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USA/Global: On Climate, How Much Will Be New?
AfricaFocus Bulletin
November 30, 2020 (2020-11-30)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
“One of the most powerful pieces of climate change legislation the
Biden administration will need has already been passed: the Dodd-
Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. This
legislation, known for creating the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau and other public safeguards against financial wrongdoing,
also empowers key agencies including the Treasury Department, the
Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission to limit
systemic risks to financial stability.” - Justin Guay, Sunrise
Project
The future of policy on climate in the Biden administration is
still to be determined, of course. It will be molded both by
pressure from the status quo, particularly from the fossil fuel
industry, and from climate justice activists. While much focus in
on the potential leadership by former Secretary of State John Kerry
as climate czar in the National Security Council, experienced
climate analyst Justin Guay argues that even more important will be
the financial institutions, in which Janet Yellen at the Treasury
Department will be a key figure. With great uncertainty about the
future of legislative action in the Senate, both analysts and
activists will be focusing on what can be done by executive action.
Note: the Sunrise Project, primarily based in Australia, with additional staff in the United States and Europe, is different from the Sunrise Movement of young climate activists in the United States. But both are committed to accelerating urgent action on the climate crisis.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains the article by Justin Guay cited
above, as well as one by Brandon Wu of Action Aid focused on the
priorities for international negotiations by the incoming Biden
administration.
Another AfricaFocus Bulletin sent out today (available on the web at http://www.africafocus.org/docs20/usa2011.php, also examining the
potential for new policy from the new Biden administration,
includes an overview essay on U.S. Africa policy by Imani Countess
and me, as well as an article by a former U.S. diplomat on U.S.
policy towards Ethiopia.
For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on climate and the environment, visit http://www.africafocus.org/intro-env.php
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Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom-US Section, Black
Alliance for Peace, & World BEYOND War invite you to attend this
free webinar on the United States African Command (AFRICOM) and
Human Rights in Africa, on Friday, Dec. 4 at 11am PT, 2pm ET, 8 pm
Nigeria time.
The webinar will feature first-hand reports from WILPF women
describing what effects AFRICOM is having on their respective
nations: Joy Onyesoh, the President of WILPF International will
speak about Nigeria, Sylvie Ndongmo, the Africa Region
representative of WILPF will speak about Cameroon, Marie-Claire
Faray, currently living in the UK will speak about the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, and Christine Odera, Commonwealth Youth
Peace Ambassador Network – Kenya Country Coordinator (CYPAN), will
speak about Kenya. Other featured speakers include writer and
author Margaret Kimberley, representing the Black Alliance for
Peace, and their initiative: Out of Africa: Shut Down AFRICOM, and
investigative journalist Amanda Sperber who has reported widely on
Somalia.
AfricaFocus Bulletin has signed on as an endorser of this webinar.
You can register at https://actionnetwork.org/events/free-webinar-africom-human-rights-in-africa
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The Most Important Climate Legislation Has Already Passed
The Dodd-Frank Act will give the Biden administration the power to supercharge the clean energy transition.
Justin Guay
Greentech Media, November 23, 2020
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/the-most-important-climate-legislation-has-already-passed
Justin Guay is director for global climate strategy at the Sunrise Project.
[The Sunrise Project, based in Australia, but also having networks in the United States and Europe, supports networks of organisations to work together to achieve outcomes that would not be possible by individual organisations acting alone. Their specific targets for pressure include Australia and global finance power structures having the greatest responsibility for climate-warming emissions. ]
On the heels of a historic election that saw Joe Biden use climate as the single biggest motivator to turn out the youth vote in record numbers, expectations for action are high. But with the fate of the Senate's partisan makeup still up in the air, what can President-elect Biden do to advance his climate mandate if an obstructionist Senate stands in his way?
As it turns out, one of the most powerful pieces of climate change
legislation the Biden administration will need has already been
passed: the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection
Act of 2010. This legislation, known for creating the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau and other public safeguards against
financial wrongdoing, also empowers key agencies including the
Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and the Securities and
Exchange Commission to limit systemic risks to financial stability.
