Morgan Stanley Follows Citi, BofA in Quitting Climate Group
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Like Exxon was/is an ESG friendly stock, but Tesla isn't. Regardless of how you feel about Elon, the real impact both companies have on the environment shows the absurdity of all this corporate green washing nonsense.
If you believe corporations tend to fall short of their external appearances, then what reason do you have to believe this isn’t still the case, but from a lower basis?
I.e. you assume:
Before: 8 goodness points (apparent) = 6 goodness points (actual)
Now: 6 goodness points (apparent) = 6 goodness points (actual)
Wouldn’t your logic actually indicate their new goodness points (actual) should be 4?
I’d rather avoid these sort of meaningless labels and just focus on doing what I think is important.
Like it I wanted to reduce climate impact and I was a bank, I would set up a page that lists all the ways I impact climate.
ESG actively allocated investment dollars that were specifically designated for socially and environmentally responsible businesses into oil & gas companies, so in that case keeping up appearances is actively making things worse than doing nothing.
This sort of thing has sucked the air from anyone actually doing useful meaningful things - since anyone paying attention just rolls their eyes when someone talks about being green or whatever. Sure, some companies and orgs actually are legitimately doing useful and interesting stuff - but it takes so much personal research into each one now that anyone blathering about how they are green is met with instant suspicion to anyone remotely paying attention to the space.
The less administrative and marketing driven grift the better, even if it's a tiny little baby step. This sort of thing has done more to harm the environmental movement than helped it from where I'm standing.
Do you really expect real movement on climate change now?
We should all stop being naive. A corporation only mandate is profits, always increasing ones. All else is secondary.
It's the role of elected governments to regulate that their incessant chase for profits don't harm society.
If society puts in place a government that doesn't care to regulate corporations in their harmful ways, well, in a sense society has spoken.
Also, capitalism is sociopathic at the first order so all we are talking about is trimming the sails to keep speed vs trying to get to a destination. Capital doesnt care what the destination is, it just wants to be first.
Line goed up
Using the word "pretend" mischaracterizes the so iopaths.
Telling when they quit then and get bad PR.
It has nothing to do with the E in ESG and was only referring to the G.
[0] This doesn't speak to the problem of "greenwashing" investments, but that's a different thread imo.
Maybe it’s a good thing? Clarity can be painful, but it’s better than living in illusions. Time to take the reins ourselves—invest consciously, act decisively, and demand accountability.
This is my wish for all of us in 2025: that we see things as they are, not as we wish they were, and have the courage to drive the change we need.
Apologies if this sounds overly philosophical—blame it on the rainy Brussels weather. It does things to a person!
Government or not, even companies are made up of people. People with family.
That is what baffles me. It's like saying "meh, our kids aren't worth the effort".
Sure, the C-suite can probably ensure their kids are adequately housed and educated to make their way in a more hostile and broken world. But what about the rest of them? And will there be enough residual wealth to shelter the grandkids, too?
But I'm glad to see these banks pull out of these net-zero related efforts. For me, and again I know I'm in the minority here, net-zero puts a huge cramp on productivity and building out what we need for civilization. These net-zero aren't progressive - they are regressive.
What we need is build. To drill. To create. For that, we need all the energy sources we can pull from. Fossil. Nuclear. And yes, solar and wind too. Hydro. Net-zero is what will pull down everyone.
But our worldviews are radically different here.
Really should just be building a lot more nuclear plants to drive energy costs to 0 but that's too much government overreach or something ...
Nuclear costs more than many other alternatives.
The rest of the world is in the dark ages. Imagine being told they will never have a chance to get to a better life? Imagine being told you will lose what you have because people in the west blew it all up.
Heck, given how crazy things in general are, I wouldnt be surprised if people start throwing nukes around as "solutions" or as "fuck you"s.
How are you calculating this?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-00985-5
and follow up works.
The methods are fairly straightforward. Panel regression with temperature effects on top of a per region and per year background.
