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corporate accountability
SEC Pauses Climate Disclosure Rules Under Attack by Republican AGs
"Investors need reliable, comparable information about risks that registered companies face and how they are managing those risks," argued Democratic attorneys general who support the paused policy.
Apr 05, 2024
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced on Thursday that it would pause the implementation of climate disclosure rules for U.S. companies while it awaits the rulings on legal challenges related to those rules.
"The commission has determined to exercise its discretion to stay the final rules pending the completion of judicial review of the consolidated 8th Circuit petitions," the agency said in its order. "The commission will continue vigorously defending the final rules' validity in court and looks forward to expeditious resolution of the litigation."
Alongside @MassAGO, I’m leading a 19-AG coalition seeking to intervene in lawsuits against @SECGov’s rule requiring public companies to disclose comprehensive and comparable information about climate-related risks to investors.
— AG Brian Schwalb (@DCAttorneyGen) April 4, 2024
The rules are meant to force companies to make public any climate risks to their businesses. They have been challenged by attorneys generals from nine different states that are controlled by Republicans.
Meanwhile, 19 Democratic attorneys general are defending the policy, which they said in a Wednesday court filing "provides the states, their residents, and other investors with information about climate-related risks that is critical to making informed investment decisions."
"Investors need reliable, comparable information about risks that registered companies face and how they are managing those risks," the Democrats argued. "Climate-related impacts are undeniably one such category of risk."
Even if the rules were implemented, the SEC has been accused of "watering them down," because they don't include the greenhouse gas emissions related to companies' supply chains.
"Climate-related risks are financial risks, and investors have a right to know the full scope of a public company's emissions profile. This SEC decision will let big corporations off the hook in the United States, allowing them to avoid disclosure of emissions from throughout their supply chains," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said when the rules were finalized last month
California has already passed legislation that requires large companies to disclose how much their supply chains are contributing to greenhouse gas emissions.
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'Damning' Probe Finds 80% of Top Carbon Offset Schemes Are 'Likely Junk or Worthless'
Carbon offset projects are "proving a dangerous diversion of political capital and time from the meaningful and just solutions needed to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis," said one researcher.
Sep 20, 2023
A joint investigation published Tuesday by the watchdog group Corporate Accountability and The Guardian finds that nearly 80% of the leading carbon offset schemes backed by corporations and governments in a purported attempt to reduce planet-warming pollution should be deemed "likely junk or worthless."
Carbon offset projects are billed as a way for corporations, governmental bodies, and individuals to compensate for their emissions footprints by investing in efforts to curb pollution elsewhere. Environmentalists have long warned that carbon offset schemes—part of the so-called voluntary carbon market (VCM)—are a way for fossil fuel companies such as Chevron to justify continued oil and gas extraction.
Citing the emissions trading database AlliedOffsets, The Guardian noted Tuesday that "the 50 most popular global projects include forestry schemes, hydroelectric dams, solar and wind farms, waste disposal, and greener household appliances schemes across 20 (mostly) developing countries."
The new joint investigation finds that 39 of the top 50 carbon offset projects contain at least one "fundamental failing that undermines its promised emission cuts," making them "likely junk."
The analysis characterizes a project as "likely junk" if there's "compelling evidence, claims, or high risk that it cannot guarantee additional, permanent greenhouse gas cuts, among other criteria."
"In some cases, there was evidence suggesting the project could leak greenhouse gas emissions or shift emissions elsewhere," The Guardian explained. "In other cases, the climate benefits appeared to be exaggerated or the project would have happened independently—with or without the voluntary carbon market."
Rachel Rose Jackson, director of climate research and international policy at Corporate Accountability, said in a statement that "the findings are extremely damning of a scheme that the world's largest emitters repeatedly tout as a lynchpin in solving the climate crisis."
"The VCM is proving a dangerous diversion of political capital and time from the meaningful and just solutions needed to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis," said Jackson.
"We cannot afford to waste any more time on false solutions."
The investigation is just the latest research to cast serious doubt on the effectiveness of carbon offset initiatives as companies and governments around the world, including the United States, increasingly invest resources in unproven voluntary carbon trading schemes as they face mounting backlash for doing little to phase out fossil fuels.
Last week, Carbon Market Watch released an analysis from experts at the University of California, Berkeley showing that popular carbon offset projects focused on forest preservation exaggerate their emissions reductions and are ineffective at combating deforestation, a major threat to the climate.
In their investigation, Corporate Accountability and The Guardian pointed to a major forest conservation project in Zimbabwe that "was reported to have had so many exaggerated and inflated claims—and probably shifted emissions elsewhere—that it was described as 'having more financial holes than Swiss cheese.'"
"In the U.S., the most problematic project is the world's largest carbon capture and storage plant in Wyoming, which has benefited from generous taxpayer subsidies, but where the vast majority of the captured CO2 has been released into the atmosphere or sold to other fossil fuel companies to help extract hard-to-reach oil," The Guardian reported, citing the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
Anuradha Mittal, director of the Oakland Institute, told the newspaper that "the ramifications of this analysis are huge, as it points to systemic failings of the voluntary market, providing additional evidence that junk carbon credits pervade the market."
"We cannot afford to waste any more time on false solutions," Mittal added. "The issues are far-reaching and pervasive, extending well beyond specific verifiers. The VCM is actively exacerbating the climate emergency."
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Climate Groups Reject 'Risky, Untested' Technofixes in IPCC Report
"Solving the climate crisis is not about what works on paper but what delivers in practice. There is no time to waste with false solutions."