The largest systemic risk of them all, climate change, is driven by reckless investments in fossil fuels, exactly the kind of speculative activities Dodd-Frank was designed to bring to a halt in order to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. That means Dodd-Frank gives the Biden administration the power to inhibit or prohibit investments in fossil fuels — a power that could be critical for achieving his pledge of delivering a carbon-free power sector by 2035.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the law could give the administration authority to increase capital requirements for banks loaning money to fossil fuel projects, or even to institute “credit guidance” policies such as those imposed during World War II to direct industrial policy. That could play a major role in redirecting climate-unfriendly investments such as the estimated $100 billion in new natural-gas plants being planned by utilities across the U.S., which if built could make Biden’s carbon-free goal impossible.
But the struggle to provide a Biden administration with the
political space to wield this kind of power has only just begun.
Industry is lining up on one side, with the climate community on
the other. It’s a battle that few would have predicted even just
several months ago, but it's already rapidly heating up.
Climate change poses a grave risk to the financial system
To understand why a Biden administration can implement Dodd-Frank authority on ”day one,” it’s important to review how far the world has come in recognizing the systemic financial risk posed by climate change. It was just a few short years ago that Mark Carney, then head of the Bank of England, gave a now-famous speech on climate-induced Minsky moments — sudden and drastic market collapses brought on by speculative activity — as he advocated for greater action on climate change. His argument was clear: Unless we act on the threat climate change posed to the stability of the financial system, we are in serious trouble.
For investors, one of the greatest risks is losing money on coal, oil and gas infrastructure that is forced into early retirement due to the inevitable policy response to climate change and a resulting clean energy transition (referred to as "transition risk"). However, even absent a concerted climate policy, the U.S. has seen a wave of bankruptcies across the oil and gas industry, and the continued secular decline of the coal industry despite desperate attempts to reverse its fortunes.
ExxonMobil refinery in Baton, Rouge, Louisiana. The removal of ExxonMobil from the Dow Jones average this year is a signal of the systemic risk in energy stocks based on oil and natural-gas. Credit: Wikipedia.
Other systemic risks loom for insurance, mortgage and other key financial markets from the extreme weather events driven by climate change, according to a September analysis from the Trump-appointed financial regulators at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Graham Steele, the director of the Corporations and Society Initiative at Stanford, argued in a January report that a mounting body of evidence clearly establishes the authority for a Biden administration to use Dodd-Frank’s authority to act to mitigate climate risk.
“That climate is a systemic risk is no longer a question,” Steele said in an email. “We have mounting evidence, a growing consensus among financial regulators around the world already taking action, and the legislative authority to act.”
The kindling on which the next crisis will burn
Despite this evidence, important entities tasked with maintaining financial stability and managing these risks have largely abdicated this responsibility during the Trump administration.
A glaring example is the Federal Reserve’s decision to prop up financially vulnerable fossil fuel companies using the billions of dollars appropriated by Congress to backstop emergency bond-buying programs meant to avert a global economic recession amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Independent analysis from Influence Map showed that the bonds the Fed was buying were actually overweight on fossil fuel companies — the same generators of systemic risk that Carney was so concerned about.
“The Fed's interventions in the bond market sent a problematic
signal,” Alexis Goldstein, senior policy analyst at Americans for
Financial Reform, said in an email. Of the Fed’s portfolio of
corporate bonds, nearly 20 percent, or about $25 billion, are from
energy and utility companies, “including many dirty energy firms
driving climate change and exacerbating environmental racism.”
Even now, with the impacts worst of the feared recession seemingly averted, Federal Reserve loans to oil and gas companies from certain programs continue to increase, including the Main Street Lending Program with total fossil fuel exposure now upward of half a billion dollars. Rather than dousing the sparks of the next financial crisis, the Fed has been fanning the flames.
The Biden administration’s finance policy will be climate policy
Biden’s electoral victory has driven a rapid shift in the Federal Reserve’s public profile on climate risk. Just days after Joe Biden was declared president-elect, the Fed formally highlighted climate as a threat to financial stability and announced it will join the NGFS, a network of 75 central banks pledging to incorporate climate-change risk into their financial analysis.
That same week, a lead candidate for Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, told Bloomberg New Energy Finance that “we need public policy oriented to make a difference on climate change,” indicating that acknowledging climate risk is viewed as a prerequisite for those seeking key financial regulator positions in the Biden administration.