As I understand it, there is some disagreement for how to exactly aggregate the growth effects over time. But to me what was shocking about this is just how clearly you already see the impacts in existing _macroeconomic_ data, once it's sufficiently high spatial resolution. I am in the "who really cares about GDP" camp generally, it's a very crude measure. I was not expecting to see climate impacts to show up in GDP data for quite some time.
It seems clearly absurd, though. They claim that 1 degree of temperature variance reduces GDP by 5pp, which is an insanely huge effect. They're saying that variability (not growth) of a size you can't even feel would eliminate the entirety of US economic growth and push the rest of the world into a large recession.
This kind of paper where you regress things against each other with no attempt to understand or explain the underlying causalities, nor have any ability to validate the results, is the sort of thing that yields false positive results all the time, it's textbook replication crisis stuff.
The statement about 5 percent per 1 degree variability gives you the sensitivity, it's not meant to extrapolate to an actual increase of 1 degree. A 1 degree increase in variability would be absolutely massive. Your intuition that you "can't even feel this" is just wrong. Just to illustrate: The variability in historical data is roughly 3° as far as I know. A 1° increase means a massively wider distribution of daily temperatures within each month. More heat days, more extremes, more wild swings. I couldn't immediately find how much it has increased in the last century, unfortunately, but if I read this [2] right, then an increase in mean temperature by 4-5° in the SSP chosen is projected to come with an increase in day to day variability of 0.5° in the most affected regions. That's really the worst case scenario as far as climate change is concerned.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-023-02323-8 [2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/pdf/10.1073/pnas.2103294118
Again, when it comes to the comprehensive assessment of the cost of climate change produced by the same team there is a debate going on (that I don't know the details of, so I don't have an opinion either way), let's see what comes out of that:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0
But I haven't heard anyone raise any real issues with the paper we are discussing, and it's well cited, and there are prominent economists who have staked their careers and reputation on climate change not being all that bad (e.g. Nordhaus), who are willing and able to push back against exactly this type of analysis if there are holes to be found...
Maybe they address all of these obvious problems in their paper, but I doubt it:
1. The low quality and wide CIs of the temperature datasets themselves. Look at the recent revelations about the CIs on the UK's weather data for an example (and the total lack of care from the Met Office about fixing the situation). It's one country but similar problems are found everywhere. One of the most depressing conclusions I reached when studying this topic a few years ago was that we don't really know if the world is getting warmer or not. It's not even a well posed question to begin with, and the datasets are subject to massive historical revisions, but even ignoring those fatal problems the error bars on the underlying data are wider than the claimed increases.
2. Dubious nature of the gridded GDP dataset they're using. Much of the data comes from sources merely cited as "literature". Of those, many are themselves estimated and modeled data dubious on their face, e.g. the Australia data comes from a paper with only two citations (one of which is this paper) and which claims to accurately reconstruct GDP back to the 1850s! This is a jenga tower of estimates and there doesn't seem to be any attempt to measure or think about error in a systematic way: they explain that they looked for outliers in the data to do manual validation (unmentioned, did they remove outliers?), and they admit that the dataset has serious problems, but just blithely hand wave it all away. There is no attempt to estimate the accuracy of their data beyond observing it isn't 100% accurate.
3. Inability to validate the resulting model ("robustness tests" aren't the same thing as validation, at all). Unvalidated models aren't useful for anything.
As for Nordhaus, I wouldn't try to outsource decisions about the reliability of work to old names. They've been pointing out serious problems in the literature for years, some of them decades, and there have never been reforms. If someone warns of problems 100 times and is ignored every time, the lack of a warning the 101st time doesn't mean anything. They could just be tired. I would be, in their shoes!
Methodologically this is bog standard econometrics. The quality of the dataset is as good as any used in economics, all you have done is cited their own transparent disclosure of the limitations. You can now say that we should never look at any economic data to make any analysis, but that would be a rather extreme position to take. Much much worse papers have had disproportionate policy impacts [1]. These papers are taken very seriously by every major relevant institution.
