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<font size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b>March</b></i></font><font
size="+2" face="Calibri"><i><b> 7, 2024</b></i></font><font
face="Calibri"><br>
</font> <br>
<i>[ An economic force meets a moral compulsion ]</i><br>
<b>S.E.C. to Approve New Climate Rules Far Weaker Than Originally
Proposed</b><br>
The rules, designed to inform investors of business risks from
climate change, were rolled back amid opposition from the G.O.P.,
fossil fuel producers, farmers and others.<br>
By Hiroko Tabuchi, Ephrat Livni and David Gelles<br>
March 6, 2024<br>
The Securities and Exchange Commission is expected on Wednesday to
approve new rules detailing if and how public companies should
disclose climate risks and how much greenhouse gas emissions they
produce, but there are fewer demands on businesses than the original
proposal made about two years ago.<br>
<br>
The rules represent a step toward requiring corporations to inform
investors of both their climate emissions, as well as the business
risks that they face from floods, rising temperatures and weather
disasters. An earlier and more all-encompassing proposal faced
outspoken Republican backlash and opposition from a range of
companies and industries, including fossil fuel producers.<br>
<br>
The main difference: Under the original proposal, large companies
would have been required to disclose not just planet-warming
emissions from their own operations, but also emissions produced
along what’s known as a company’s “value chain” — a term that
encompasses everything from the parts or services bought from other
suppliers, to the way that people who use the products ultimately
dispose of them. Pollution created all along this value chain could
add up.<br>
<br>
Now, that requirement is gone.<br>
<br>
In addition, the biggest companies will have to report the emissions
they directly produce, but only if the companies themselves consider
the emissions “material,” or of significant importance to their
bottom lines, a qualification that leaves corporations leeway.
Thousands of smaller businesses are exempt, another big change from
the original proposal, which would have required all publicly traded
corporations to disclose their direct emissions.<br>
Also gone from the final rules is a requirement that companies state
the climate expertise of members on their board of directors.<br>
<br>
But the directive for companies to disclose significant risks
related to climate change — for example, risks to waterfront
properties owned by a hotel chain from rising sea levels and storm
surges — survived.<br>
Supporters of stronger disclosure requirements said the omissions
could undermine the rule altogether. “Thanks to corporate lobbying,
disclosure of the very real financial risks from climate change has
fallen victim to the culture wars,” said Allison Herren Lee, former
acting chair and commissioner at the S.E.C., who had championed more
climate-related disclosures.<br>
<br>
Climate disasters, including extreme weather like hurricanes, floods
and drought, are taking a rising toll on people and businesses
around the world, disrupting supply chains and damaging crops. In
2023, the United States experienced a record 28 weather and climate
disasters that cost at least $1 billion each, according to the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Treasury Secretary
Janet Yellen said last year that losses tied to climate change could
“cascade through the financial system.”<br>
<br>
But Jay Clayton, who served as S.E.C. chair under Donald J. Trump,
said the commission had been “arrogant” in proposing the stronger
requirements, saying it hadn’t shown that the data was relevant to
financial returns for investors. Instead, he said, many investors
seemed to want those requirements “for political, social and other
reasons.”<br>
Some Democratic lawmakers also opposed the S.E.C.’s initial
proposal, believing they would be burdensome to small farmers.<br>
<br>
The S.E.C. first proposed the climate rules almost two years ago.
Since then, it has considered more than 16,000 comments from
companies, business groups and others weighing in on the potential
regulation.<br>
Many corporations argued that the regulations would be onerous and
expensive, and fail to offer investors much useful information.
