English references

The nation’s top banks are quietly advising their clients on how to build a financial life raft — or perhaps life yacht — from the wreckage of runaway climate change. Make no mistake: The forecasts coming from Wall Street’s leading financial institutions are bleak. But they also point their clients to potential profit-making opportunities from the havoc spreading across the planet, writes Corbin Hiar.

As authorities declared 2024 the hottest on record, a key private sector climate alliance, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) abandoned a requirement that members be aligned to the Paris agreement. That was followed by a network of net zero asset managers suspending work, and deleting from its website its statement of commitments that members must adopt, after BlackRock, the biggest of them all, quit its ranks.

But the decline in oil, gas and coal will not be steep enough to limit global warming to 1.5C

The UK’s advertising watchdog has banned a group of big oil and gas company advertisements for being misleading as part of crackdown on “greenwashing”, or making something appear more sustainable than it really is.

Strong climate action could wipe $756bn from individuals’ pension funds and other investments in rich countries

For the past few years, scientists have been frantically sounding an alarm that governments refuse to hear: the global food system is beginning to look like the global financial system in the run-up to 2008.

The Ukrainian crisis has revived an old debate: how to effectively sanction a state like Russia? Let’s say it straight away: it is time to imagine a new type of sanction focused on the oligarchs who have prospered thanks to the regime in question. This will require the establishment of an international financial register, which will not be to the liking of western fortunes, whose interests are much more closely linked to those of the Russian and Chinese oligarchs than is sometimes claimed. However, it is at this price that western countries will succeed in winning the political and moral battle against the autocracies and in demonstrating to the world that the resounding speeches on democracy and justice are not simply empty words.

Capitalism isn’t what it used to be. Since 2008, critics of the world’s dominant economic system have been lamenting its imperviousness to change. And for good reason. In earlier epochs, financial crises and pandemics wrought economic transformation. In our own, they seem to have yielded more of the same. Before the 2008 crash, global capitalism was characterized by organized labor’s weakness, rising inequality within nations, and a growth model that offset mediocre wage gains with asset-price appreciation. All of these have remained features of the world’s economic order.

CCS - Carbon Capture and Storage: A research brief published by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) concludes that the abrupt recent shutdown of the Petra Nova coal-fired carbon capture plant in Texas should be seen as a strong signal for investors to avoid such projects.

Every metric ton of carbon dioxide humans emit comes at a cost—not only in terms of the financial toll of the damage wrought by floods, heat waves and droughts but also the price in human lives. Substantially curtailing emissions today could prevent tens of millions of premature deaths over the course of the 21st century, according to a new study that calculated this “mortality cost of carbon.”