Whether it's Janet Yellen or other leading climate-friendly candidates such as Sarah Bloom Raskin, the former Fed governor and deputy Treasury secretary early to criticize the Fed’s fossil fuels bond buying, the Biden administration’s choice for Treasury Secretary will have an arsenal of powerful tools courtesy of Dodd-Frank, David Arkush, managing director of Public Citizen's Climate Program, said in an email.
"Dodd-Frank gives financial regulators awesome power to ensure financial stability — 'awesome' in the biblical sense," he said. "The regulators are loath to use their power, and sometimes their hesitance is appropriate. But if the threats involved in the climate crisis aren't enough to justify acting, then it's hard to imagine what is."
To self-regulate or not? That is the question
One major choice the Biden administration will face early on may be
guided by its confidence in the prospect that enhanced climate risk
disclosure, and the informed reaction of investors to those
disclosures, will in itself be a sufficient step to combat the
financial risks posed by climate change.
Leading financial institutions are supportive of that approach to regulation. Much as the Fed changed course at the news of Biden’s electoral victory, so too have leading CEOs like Blackrock’s Larry Fink, who now publicly backs mandatory disclosure rules.
The favored corporate approach is to embrace Task Force for Climate Disclosure standards, which nearly every public company on earth now supports, according to Bloomberg. This approach is predicated on the notion that more high-quality information created by the disclosure of climate risks will lead the market to make better investment decisions while avoiding burdensome regulations.
But whether disclosure alone will drive a decisive shift from fossil fuel investment is increasingly in doubt. According to a survey by HSBC, only 10 percent of investors view climate-risk disclosures as material information. The nearly $2 trillion channeled into speculative fossil fuel investments by leading banks just since the Paris Agreement was signed indicates they’re not using the information already widely available in the marketplace to shift their investments.
How far a Biden administration will go beyond basic steps like disclosure of risks is an open, and increasingly politically important, question. The climate community is already gearing up for a fight. Groups lunch as Evergreen Action, run by former Inslee and Warren campaign staffers, call Dodd-Frank one of the most important tools available for Biden to act on his climate pledges.
Climate advocates buoyed by a fight over Federal Reserve bond-buying programs have been joined by members of Congress demanding the Federal Reserve end its own fossil fuel purchases, not simply disclose them. Fights like these have raised the general understanding of the fact that, as Bill McKibben has put it, money is the oxygen on which the fire of global warming burns.
The first fight: Personnel is policy
Some of the first fights may well focus on appointments to key financial regulatory agencies including Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Stop the Money Pipeline, the national coalition of over 130 groups that McKibben helped create, has issued a set of climate principles any would-be financial regulator must comply with to gain its support.
While the pressure to act on climate is just now growing, broader pressure to regulate Wall Street is already working. The progressive wing of the Democratic party is praising Biden’s picks for his financial regulation transition team, while the financial industry is predicting a regulatory crackdown. Recent regulatory fights over climate-friendly investing rules in Europe indicate that climate advocates should expect fierce opposition from the financial sector, which means they’ll need strong regulators on the beat.
Biden has promised that he’ll name his Treasury Secretary before Thanksgiving, and that "all elements of the Democratic party" will support his choice. Speculation leans toward Yellen, pointing out that her calls on climate action stretch back to 1997. But this decision is just the first of many that could well shape the trajectory of the most consequential climate administrations in history and presage its willingness to use the “awesome powers” of Dodd-Frank to drive its agenda and the clean energy transition.
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Old dog, new tricks? John Kerry needs to lead a total reform of U.S. climate diplomacy
Brandon Wu, Director of Policy and Programs
ActionAid USA
November 25, 2020
https://www.actionaidusa.org/blog/old-dog-new-tricks-john-kerry-needs-to-lead-a-total-reform-of-u-s-climate-diplomacy/
November 25, 2020
After four years of climate denial at the top of the U.S. government, the appointment of John Kerry as a climate envoy for the next administration is a bit of a breath of fresh air. Having an administration that believes that the climate crisis is real, and takes it seriously enough to create high-level White House positions to deal with it, is obviously far better than the alternative.