Republican lawmakers have also been pushing back on the business
world’s embrace of environmental, social and governance principles,
known as E.S.G.<br>
<br>
In recent weeks, more financial firms have walked back their own
climate commitments, suggesting that the political pressure was
having an effect.<br>
<br>
Also weighing on the S.E.C. as it mulled the final rules is a
Supreme Court that has shown a willingness to entertain conservative
challenges to regulation and to limit agencies’ power, including
authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions...<br>
- -<br>
At the same time, environmental organizations are gearing up to sue,
saying the final rules fall short. The Sierra Club said it was
“considering challenging the S.E.C.’s arbitrary removal of key
provisions from the final rule.” And it would also defend the
commissions’s authority to implement such a rule in the first place,
the Sierra Club said, something industry lobby groups and
conservative politicians were expected to challenge.<br>
<br>
There is some evidence that climate-disclosure rules could have an
effect on human emissions of greenhouse gases, the most significant
driver of climate change, said Asaf Bernstein, a professor of
finance at the University of Colorado Boulder who focuses on climate
issues. “In other countries, when they’ve put in disclosure
requirements, there have been what appears to be emissions
reductions in response to those disclosures,” he said.<br>
<br>
Even if the S.E.C. rules face challenges, some companies have begun
voluntarily reporting more information about their emissions and the
risks posed by climate change, said Amelia Miazad, who runs the
Business in Society Institute at the U.C. Berkeley law school.<br>
<br>
“There’s clear investor demand for the information, and so the
business community will have to respond to that demand,” she said.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/climate/sec-climate-disclosure-regulations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ak0.9qic.h-1nr-4R4vpH&smid=url-share">https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/06/climate/sec-climate-disclosure-regulations.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ak0.9qic.h-1nr-4R4vpH&smid=url-share</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ The election and sea level rise ]</i><br>
<b>Record Heat, Rising Sea Levels:<br>
The Stakes for the Climate Couldn’t Be Higher in 2024 Elections<br>
</b>From Biden vs. Trump to an oil well referendum in California,
climate change debate is all over the ballot in federal, state and
local contests.<br>
By Marcus Baram<br>
03-01-24<br>
- -<br>
We cannot predict the outcome of the fall elections, but there is no
doubt among scientists that immediate and transformative action is
our only hope against a future of cataclysmic weather, mass
migration, and wars caused by our destabilized environment. As time
runs out, it is candidates and voters who will determine if we step
up to the challenge.<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.fastcompany.com/91042364/in-the-2024-election-climate-is-on-the-ballot-and-not-just-when-it-comes-to-biden-vs-trump">https://www.fastcompany.com/91042364/in-the-2024-election-climate-is-on-the-ballot-and-not-just-when-it-comes-to-biden-vs-trump</a><br>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<i>[ politics will engage with the physical world ]</i><br>
<b>How five crucial elections in 2024 could shape climate action for
decades</b><br>
Some of the world’s biggest carbon emitters are going to the polls
this year — the results could determine whether humanity can correct
its trajectory of dangerous global warming.<br>
By Smriti Mallapaty, Jeff Tollefson, Carissa Wong, Sarah Wild &
Nisha Gaind<br>
This year, voters in five of the world’s biggest carbon-emitting
territories go to the polls. These regions — the United States,
India, Indonesia, Russia and the European Union — represent
one-third of the world’s population and about the same proportion of
human-made carbon emissions.<br>
<p>How the political wind blows from these elections will be crucial
in determining whether humanity can correct its current trajectory
of dangerous climate warming (see ‘Monstrous emissions’). Current
climate policies are likely to result in warming of about 2.7 °C
by 2100, according to the group Climate Action Tracker, which
monitors global climate commitments — well above the 1.5 °C goal
laid out in the 2015 Paris climate accord. Long-term climate
commitments could prevent another 0.6 °C of warming, but those
depend on further action by governments, including many whose
leaders are up for election in 2024. It could be a pivotal year.</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://media.nature.com/lw767/magazine-assets/d41586-024-00642-3/d41586-024-00642-3_26807010.jpg?as=webp">https://media.nature.com/lw767/magazine-assets/d41586-024-00642-3/d41586-024-00642-3_26807010.jpg?as=webp</a></p>
<b>United States: Biden versus Trump</b><br>
In August 2022, US President Joe Biden surprised the world with a
legislative victory on climate spending that, by some recent
estimates, is likely to lock in nearly US$1 trillion in investment
until 2032. This includes direct spending as well as tax credits for
everything from wind and solar power to electric transport, carbon
