Do these groups achieve anything meaningful? Feels like the kind of thing companies sign up to so they can get some PR and say they're being 'responsible'.
Like Exxon was/is an ESG friendly stock, but Tesla isn't. Regardless of how you feel about Elon, the real impact both companies have on the environment shows the absurdity of all this corporate green washing nonsense.
They probably do still need to pretend they care, customer opinion isn't irrelevant. but they certainly don't need to convince the US government that they care anymore.
They can’t make decisions on that basis, because they’re only good for the next two years; Republicans are very likely to lose the House in 2026. Assuming anything resembling the current structure of the world holds together at all.
Linking this to any former current or upcoming administration is just silly political bias and grandstanding. By your own admission it was already wholly ineffective.
Also, capitalism is sociopathic at the first order so all we are talking about is trimming the sails to keep speed vs trying to get to a destination. Capital doesnt care what the destination is, it just wants to be first.
Line goed up
Using the word "pretend" mischaracterizes the so iopaths.
I think “keeping up appearances” is too subjective to be meaningful. It seems like something that someone will always think they aren’t or are, so you have to poll people or whatever to figure it out. So it will lead to me chasing something I can’t know well.
I’d rather avoid these sort of meaningless labels and just focus on doing what I think is important.
Like it I wanted to reduce climate impact and I was a bank, I would set up a page that lists all the ways I impact climate.
This relies on the totally unsubstantiated view that a less appealing outward appearance is more honest.
If you believe corporations tend to fall short of their external appearances, then what reason do you have to believe this isn’t still the case, but from a lower basis?
Honestly, I don't really know if I should or shouldn't be.
ESG actively allocated investment dollars that were specifically designated for socially and environmentally responsible businesses into oil & gas companies, so in that case keeping up appearances is actively making things worse than doing nothing.
Nope. I find it hopeful. Maybe people in general are sick of the pandering and performative nonsense and are finally realizing "awareness" is a bullshit made up thing for people to feel better while doing absolutely nothing useful. As others have pointed out, this sort of stuff is actively harmful once entities learn to easily game it.
This sort of thing has sucked the air from anyone actually doing useful meaningful things - since anyone paying attention just rolls their eyes when someone talks about being green or whatever. Sure, some companies and orgs actually are legitimately doing useful and interesting stuff - but it takes so much personal research into each one now that anyone blathering about how they are green is met with instant suspicion to anyone remotely paying attention to the space.
The less administrative and marketing driven grift the better, even if it's a tiny little baby step. This sort of thing has done more to harm the environmental movement than helped it from where I'm standing.
I get that you are joking about Exon and Tesla but the story behind that is that Exxon actually has a responsive board while Tesla has very poor governance.
It has nothing to do with the E in ESG and was only referring to the G.
Fair enough that Tesla is disqualified for poor governance. Lacking the G is disqualifying, but lacking the E isn't? Tells you all need to know about the programme.
Brief background: the Net-Zero Banking Alliance launched in 2021 and by now it includes the majority of large European banks [1]. The departure of Morgan Stanley means they are now less than a handful US banks participating (notably sustainability oriented ones like Amalgamated and Climate First).
I think it's a shame that ESG/DEI/etc all got lumped in together by the culture warriors on various ends of the spectrum. It makes logical sense that a business that acts responsibly vis-a-vis its environmental externalities would generate greater value in the long run (whether because they've avoided fines, or reduced the negative externalities, or whatever) [0]. I don't think we'd have as much of this climate backtracking if the "E" had been kept separate from the "S" and the "G". Unfortunately, now it's all been lumped together as part of the never ending culture war. Shame.
[0] This doesn't speak to the problem of "greenwashing" investments, but that's a different thread imo.
Why am I not surprised? We’re starting 2025 just as we ended 2024—with masks dropping everywhere. From Big Oil slashing investments in green energy, to U.S. banks walking back on sustainability-linked loans, to the EU's push for an omnibus that could weaken already fragile regulations. And let’s not even get started on carbon markets turning into a growing scam.