Mar 20, 2023
Longtime critics of "false solutions" to the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency responded to a United Nations report released Monday by reiterating their warnings about relying on underdeveloped and untested technologies that could enable major polluters to continue producing massive amounts of planet-heating emissions.
Noting the 2015 Paris agreement's two primary temperature targets for this century, the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report states that "all global modeled pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot, and those that limit warming to 2°C, involve rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate" greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions in all sectors this decade.
"We must heed the IPCC's urgent messages, without falling into the trap of assuming that carbon dioxide removal will save the day."
Modeled mitigation pathways, the report continues, "include transitioning from fossil fuels without carbon capture and storage (CCS) to very low- or zero-carbon energy sources, such as renewables or fossil fuels with CCS, demand-side measures and improving efficiency, reducing non-CO2 GHG emissions," and carbon dioxide removal (CDR).
As the document details:
CCS is an option to reduce emissions from large-scale fossil-based energy and industry sources provided geological storage is available. When CO2 is captured directly from the atmosphere (DACCS), or from biomass (BECCS), CCS provides the storage component of these CDR methods. CO2 capture and subsurface injection is a mature technology for gas processing and enhanced oil recovery. In contrast to the oil and gas sector, CCS is less mature in the power sector, as well as in cement and chemicals production, where it is a critical mitigation option. The technical geological storage capacity is estimated to be on the order of 1000 GtCO2, is more than the CO2 storage requirements through 2100 to limit global warming to 1.5°C, although the regional availability of geological storage could be a limiting factor. If the geological storage site is appropriately selected and managed, it is estimated that the CO2 can be permanently isolated from the atmosphere.
"Implementation of CCS currently faces technological, economic, institutional, ecological environmental and socio-cultural barriers," the report notes. "Currently, global rates of CCS deployment are far below those in modeled pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C to 2°C. Enabling conditions such as policy instruments, greater public support, and technological innovation could reduce these barriers."
The report further says that "biological CDR methods like reforestation, improved forest management, soil carbon sequestration, peatland restoration, and coastal blue carbon management can enhance biodiversity and ecosystem functions, employment and local livelihoods. However, afforestation or production of biomass crops can have adverse socioeconomic and environmental impacts, including on biodiversity, food and water security, local livelihoods, and the rights of Indigenous peoples, especially if implemented at large scales and where land tenure is insecure."
While the world's top scientists—and the governments that signed off on the report—recognized issues with CCS and CDR, climate campaigners expressed frustration that such technologies were featured as partial solutions.
"It's very alarming to see carbon dioxide removal featuring so centrally in the IPCC report," declared Sara Shaw at Friends of the Earth International (FOEI). "We can't rely on risky, untested, and downright dangerous removals technologies just because big polluters want us to stick to the status quo."
"A fair and fast phaseout of oil, gas, and coal needs to happen in this decade, and it can, with the right political will," she stressed. "We must heed the IPCC's urgent messages, without falling into the trap of assuming that carbon dioxide removal will save the day."
Fellow FOIE leader Hemantha Withanage explained that "in my country, Sri Lanka, the impacts of climate change are being felt now. We have no time to chase fairy tales like carbon removal technologies to suck carbon out of the air."
"The IPCC evidence is clear: Climate change is killing people, nature, and planet," he said. "The answers are obvious: a fair and fast phaseout of fossil fuels, and finance for a just transition. The fantasy of overshooting safe limits and betting on risky technofixes is certainly not a cure for the problem."
Lili Fuhr at the Center for International Environmental Law agreed that "the takeaway of the IPCC synthesis is irrefutable: An immediate, rapid, and equitable fossil fuel phaseout is the cornerstone of any strategy to avoid catastrophic levels of global warming."
"Building our mitigation strategies on models that instead lock in inequitable growth and conveniently assume away the risks of technofixes like carbon capture and storage and carbon dioxide removal ignores that clarion message and increases the likelihood of overshoot," Fuhr warned. "The most ambitious mitigation pathways put out by the IPCC set the floor, not the ceiling, for necessary climate action.
Research shows that overshooting Paris temperature targets, even temporarily, could dramatically raise the risk of the world experiencing dangerous "tipping points," as Common Dreams reported in December. The IPCC report notes that "the higher the magnitude and the longer the duration of overshoot, the more ecosystems and societies are exposed to greater and more widespread changes in climatic impact-drivers, increasing risks for many natural and human systems."
As Corporate Accountability director of climate research and policy Rachel Rose Jackon put it Monday: "Breaching 1.5°C is not an option. Governments will be effectively signing millions of avoidable death warrants for those who contributed least to the crisis."
While arguing that the IPCC document "demands a last and final reckoning" that leads to Global North governments "doing their fair share," the campaigner also emphasized that "the report should have actually named the solutions that will keep us below 1.5°C instead of leaving the door open for an inadequate suite of industry-backed removals and dangerous distractions."
Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter targeted U.S. lawmakers and President Joe Biden in a statement Monday.
"The IPCC is sending one key message above all else: We must stop burning fossil fuels, drilling for fossil fuels, and building new infrastructure to deliver fossil fuels," Hauter said. "Unfortunately, policymakers continue to lock in new dirty energy schemes—most notably the Biden administration's approval of a massive new oil drilling project in Alaska."
"Tragically, Congress and the White House continue to waste money on carbon removal technologies that have been a failure. Relying on these scams instead of taking actions to stop fossil fuel expansion will only lead to further climate catastrophe," she added. "President Biden's actions to expand oil and gas drilling and ramp up fossil fuel exports undermine his professed climate goals and invite further catastrophe. The IPCC's message is clear, and political leaders must answer the call with actions to match the moment."
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