If the data is low quality, and you still obtain a strong signal, that shows the result is robust, unless the data errors can be expected to be correlated with the drivers. And this is where this analysis is a lot simpler and more robust than standard econometrics: The economy doesn't influence the weather. Common drivers are conceivable, but the panel regression controls for both regional and temporal background rates. At this point it is very difficult to conceive of common drivers that would not be controlled for here.
Finally: "One of the most depressing conclusions I reached when studying this topic a few years ago was that we don't really know if the world is getting warmer or not."
If your conclusion is contrary to that of _every_ scientist who studies this for a living, you should consider the hypothesis that the problem is with your reasoning/analysis and not with everyone else.
There is surely no way we stop producing, even if the world burns to a crisp.
Embrace the nihilism is my current stance. People think they need optimism to think and feel ok. Turns out you can feel perfectly fine and productive when you assume the world is coming to an end as well!
Its just a matter of perspective, what matters is having a clear plan for what you think will happen, and executing on it. It doesnt matter if the plan may be grim to others.
This is just reality, reality doesnt care about someones feelings.
Thanks for the heads-up, friend.
Most energy out there already goes to causes that do nothing whatsoever to advance humanity's future or to improve people's lives. Burning fossil fuels to produce that waste of energy is absolute madness.
If we are to waste energy, it should at least be produced in a manner that doesn't doom future generations.
That is only true if you think this is a worthwhile effort. I have no idea what the Net Zero Banking Alliance achieves, but its perfectly possible its not achieving anything worthwhile.
if you regard climate change as an emergency, then a target of achieving net zero in 2050 is probably pretty useless.
You would expect then that these banks would announce a new alliance, a new effort they are leading to reduce carbon emissions.
Anyone who takes on additional costs will be punished for it, because the hive mind of society always (read: _always_) (let me reiterate: always) favors lowest cost, all else being equal.
If your SaaS costs $12/mo because you voluntarily pay for offsetting all emissions that result, you are going to be hard pressed to beat the guy who doesn't give a fuck about emissions and offers an equal product for $10/mo.
The only way is to regulate these things to force compliance between all competitors. Emissions have a real cost, but it is far enough in the future to hide it. The government needs to force that cost into the present.
All else is rarely equal. Be it with luxury brands, or with sustainability. See airlines giving consumers the option to pay for Sustainable Aviation Fuel, people literally pay more for the exact same product just because of the wider environmental benefits.
It is very difficult for an average person to understand how callous and/or cruel a person can be when they are seeking more pleasure out of this world's resources. A person must begin the positive long tail of spiritual development to grok the negative long tail. The >80% of folks in neither long tail just have no clue, my friend.
I don't think it's like saying that. In most cases the point is there is no amount of effort that an individual (or even a small group) can make that would solve the problem. I'm not saying I agree with that reasoning, but it is very different to saying our kids aren't worth the effort. Like if a child was sick, a parent might genuinely believe that they would chop their arm off to save them, but they don't because it won't actually fix anything.
I think very few people (1) believe that climate change is a real and existential threat; and (2) believe that their actions can stop climate change; but (3) decide it's not worth taking those actions.
https://x.com/AndrewKelleyCA/status/1683151483687116802?t=47...
On the other hand we can directly measure actual gas in the atmosphere. Every one of us can replicate these measurements with 100$ analyzer. These numbers show that the planet as a whole is doing jack shit regarding reducing climate change:
Analogy: though I've always been an atheist, the cultural conditioning is so strong, that in my 20's it took me a LOT of conscious effort to consider the notion that "Religion should not be treated specially" (when it comes to e.g. tax breaks, protection, freedom of speech, etc).
On this too then, I've been strongly conditioned that "company's only prerogative is and should be shareholder value", that it took me a lot of effort to consider it critically, but... it's just a sentence, a statement. It's no more true than we desire it to be.
Or to put it another way - if company's ONLY priority is shareholder value, over consumer interest, employee well-being, external impact, and long term picture... the system is as broken as the more aggressive amongst us have banged the drums it to be.
There is a generalized "duty of care" requirement in most jurisdictions, but it can be and often is interpreted much more widely than a requirement to maximize shareholder returns.