Maybe it’s a good thing? Clarity can be painful, but it’s better than living in illusions. Time to take the reins ourselves—invest consciously, act decisively, and demand accountability.
This is my wish for all of us in 2025: that we see things as they are, not as we wish they were, and have the courage to drive the change we need.
Apologies if this sounds overly philosophical—blame it on the rainy Brussels weather. It does things to a person!
Not surprising. There are less than 140 banks in the alliance globally. There are only something like 3-4 in the US. They're not going to spend time and money on the alliance when their competitors don't.
If the government isn't going to do anything meaningful, and people continue to put people in office who won't do anything meaningful, then whats the point?
We can't count emissions, at most we can estimate them and hope that we would be only one order of magnitude off and not worse. Numbers like that are politically motivated.
On the other hand we can directly measure actual gas in the atmosphere. Every one of us can replicate these measurements with 100$ analyzer. These numbers show that the planet as a whole is doing jack shit regarding reducing climate change:
This is missing much, including that we've outsourced our manufacturing (and thus CO2 from manufacturing) but we still buy lots of stuff that requires intense manufacturing.
Unless you have no kids or grandkids to think of, it really matters.
Government or not, even companies are made up of people. People with family.
That is what baffles me. It's like saying "meh, our kids aren't worth the effort".
Sure, the C-suite can probably ensure their kids are adequately housed and educated to make their way in a more hostile and broken world. But what about the rest of them? And will there be enough residual wealth to shelter the grandkids, too?
Anyone who takes on additional costs will be punished for it, because the hive mind of society always (read: _always_) (let me reiterate: always) favors lowest cost, all else being equal.
If your SaaS costs $12/mo because you voluntarily pay for offsetting all emissions that result, you are going to be hard pressed to beat the guy who doesn't give a fuck about emissions and offers an equal product for $10/mo.
The only way is to regulate these things to force compliance between all competitors. Emissions have a real cost, but it is far enough in the future to hide it. The government needs to force that cost into the present.
> because the hive mind of society always (read: _always_) (let me reiterate: always) favors lowest cost, all else being equal
All else is rarely equal. Be it with luxury brands, or with sustainability. See airlines giving consumers the option to pay for Sustainable Aviation Fuel, people literally pay more for the exact same product just because of the wider environmental benefits.
There are many people who simply don't give a da_n about any one, even their own kids. I know that sounds crazy to the vast majority of us (and it is crazy, for sure), but we are not the super-rich, and they are not like us, my friend. In the very rare situations where they are like us, you get Bezos' ex-wife, a true rarity who turns her wealth into others' happiness.
It is very difficult for an average person to understand how callous and/or cruel a person can be when they are seeking more pleasure out of this world's resources. A person must begin the positive long tail of spiritual development to grok the negative long tail. The >80% of folks in neither long tail just have no clue, my friend.
Rich people don't worry about this. They can always buy whatever they need to survive. And workers in a company have to do whatever they're told to, just to maintain their job. So don't expect them to do anything, specially if rich people need to make less money in the process.
> It's like saying "meh, our kids aren't worth the effort".
That is only true if you think this is a worthwhile effort. I have no idea what the Net Zero Banking Alliance achieves, but its perfectly possible its not achieving anything worthwhile.
if you regard climate change as an emergency, then a target of achieving net zero in 2050 is probably pretty useless.
> That is only true if you think this is a worthwhile effort. I have no idea what the Net Zero Banking Alliance achieves, but it's perfectly possible it's not achieving anything worthwhile.
You would expect then that these banks would announce a new alliance, a new effort they are leading to reduce carbon emissions.
> It's like saying "meh, our kids aren't worth the effort".
I don't think it's like saying that. In most cases the point is there is no amount of effort that an individual (or even a small group) can make that would solve the problem. I'm not saying I agree with that reasoning, but it is very different to saying our kids aren't worth the effort. Like if a child was sick, a parent might genuinely believe that they would chop their arm off to save them, but they don't because it won't actually fix anything.