But let’s not forget the scale of action and transformation that addressing the climate crisis demands. If we are going to avert runaway climate breakdown, we need the Biden administration to be orders of magnitude more ambitious in transforming our energy, food, and economic systems, than any previous administration. We are going to need a new level of recognition of U.S. responsibility and capacity for action, with global solidarity at the core of our belief.
The Biden administration has to deal with the stark reality that after four more years of climate inaction – on top of 30-odd years of little to no action since the beginning of international climate negotiations – business-as-usual solutions to climate change are even more inadequate than they were before. While the continuity of John Kerry as Obama Secretary of State, to John Kerry as Biden climate envoy, may be welcome diplomatically for some, we cannot afford to just go back to old negotiating tactics and climate policies.
Out with the old…
Under previous administrations, U.S. negotiating strategies were
more focused on maintaining U.S. economic and geopolitical
dominance rather than on finding ways to work collectively and
constructively with other countries to solve the climate crisis.
Divide-and-conquer tactics – playing blocs of developing countries
against each other using bullying tactics and power politics – were
the norm. U.S. politicians also relied heavily on “national
security” framing, emphasizing the importance of U.S. interests
above the needs of shared human society.
To their credit, the Obama administration proactively re-engaged
with international climate negotiations after a long U.S. absence.
But the Obama State Department negotiating team – including while
Mr. Kerry was at the helm – trumpeted “U.S. climate leadership”
while undermining core principles of the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change. The principles that especially came
under fire from U.S. negotiators were those around equity and
fairness – the idea that the U.S. and other historically
industrialized countries should do more, faster, than poorer
countries.
So what did U.S. climate leadership look like with Secretary Kerry’s negotiation team? The U.S. commitment for emissions reductions under the Paris Agreement was 5-6 times weaker than our fair share. The U.S. was a perpetual roadblock to progress on key negotiations around financial support for poorer countries. The U.S. tried to ensure that it could never be held liable for the damage caused by climate impacts in vulnerable countries and has no obligation to support them – a hard-line position that nearly torpedoed negotiations on multiple occasions.
John Kerry, as President-Elect Biden’s climate envoy, must break from Obama-era policies and negotiating practices.The U.S. has never been a climate leader – quite the opposite. For the U.S. to really lead, Kerry must pioneer an approach that has true international cooperation, global solidarity, and respect for human rights and justice at its center. First and foremost that means he must find a way to convince the world that the U.S. is genuinely ready to do its fair share – meaning deep emissions reductions at home and massively scaled up international support for poorer countries.
In his speech yesterday accepting the position of presidential climate envoy, Mr. Kerry fell back on outdated and misleading talking points. “No country alone can solve this challenge. Even the United States, for all its industrial strength, is responsible for only 13% of global emissions.” The first sentence is absolutely correct. The second is an incredibly dangerous underestimation of the U.S. responsibility for the climate crisis.
In 2017, the U.S. was indeed responsible for about 13% of greenhouse gas emissions, compared to China’s 24%. But climate change is not based on a single year of emissions. The climate changes due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, so historical emissions over time is what really matters. Over history (since the Industrial Revolution), the United States is responsible for closer to 25% of greenhouse gas emissions – vastly more than any other single country, including China at just over half of U.S. emissions.
Old-style U.S. climate diplomacy dictated that U.S. officials
ignore this basic fact in favor of finger-pointing at other
countries, particularly developing economies. There is no pathway
to successful global cooperation with this kind of behavior. The
only U.S. climate diplomacy that gives us a chance at solving the
climate crisis is a completely new version – one in which the U.S.
recognizes its true responsibility and commits to urgent action at
a huge scale. The United States must pull our weight – not just
throw our weight around to try to get other countries to act so
that we don’t have to.
In with the new?
Donald Trump was a disaster for the climate, but a repeat of
previous U.S. climate diplomacy and inaction will be a disaster as
well. Simply being better is not going to be enough. We hope that
Mr. Kerry and other climate leaders in the Biden administration
recognize this fact and are planning a new, less exceptionalist,
more equitable vision of U.S. climate leadership.
We look forward to working with Mr. Kerry and the Biden
administration to ensure that they act with the urgency that the
crisis demands, rather than simply going back to the failed pre-
Trump status quo.
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
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