sequestration and reskilling programmes for people who currently
work in the fossil-fuel sector. One of the Biden administration’s
main jobs now is to ensure that the money is invested wisely and
keeps flowing if Biden is re-elected on 5 November.<br>
<br>
Researchers have estimated that Biden’s flagship achievement, the
2022 Inflation Reduction Act, could double the pace of US climate
progress by itself and reduce the country’s carbon emissions by
43–48% by 2035, relative to 2005 levels. That is short of the US
commitment to cut emissions by 50% by 2030, also compared with 2005,
but the administration is pushing forwards on other fronts,
including issuing regulations to reduce emissions from vehicles and
power plants. Overall, climate specialists say it’s a historic
effort that could help the world’s second-largest greenhouse-gas
emitter (behind China) to lead a clean-energy revolution.<br>
<br>
“We’ve never seen a decarbonization effort like this,” says Noah
Kaufman, an economist at Columbia University’s Center on Global
Energy Policy in Washington DC. The Biden administration’s climate
agenda has significant momentum, Kaufman says, and another four
years would help the administration to lock in progress. “The
question is, what happens if we lose this momentum?”<br>
Biden’s likely main opponent in the November election, former
president Donald Trump, remains hostile to government action on
climate, and there is little doubt that he will do everything he can
to promote fossil fuels if he wins. He is widely expected to pull
the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate agreement — for a
second time. The first withdrawal, which came into effect on 4
November 2020, a day after Trump lost his re-election bid, was
quickly reversed by the incoming Biden administration. Trump has
also said he would use his executive authority to weaken climate
regulations and expand federal oil and gas programmes.<br>
<br>
But it would be difficult for Trump to override the clean-energy
investments in the Inflation Reduction Act. Because those
investments were laid out in a law, Congress would need to enact a
new one to roll them back, says Samantha Gross, who heads the Energy
Security and Climate Initiative at the Brookings Institution, a
think tank based in Washington DC.<br>
<br>
To have any chance of doing that, Republicans would need to retain
control of the House of Representatives and win enough seats to take
control of the Senate in the November elections. Even then, Gross
says, it wouldn’t be easy. The law is already incentivizing
businesses to invest and create jobs in communities across the
country, and many are in Republican districts. “Once the economic
benefits start flowing, the political calculus changes,” she says.<br>
- -<br>
<b>India: Modi’s climate balancing act</b><br>
Climate change isn’t high on the agenda in India’s upcoming general
elections. But it is crucial to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
global ambitions, say researchers.<br>
<br>
Voting across the vast country will probably take place in April and
May. If Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win a third
five-year term, he will be preoccupied with his legacy as a climate
leader, says Aseem Prakash, a political scientist at the University
of Washington in Seattle.<br>
<br>
India is the world’s third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. But
the country is also home to 1.4 billion people, which is more than
one-sixth of the world’s population. Its per-capita emissions are
less than one-seventh those of the United States and one-quarter
those of China...<br>
--<br>
In the unlikely event that Modi loses, Selvaraju says he doesn’t
expect a shift away from India’s dual push for renewables and coal,
“simply because it’s not really in the hands of the politicians”.
Unlike in the United States, India’s climate policies don’t
flip-flop according to who is in power, says Dhruba Purkayastha,
director for India at the non-profit research group Climate Policy
Initiative, based in New Delhi.<br>
<p>But climate change should be on the agenda, says Das. From
flooding to drought and heat stress, “India is a highly
climate-vulnerable country.”</p>
<b>Indonesia: powered by nickel and coal</b><br>
Indonesians went to the polls on 14 February to elect a new
president and legislature. Votes are still being counted, but the
majority of the almost 130 million Indonesians who voted look to
have chosen a leader who promised continuity with the policies of
Joko Widodo, the outgoing president. Prabowo Subianto, a former army
general and minister of defence under Widodo, ran with Widodo’s
eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, as his vice-presidential
candidate.<br>
<br>
“From the perspective of climate change, not much will change,” says
Daniel Murdiyarso, a climate scientist and president of the
Indonesian Academy of Sciences, who is based in Bogor, south of the
capital Jakarta.<br>
Researchers say that in the short term, that means more coal
consumption and exports, slow progress on reducing deforestation and
cheap but dirty nickel extraction. The country is the world’s
leading producer of raw nickel, needed to fuel the growing global
appetite for electric vehicles, batteries and stainless steel.