I think very few people (1) believe that climate change is a real and existential threat; and (2) believe that their actions can stop climate change; but (3) decide it's not worth taking those actions.
I think big banks are definitely up there with the organisations that can have legitimate worldwide impact on climate change. So it's matter of either not believing in it, or deciding it's not worth it.
But I'm glad to see these banks pull out of these net-zero related efforts. For me, and again I know I'm in the minority here, net-zero puts a huge cramp on productivity and building out what we need for civilization. These net-zero aren't progressive - they are regressive.
What we need is build. To drill. To create. For that, we need all the energy sources we can pull from. Fossil. Nuclear. And yes, solar and wind too. Hydro. Net-zero is what will pull down everyone.
We now live in a 1.5 degree warmer world. We can empirically study how much that level of warming is costing us already. It turns out that the measurable effects of warming on GDP absolutely dwarf the costs of mitigation. Ignoring climate change constraints in developing civilization will make us all poorer. Again, the effect of warming on GDP is measured, not postulated.
The methods are fairly straightforward. Panel regression with temperature effects on top of a per region and per year background.
As I understand it, there is some disagreement for how to exactly aggregate the growth effects over time. But to me what was shocking about this is just how clearly you already see the impacts in existing _macroeconomic_ data, once it's sufficiently high spatial resolution. I am in the "who really cares about GDP" camp generally, it's a very crude measure. I was not expecting to see climate impacts to show up in GDP data for quite some time.
Have you actually read that paper? I ask as it doesn't seem to be open access.
It seems clearly absurd, though. They claim that 1 degree of temperature variance reduces GDP by 5pp, which is an insanely huge effect. They're saying that variability (not growth) of a size you can't even feel would eliminate the entirety of US economic growth and push the rest of the world into a large recession.
This kind of paper where you regress things against each other with no attempt to understand or explain the underlying causalities, nor have any ability to validate the results, is the sort of thing that yields false positive results all the time, it's textbook replication crisis stuff.
Yes I have. The underlying dataset is also freely available [1]. And all the points you raise have of course been considered and discussed, in the paper or in the follow up literature. Half the paper is dedicated to robustness tests. From where I stand this has absolutely nothing in common with replication crisis stuff, and you haven't given any indication for why it would be. Maybe you are not familiar with panel regression as used here? This isn't just throwing a bunch of points into a scatter plot and drawing a line through it.
The statement about 5 percent per 1 degree variability gives you the sensitivity, it's not meant to extrapolate to an actual increase of 1 degree. A 1 degree increase in variability would be absolutely massive. Your intuition that you "can't even feel this" is just wrong. Just to illustrate: The variability in historical data is roughly 3° as far as I know. A 1° increase means a massively wider distribution of daily temperatures within each month. More heat days, more extremes, more wild swings. I couldn't immediately find how much it has increased in the last century, unfortunately, but if I read this [2] right, then an increase in mean temperature by 4-5° in the SSP chosen is projected to come with an increase in day to day variability of 0.5° in the most affected regions. That's really the worst case scenario as far as climate change is concerned.
Again, when it comes to the comprehensive assessment of the cost of climate change produced by the same team there is a debate going on (that I don't know the details of, so I don't have an opinion either way), let's see what comes out of that:
But I haven't heard anyone raise any real issues with the paper we are discussing, and it's well cited, and there are prominent economists who have staked their careers and reputation on climate change not being all that bad (e.g. Nordhaus), who are willing and able to push back against exactly this type of analysis if there are holes to be found...
Good that you've read it, but I'm afraid the entire idea of this analysis just seems absurd to me. It's exactly the kind of thing that creates the replication crisis, which outside of the experimental sciences is driven by a morass of P=0.049 modeling claims that disappear when re-examined. Many such papers are well cited, are claimed to use "robust" methods and so on. Yet when the claims fail to generalize, nothing happens. There's no postmortem or other institutional attempt to learn anything, no period of self reflection or adjustment of methods. Academia unfortunately no longer has credibility when it comes to this type of statistical analysis.
