RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/can-ukraine-kill-climate-change/

All apocalyptic movements end in failure, but often only after they have wreaked untold damage on the societies that believe in them. That’s the takeaway from Richard Landes’s Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, which explores the appeal of these movements over the centuries, their chief characteristics, and how they take over societies and eventually run out of steam.

Global warming, for all its scientific veneer, has the basic characteristics of an apocalyptic movement: there is a prophecy of impending doom, a demand for repentance and societal self-sacrifice (in this case, giving up the fossil fuels upon which industrial society depends), and a sense of urgency that if action is not taken immediately, it will be too late. In the end, if the required sacrifices are made, there is an idyllic future. In this case, it’s a green new world, powered by sun and wind. Since its emergence in the 1980s, the global warming apocalypse has shown remarkable resilience, emerging stronger than ever from a near-death experience in November 2009 when leaked emails between top climate scientists exposed their shenanigans in suppressing scientific dissent and deleting data.

What probably saved the movement was that the West’s political elite had by then committed themselves. At the beginning of 2009, global warming had scored its most important convert: President Barack Obama. The hacked emails became news just before 40,000 delegates, including over 100 heads of state, Obama among them, converged on Copenhagen for the 15th annual UN climate conference.

In 2018, the movement obtained a major public relations boost when Greta Thunberg launched an international children’s crusade. President Donald Trump took the United States on a brief time out, but even while still on the campaign trail, now-President Joe Biden promised, “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels.” At the 2021 UN climate conference in Glasgow, Biden showed up from Rome in an 85-car emissions-spewing cavalcade. This time, along with the unusually huge number of delegates — including 27 from Palau (total population: 18,000) — he was one of 120 heads of state. Today, the movement would seem by most measures to be at its peak, riding what Landes would call its “cresting wave.” Yet, it is possible that the crisis in Ukraine may mark the beginning of its end.

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/600203-the-sec-tries-its-hand-at-climate-policy

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) remit includes ensuring candor, honesty and transparency in what public companies tell investors. Yet it will spend the next few weeks and months trying to fool us into believing that its new 510-page proposal on mandatory climate disclosure is solely about protecting investors and has nothing to do with climate policy or achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

No one should be fooled.

Materiality is the governing principle of corporate disclosure requirements. In 2010, the SEC issued 29 pages of guidance on climate-change disclosures. With respect to what is now called climate-transition risk, the guidance requires that companies “should consider specific risks they may face as a result of climate change legislation or regulations and avoid generic risk factor disclosure that could apply to any company.”

This common-sense approach is now being superseded by an SEC-specified climate-risk reporting and accounting framework that will run in parallel with traditional financial reporting requirements, with its own verification and attestation regime necessitating the employment of legions of climate consultants.

At the heart of the SEC’s new climate-disclosure regime is quantification of a company’s greenhouse gas emissions, at three levels: those emitted directly as a result of its own operations (Scope 1); those emitted from generating the electricity it consumes (Scope 2); and those emitted by its suppliers and customers (Scope 3). “Greenhouse gas emissions in many respects resemble financial statement disclosures,” writes Commissioner Allison Herren Lee, who, as the SEC’s acting chair in March 2021, initiated the process that led to the current proposal. Such disclosures, she claims, provide “critically important insights into a company’s operations.”