This Week’s Science News from SWTG

Climate Goals & Time Travel

Everyone Is Giving Up On Climate Goals

It’s 2025 and the tide is turning on climate change. To me, it looks like this will be the year when we’ll stop trying to prevent it from happening and instead focus on adapting to it.

Donald Trump is back in the White House and he means business. He’s already pulled the United States out of the Paris Agreement, again, and announced he will set an end to what he calls the “the green new scam,” and instead invest into roads, bridges and other infrastructure. “And we will drill, baby, drill.”

Meanwhile, Europeans are afraid to fall behind in international competition, and global businesses are done pretending they care about carbon neutrality. Already last year in March, Shell abandoned its goal of reducing carbon emissions by 45%, citing “uncertainty in the pace of change in the energy transition.” In October, Reuters reported that “BP abandoned it’s goal to cut oil output” and, very tellingly, that “BP shares were up 0.8%.”

The likely reason fossil fuel companies are abandoning climate goals is that they expect demand to increase. Many multinational companies including Gucci, Nestlé, and Easyjet, have downgraded their ambitions to reduce carbon emissions. It’s not hard to guess why: Carbon neutrality isn’t helping their business.

So fossil fuel is back in fashion and the financial sector is drawing consequences, too. The clearest sign is that the Net-Zero Banking Alliance is falling apart. That’s a group of banks who “committed to aligning their lending, investment, and capital markets activities with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.” In December, Goldman Sachs left the Alliance, followed by Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and JP Morgan.

A recent report from ShareAction, a charity that supports responsible investments, found that decarbonization efforts by 18 large European banks, including HSBC and Barclays, are behind target and I suspect that these banks will soon stop pretending they even care. On Jan 13, the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, one of the world’s biggest climate-investor groups, announced that it is suspending activities because of “Recent developments in the U.S. and different regulatory and client expectations.”