Maybe they address all of these obvious problems in their paper, but I doubt it:
1. The low quality and wide CIs of the temperature datasets themselves. Look at the recent revelations about the CIs on the UK's weather data for an example (and the total lack of care from the Met Office about fixing the situation). It's one country but similar problems are found everywhere. One of the most depressing conclusions I reached when studying this topic a few years ago was that we don't really know if the world is getting warmer or not. It's not even a well posed question to begin with, and the datasets are subject to massive historical revisions, but even ignoring those fatal problems the error bars on the underlying data are wider than the claimed increases.
2. Dubious nature of the gridded GDP dataset they're using. Much of the data comes from sources merely cited as "literature". Of those, many are themselves estimated and modeled data dubious on their face, e.g. the Australia data comes from a paper with only two citations (one of which is this paper) and which claims to accurately reconstruct GDP back to the 1850s! This is a jenga tower of estimates and there doesn't seem to be any attempt to measure or think about error in a systematic way: they explain that they looked for outliers in the data to do manual validation (unmentioned, did they remove outliers?), and they admit that the dataset has serious problems, but just blithely hand wave it all away. There is no attempt to estimate the accuracy of their data beyond observing it isn't 100% accurate.
3. Inability to validate the resulting model ("robustness tests" aren't the same thing as validation, at all). Unvalidated models aren't useful for anything.
As for Nordhaus, I wouldn't try to outsource decisions about the reliability of work to old names. They've been pointing out serious problems in the literature for years, some of them decades, and there have never been reforms. If someone warns of problems 100 times and is ignored every time, the lack of a warning the 101st time doesn't mean anything. They could just be tired. I would be, in their shoes!
With all due respect, it does not look like you have looked at any of this earnestly. First of all, the results are not marginally significant. In every variant of the analysis, the results are significant at the p < 0.001 level. This is not modelling, this is data analysis. "Validated" doesn't really make sense in this context.
Methodologically this is bog standard econometrics. The quality of the dataset is as good as any used in economics, all you have done is cited their own transparent disclosure of the limitations. You can now say that we should never look at any economic data to make any analysis, but that would be a rather extreme position to take. Much much worse papers have had disproportionate policy impacts [1]. These papers are taken very seriously by every major relevant institution.
If the data is low quality, and you still obtain a strong signal, that shows the result is robust, unless the data errors can be expected to be correlated with the drivers. And this is where this analysis is a lot simpler and more robust than standard econometrics: The economy doesn't influence the weather. Common drivers are conceivable, but the panel regression controls for both regional and temporal background rates. At this point it is very difficult to conceive of common drivers that would not be controlled for here.
Finally: "One of the most depressing conclusions I reached when studying this topic a few years ago was that we don't really know if the world is getting warmer or not."
If your conclusion is contrary to that of _every_ scientist who studies this for a living, you should consider the hypothesis that the problem is with your reasoning/analysis and not with everyone else.
Why do we need to do all that? Why do we need unlimited energy? Can you really not foresee problems with that, if everyone could drive/fly/boat as long and as fast as they want because fuel is basically free?
Thing is, people who foresee problems happen to be the people who have the education to talk about them.
The rest of the world is in the dark ages. Imagine being told they will never have a chance to get to a better life? Imagine being told you will lose what you have because people in the west blew it all up.
Heck, given how crazy things in general are, I wouldnt be surprised if people start throwing nukes around as "solutions" or as "fuck you"s.
We don’t need to do anything, we didn’t need to start farming, we didn’t need to start reading and writing, and so forth. The journey of mankind has been to get closer to doing what we want, whenever we want.
I agree! I think we should be just chucking excess heat off of earth with massive mirros or micro waves.
There is surely no way we stop producing, even if the world burns to a crisp.
Embrace the nihilism is my current stance. People think they need optimism to think and feel ok. Turns out you can feel perfectly fine and productive when you assume the world is coming to an end as well!
