To Orwellian Infinity And Beyond!! Wall Street's Climate Doublespeak Getting Clearer
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The scene was a virtual forum organized by the Institute of International Finance, and the participants were the people running the world’s biggest banks, investment houses, and insurance companies. The backdrop was the heightened effort by activists in the past eighteen months to get them to stop loaning money to, buying the stocks of, and underwriting the expansion plans for the fossil-fuel industry. (Another backdrop was one of the hottest years ever recorded on Earth, a year that also saw the biggest wildfires and the most Atlantic hurricanes.) The Biden Administration has begun to make noises about supporting those activist efforts with new regulations at the Federal Reserve, the Department of the Treasury, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. And now the money men were saying, essentially, go to Hell. Not in the obvious, gloating way of the Texas gas exec who boasted last week of “hitting the jackpot with some of these incredible prices.” Nothing quite so crude, yet far more ominous.
Larry Fink, the C.E.O. of BlackRock, warned against a “full divestiture” from fossil-fuel stocks, because it would be “greenwashing.” Not only is that statement contrary to his company’s own policies—BlackRock has made a conditional promise to divest from some coal-mining companies—it’s also a remarkably Orwellian use of an Orwellian idea. Greenwashing, in truth, is what Fink and his peers engage in when they announce their calls for Paris compliance or for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 or the other dodges that, for the time being, allow them to keep lending vast sums of money to the fossil-fuel industry while insisting that they’re very worried.
Here, for instance, is Brian Moynihan, the C.E.O. of Bank of America, which is the world’s fourth-largest financier of fossil fuels, having handed the sector more than a hundred and fifty-six billion dollars last year: “We have to have a balanced, fair transition across the globe and realize it’s going to take time and investment and innovation. And that’s what capitalism brings.” Actually, what capitalism has helped bring during the past decades (besides incredible economic inequality) is a rise in the global average temperature of nearly two degrees Celsius, record lows for summer sea ice in the Arctic, and a jet stream so destabilized that, in mid February, Houston can be colder than Anchorage.
And now capitalism—or so the scientists tell us—does not have time. It has nine years to deliver a world in which emissions are cut in half; if it doesn’t, then the talk of “Paris” will be utterly meaningless, because the targets we set there just six years ago will be unachievable. These institutions, to play their part, would have to set aside only a small part of their business. (A hundred and fifty-six billion dollars is, stunningly, a small part of Bank of America’s business—but a rant about the concentration of economic power will have to wait for another day). But they are, simply put, too greedy to do that. I suppose a politer way of saying it would be that they are too invested in their current business model. Forget about reading the room (though one hopes that they’re underestimating Biden’s moxie); they’re not reading the planet.
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/on-climate-wall-street-out-orwells-orwell
