Shocked, Shocked! Big Corporations Seem To Be Forgetting Their Big Climate Action Pledges
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AIG, which declined to comment or share its response to questions about its climate pledge from the committee, is hardly unusual. Over the last year, Amazon retreated from an effort to zero out the emissions of half its shipments by 2030. Shell Oil dropped an ambitious initiative to build a pipeline of carbon credits through investment in forest preservation and other carbon-absorbing projects worldwide. And BP significantly scaled back its plan to reduce emissions by as much as 35 percent by the end of the decade.
As the planet heats up at an alarming pace, these turnabouts expose the shortcomings of leaving it up to voluntary corporate action to solve an existential crisis, said John Lang, the project lead at Net Zero Tracker, a group that monitors progress on corporate and government climate pledges. “There is a massive credibility gap with these corporate targets,” he said. “We need more regulation. Otherwise, the dial just will not turn.”
The United States gives generous subsidies to companies that pursue clean technologies but has no national climate law with emissions targets that industries must meet. It does not tax carbon, which many economists say is the most efficient and practical way to nudge businesses toward cutting their carbon footprint. And U.S. financial regulators — amid corporate pushback — have been unable to agree on rules that would simply require companies to report the emissions created by their operations and supply chains.
That leaves companies setting climate targets on their own terms. Experts say many of them announced that they would align with the Paris agreement without a clear plan for getting there or a full understanding of the trade-offs involved. Lang’s group examined more than 1,000 companies that have pledges to zero out their emissions by 2050. It found that 38 of them — less than 4 percent — are doing the bare minimum required under the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The rest are not meeting the “starting line criteria” laid out by the United Nations, which calls on companies to track their carbon footprint across supply chains, immediately cut emissions, create a scientifically credible plan for using carbon offsets, and report annual progress on meeting climate targets. The lack of action by companies that have made climate pledges is particularly consequential because scientists warn that there is no time for delay, with a global emergency that demands emissions be cut now rather than in a decade or two down the road.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/12/03/climate-corporate-cop28/
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Climate Action Pledge == whatever we have to say to get you to shut up a little bit. 