Its just a matter of perspective, what matters is having a clear plan for what you think will happen, and executing on it. It doesnt matter if the plan may be grim to others.
This is just reality, reality doesnt care about someones feelings.
Practically, sure. But physically? Debatable. A lot of the cost has to do with the time necessary to build the plant (with permits et al), and the money that gets tied up as a result.
Why do we need to create and use so much? People aren’t happier now, they are less happy. That’s all that matters. And the world population isn’t growing like we thought. We need to use much less. As a former guy that grew microbes, I remember what happened to flasks where the bacteria just use all the resources they can, the whole flask dies.
Build and create what? More cheap plastic junk for consumers? Big SUV cars for middle class that could very well drive a Corolla? Cloud services delivering social media that negatively impacts people's mental health, but makes billionaires a lot of money?
Most energy out there already goes to causes that do nothing whatsoever to advance humanity's future or to improve people's lives. Burning fossil fuels to produce that waste of energy is absolute madness.
If we are to waste energy, it should at least be produced in a manner that doesn't doom future generations.
Are you making the claim that small numbers are always irrelevant? In that case it's worth reading up on the greenhouse effect. It's unfortunately very true that water vapour and CO2 have an outsize effect on the planet's heat balance.
You mix that claim with an implication about people who don't know that number off the top of their heads, but:
- work on sustainability for feelgood
- are independently wealthy otherwise.
I don't understand exactly what you're implying but it doesn't seem very generalizable. Society can face arbitrarily complicated threats, to counter which we can create incentives even for those who don't know the details.
How to get political agreement on the important threats and the best (effective / fair / ...) incentives is an open problem.
That wasn't my point entirely but admittedly it was a part of it. I have not heard a good reason for why a trace gas has such an effect. Bearing in mind that 0.04% is total CO2 and human produced CO2 is a tiny fraction of that - can't seem to find an agreed on percentage on that one but happy to be enlightened. The other point I was making is that when I have asked that basic question to people who are seemingly frightened of the effects of CO2 I have got massively inflated guesstimates e.g. 50%. I just think if you are going to be scared and try and scare others you should know at least that.
Gotcha, I see. You're not wrong that a combination of scientific illiteracy and political orthodoxy can give terrible outcomes. So some default skepticism is quite wise.
If you want to understand the effect of the trace gases from first principles, you can read more about it under "Effective temperature of the Earth" at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefan%E2%80%93Boltzmann_law . It also links to the Wikipedia page about the greenhouse effect, which you'll appreciate more after reading about the Stefan Boltzmann law first.
OK, will read, much appreciated. Just have to deal with my fence that blew down in the high winds we had in the UK yesterday - climate change no doubt (joke). Thank you.
You seem to be implying that this percentage is very low, so how could it be responsible for climate change?
You seem to be doing the opposite of your question, knowing the answer to the question and then concluding (without knowledge of how the whole system works) that since it's so low that it couldn't be responsible for drastic changes.
Aha... I like the confidence that "I'm right, all those climate scientists are swindlers", based on your knowledge that "0.04% is a very small number". True, you probably would not lose sleep after e.g. losing 0.04% of your investments, but I dare say, believing this translates to the area of climate change is an act of supreme ignorance.
You appear to have created a straw man. Your prompt assumes I am a climate change denier, when it might have been better to have labelled me a man-made climate change skeptic. Not sure chatGPT is the way to go on this one as I'd imagine it will be weighted towards the consensus. There was once a consensus that the Earth was the centre of the Universe. Anyway thanks for the link, I enjoyed it.
> Your prompt assumes I am a climate change denier, when it might have been better to have labelled me a man-made climate change skeptic
Duck me, as if that hair-splitting makes a huge difference. I dare say there's a 0.04% difference between the two.
You flaunt your superficial intellect but you're still ignorant as hell, using it to nitpick. Did you figure out the Stefan-Boltzmann law? Or is it yet again somebody's job to convince you? Oh noo the wind blew your fence down so you were denied the chance to be proven wrong, therefore you're still this smart and correct man? Whatever saves your ego, man.
