanks to the wide-open competitive energy market, abundant land, relatively easy permitting requirements, and the nation’s fastest timelines to interconnect projects to the grid. Texas is building more solar and battery capacity today than any other state, California included; on average, developers have connected about 1 gigawatt of new solar and batteries to the grid each month for the last year, noted Austin-based energy analyst Doug Lewin.

Conservatives talk a big game about how free market is the solution to all human perils, until renewables start kicking fossil fuel’s ass in one of the freest, most competitive energy markets. Suddenly, regulations that favour fossil fuels are no longer inefficient market distortions.

In a recent episode of Heatmap News’s Shift Key podcast, co-hosts Robinson Meyer and Jesse D. Jenkins aptly described it as “DEI for gas plants”. How ironic.

Janice Lim, reporting for The Business Times a week ago:

Both UOB and CIMB – who are members of the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) – told The Business Times that they will be accepting a proposal by the group to remove the requirement that signatories have to align their portfolios to the 1.5 deg C threshold. Their net-zero pledge will instead be replaced with a commitment to keep global warming to “well below 2 deg C”.

The vote comes as the climate group convened by the United Nations faces increasing pressure after a series of high-profile departures in recent months.

[…]

“We have stayed pragmatic, even as we are guided by the science in setting our net-zero targets and adopting internationally recognised climate models,” [UOB’s chief sustainability officer Eric Lim] added.

Being pragmatic means choosing convenience over principles. Banks are now so good at talking about the technicalities around climate, it’s hard to quibble with them. But in moments like this, we are reminded that they have never been ready to take the uncomfortable step of wielding their immense political power to demand inconvenient changes.

Ecologists Martín Boer-Cueva, Dieter Hochuli, Marco Salvatori, and Peter Banks, writing for The Conversation about “de-extinction” of the dire wolf:

First, it is important to recognise that Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi, the three “dire wolf” pups created, are not actually dire wolves.

Colossal carried out 20 edits in 14 genes of the grey wolf genome to create their “dire wolves” using a genetic technique called CRISPR-Cas9.

The grey wolf’s genome is 2,447,000,000 individual bases long. Would we consider a chimpanzee, with which we share 98.8% of our genome, to be human after 20 edits?

The reality is that these are three slightly modified grey wolves.

In another The Conversation article, Rich Grenyer, an Associate Professor in Biogeography and Biodiversity, talked about the moral hazard of such irresponsible claims:

There won’t be a dire wolf, and even if there were to be one, we’d have no idea what it was for (and neither would it). We’ll all pay for the mistaken belief that extinction is a solved problem, and that the business-as-usual global economy that has caused the sixth mass extinction is no big deal, because its casualties aren’t actually dead – just temporarily inconvenienced by an extinction that is no longer forever.

Unsurprisingly, the totally unserious people of the Trump administration have started using “de-extinction” as PR cover for weakening conservation laws.

Virginia Furness reporting for Reuters:

The world’s leading bank coalition looking to help tackle climate change has voted to ditch some of its more stringent membership rules to better reflect the slow pace of change in the real economy, its chair told Reuters.

The UN-backed Net Zero Banking Alliance has been canvassing members over changes to its rules amid the withdrawal of some of the coalition’s biggest banks and as the United States leads calls to abandon climate action in the financial sector.

Banks voted to abandon a more stringent target to align all sector financing with 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average by mid-century and replace it with a more flexible ambition to align their businesses with a well-below 2 degrees target, albeit striving for 1.5 degrees.

If you think American, Japanese, Australian and Canadian banks left NZBA because it didn’t provide a “well-below 2 degree” option, you’d be kidding yourself.

I don’t see this as NZBA abandoning 1.5 degrees, but this does mean NZBA members have decided they don’t have what it takes to be climate leaders. If they have been honest with us (and with themselves), this decision perhaps accurately reflects their true ambition all along.

But of course, they always have an excuse:

“The knowledge we had in 2021 on what was achievable … has been very different than where we are today,” Shargiil Bashir, Chief Sustainability Officer and Executive Vice President at First Abu Dhabi Bank said.

“Some of the industries are not transitioning as we expected four years ago because either the technology is not moving as fast or the policymaking is not moving as fast,” he said naming housing and aviation as examples.

If you know climate, you’d understand that, unlike U.S. presidents, fundamental changes in climate technology or policy don’t happen in 4 years. I don’t know what Bashir expected 4 years ago, but to be fair to him, back then he hadn’t started his “Sustainability Leadership and Corporate Responsibility” course.

Over 100 of the groups member banks have already set 1.5 degree aligned sector targets, but the group wants to attract banks in countries which are not aligned to 1.5 degrees to bolster its numbers.

But that’s the whole point! NZBA members are supposed to be lobbying for more ambitious climate policies, in places that don’t have them yet. When the likes of JPMorgan and Mizuho left NZBA earlier this year, I knew they were cowards. Now feeling less relevant, NZBA members decided to lower their admission requirements to ingratiate themselves with the laggards.

Like other cause-based business associations, the value of NZBA to its members are virtue signalling and collective lobbying. We climate people tolerate the virtue signalling part when the collective lobbying part aligns with our climate goals. When they voted to lower their standards, they made it clear that they were not willing to lobby for the level of climate actions we need to see. Now, the rest of us need to make sure they can’t get the same virtue signalling value anymore. It’s a choice they made for their alliance, but the true leaders will go elsewhere.