“Business is probably going to trump any other concerns,” says
political scientist Jemma Purdey at the Australia–Indonesia Centre
at Monash University in Melbourne...- -<br>
<p>Indonesia is also home to some of the world’s largest tropical
rainforests, peatlands and mangroves. Under Subianto, researchers
expect Indonesia to adhere to its international commitments to
reducing deforestation — the rate of forest loss there has
declined over the past five years — while also strengthening the
palm-oil industry, which adds to pressure on rainforests and
carbon-storing peatlands.</p>
<b>Russia: the smog of war</b><br>
In March, Russian leader Vladimir Putin will begin a fifth term as
president following an election, the result of which is not in
doubt. Climate change will not feature in a campaign that Putin will
use to claim endorsement of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rally
anti-Western sentiment.<br>
<br>
The ongoing war and economic sanctions — imposed by the European
Union and countries including the United States and United Kingdom —
are likely to hinder future climate action in the world’s
fourth-largest greenhouse-gas emitter, says Marianna Poberezhskaya,
who studies Russian climate politics at Nottingham Trent University,
UK.<br>
“Major shocks like economic crises, and obviously the war, the worst
of them all, makes the already quite weak climate position and
policy in Russia even weaker,” says Poberezhskaya. This is despite
the nation already experiencing severe wildfires and flooding owing
to climate change in recent years...<br>
As the war continues, climate change and its impact on human rights
will continue to take a back seat, says Matthew Druckenmiller,
vice-president of the International Arctic Science Committee. “This
is sad to see; the majority of Indigenous peoples in the Arctic are
in Russia, and now they are removed from the equation.”<br>
<br>
<b>EU: A challenging shift to the right</b><br>
The European Union likes to see itself as a world leader on climate
action. In 2021, the bloc’s members agreed and passed laws to reduce
net greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 55% from 1990 levels by
2030, and to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. A proposal unveiled
last month targets an even more ambitious 90% reduction by 2040. So
far, Europe has reduced its emissions by 32.5% from 1990 levels.<br>
<br>
Over 4 days from 6 to 9 June, European citizens from 27 countries
will elect 720 politicians to the European Parliament for 5 years.
Polling indicates a sharp move towards parties on the right that are
less focused on climate action, a trend that could stymie Europe’s
climate leadership and delay urgent measures, say experts...<br>
“The EU has successfully tackled the low-hanging fruit, like
renewable energy and energy efficiency,” she says. “Can it actually
go the next step in tackling the harder parts of the transition to
carbon neutrality?”<br>
Nature 627, 22-25 (2024)<br>
doi: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00642-3">https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00642-3</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00642-3">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00642-3</a>
<p><br>
</p>
<font face="Calibri"><br>
</font><font face="Calibri"> <i>[ The news archive - from the great
Kate Sheppard ]</i></font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> <font size="+2"><i><b>March 7, 2013 </b></i></font>
</font><br>
<font face="Calibri"> </font> March 7, 2013: Kate Sheppard of
Mother Jones reports:<br>
<blockquote> "Despite record heat and extreme weather disasters in
recent years, insurers aren't adequately planning for climate
change, according to a report issued Thursday. Only 13 percent of
insurance companies have a 'specific, comprehensive strategy' to
deal with global warming."<br>
</blockquote>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/03/report-insurers-still-ignoring-climate-change">http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2013/03/report-insurers-still-ignoring-climate-change</a>
<br>
<br>
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