If you think there is little difference between someone who does not believe the climate is changing and someone who can well believe it is (that's what the climate does), but isn't entirely convinced it's man-made there's not much I can do about that. Funnily enough AI returned the following on the Stefan-Boltzmann law: The Stefan-Boltzmann law is a fundamental physical law that helps explain Earth's energy balance, but it doesn't account for the greenhouse effect, which is a key part of the climate system
Anyway, I was pleased to have this pointer, and intend to look more thoroughly in to this life/fence permitting.
BTW, I do not think ad hominim attacks are the way to bring someone over to your way of thinking. Cheers.
Yeah, it's hard to get anyone who smugly think they know it all to realize that they're actually an idiot. I don't care about changing your viewpoint, for all I care, you stay you, so anyone who can see through that thin veneer can see they should stay away from a fool.
> I don't care about changing your viewpoint, for all I care, you stay you, so anyone who can see through that thin veneer can see they should stay away from a fool.
And yet you keep coming back with nothing but ad hominem (cheers spellcheck guy). Right, I'm gonna leave it there; it's been emotional. All the best.
> It should be enough to make companies answerable to shareholders
It very obviously isn't. The prime incentive for shareholders is profit (which is only natural), and this is in many, many cases demonstrably misaligned with what's best for society. Cases in point: health insurance, the military industrial complex, fossil fuel based companies, education, landlords, big tech.
"I disagree with this decision" -literally every critic of this decision
"This sounds the same as a movement where millions were forcibly relocated to be worked to death while zealots chanted slogans and firebombed political opponents and a wave of massacres swept the nation" -you
It's almost as though companies should be most concerned with profit and not unproductive virtue based working groups that don't produce shareholder value /shrug.
I found it fascinating recently (last few years) to try, myself, to consider and challenge that axiom/assumption.
Analogy: though I've always been an atheist, the cultural conditioning is so strong, that in my 20's it took me a LOT of conscious effort to consider the notion that "Religion should not be treated specially" (when it comes to e.g. tax breaks, protection, freedom of speech, etc).
On this too then, I've been strongly conditioned that "company's only prerogative is and should be shareholder value", that it took me a lot of effort to consider it critically, but... it's just a sentence, a statement. It's no more true than we desire it to be.
Or to put it another way - if company's ONLY priority is shareholder value, over consumer interest, employee well-being, external impact, and long term picture... the system is as broken as the more aggressive amongst us have banged the drums it to be.
The reason for shareholder value to be the guiding principle for companies is about being clear what an organization is about. There is nothing wrong with a company supporting some nonprofit cause but that should be a distinct legal entity. Productive enterprises should be corporations that endeavor to make money. Social cause organizations should be 501c3 or equivalents and not making products as their primary business. Blurring the lines (C corps getting involved in social activism, nonprofits making lots of money and paying most of it for administrative purposes) causes no end of problems.
There is no legal requirement for a company to prioritize or only consider shareholder value when making decisions, and never has been. This idea is a meme but it's a straw man. The law doesn't say that. In fact CEOs have enormous leeway to do whatever they like, even if it's not good for shareholder profits. The accountability mechanism isn't a legal requirement to make shareholders money but the ability of shareholders to appoint a board who will then fire the CEO if they're not doing a good job. But those shareholders can choose the board and the board choose the CEO using whatever criteria they like, including making less profit to prioritize other things.
There is a generalized "duty of care" requirement in most jurisdictions, but it can be and often is interpreted much more widely than a requirement to maximize shareholder returns.
Discounting the economic benefits of social stability to the point where you don't expend any effort to mitigate resource wars isn't good business for banks.
You may be correct that companies should focus on profit, shareholder value. If true then we should want to destroy companies since our planet may depend on it.
I'd be satisfied with just the first half of this sentence. What they think about the shareholders is entirely irrelevant. Let them do their thing while the company does their own. Distinct entities.
