Corporate Carbon Crock of Crap Cracking

With all the Trumpian brouhaha swirling in the airwaves, be it Fulton County Fani-tacies, Jack-ed up law Smithing, or waiting for last night’s definitive cleansing of Haley’s Comet, interesting developments in Biden’s martial march to NetZero have been able to slide quietly under the radar.

It’s probably just as well for the old goat, as things aren’t turning out the way his Green cultist cohorts and he had planned, which would add yet another ding to his election prospects from the progressive side. There are already enough angry, snarling faces in the crowd that they have to hide him as it is.

Right before I managed my jailbreak out of here for a couple weeks, I told you guys about firms like J.P. Morgan, et al, pulling out of something called “The Climate Action 100 Group.” It was yet another one of those globalist cabals where the powers that be pledge to lord it over the businesses who need their money.

…That sound you hear is the beginning of the implosion of the Climate Action 100 group, a cabal of some of the largest investment firms on Earth. They are dedicated to enforcing and monitoring the companies they invest in to force them to focus on and execute strategies to achieve the climate cult’s greenhouse gas goals. In other words, if you don’t follow the Green initiative dictates for carbon reduction, etc you don’t receive your financing from these people.

Thanks to the efforts of US state attorneys general, agricultural commissioners, and a host of others savvy in fiduciary responsibility matters, these behemoth investment firms were brought to heel at last by realizing their liabilities in relation to their investors, particularly if handling public retirement funds. One doesn’t have the latitude to indulge climate cult fantasies in perpetually losing propositions when one is obligated to provide the BEST and SAFEST return on the funds entrusted to them.

Once they realized the various entities coming at them meant business and would be demanding an accounting while withdrawing their not-insignificant assets from these funds, the firms exited their little dictatorial ESG club post-haste.

There’s also been a concerted push-back at more radical, organized stockholders during meetings across the corporate world. Rather than knuckle under to the screechers in the back of the room demanding ever more insane and impossible NetZero metrics, corporate boards from Shell, Exxon, Chevron, etc, as well as investment firms like Blackrock, told them to suck a stone. 

…Big U.S. investors at the top five western oil firms’ shareholder meetings this year rebuffed an activist group’s resolutions to align their emission targets with the Paris climate pact, in contrast to some European peers, voting data showed.

Paris might be nice and all, but it’s not making anyone any money while causing a whole lot of unwelcome attention and friction.

What private businesses responsible to shareholders and a bottom line can’t do, though, the government can compel. And what has been quietly in the works for the past two years has been on the U.S. government side of the house. 

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been working on something called the “Climate Related Disclosure Standards” (CRDS) since 2022. It’s an effort to force U.S. companies into alignment with the Paris Accords and European Union standards for reporting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. And if you want to see a tangled snarl of regulations, this would be your intrusive bag of worms.

…Initially proposed in March 2022, the CRDS is part of a global framework of sustainability reporting standards. While the final rule is not yet public, the draft rule adopts three levels of reporting of GHG. Generally, Scope 1 focuses on the direct GHG emissions of the company and Scope 2 reports GHG emissions of the energy providers used by the company. Scope 3 focuses on GHG emissions along the supply chain, including those of private companies who sell to publicly traded companies, and of the end consumer.

The most controversial points are Scope 3 and Regulation S-X. Regulation S-X, also referred to as the footnote requirement, will require companies to amend their previous years disclosures via a footnote, to take into consideration severe weather events and the costs of transition to sustainability.

Not just a company’s emissions but also the emissions within its supply chain, AND GHG emissions ALONGSIDE its supply chain.

So, one could reasonably interpret this to mean that it includes basically any bovine who farts as a company truck passes by has to be reported for the emissions. Pretty much what it boils down to – a company would have to account for all that carbon – theirs and everyone else’s.

Insanity, no?

This really IS a thing in the carbon credit/offset/BS world these people live in. 

…In a report entitled “Above and Beyond,” SBTi said beyond value-chain mitigation (BVCM) may help accelerate the transition to a net-zero economy. Companies may decide to finance emissions reductions outside their business activities to deliver additional carbon cuts at a time when global emissions keep rising, and to drive additional finance to scale up nascent climate solutions, SBTI said.

“Private-sector investment into BVCM can unlock debt-free financial resources for sustainable, low-carbon, resilient growth,” the report states. “If aggregated appropriately it can be a valuable strategic source of finance for developing countries, many of whom are highly debt-constrained.” The report adds however that “investment by companies into mitigation beyond their own value chains must not displace efforts to reduce their scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.”

There are some cooler heads who might have actually been in business before trying to ratchet down the enthusiasm for BVCM. I’m not sure how much good explaining business is about making a profit, and the fact that Green fantasies are withering on the vine from their own blight at this very moment will have any impact on true believers.

…Though such a call for voluntary investment may be laudable, for some observers it’s unrealistic. Especially when companies and financial firms are already in retreat.

Alexia Kelly, managing director of the Carbon Policy and Markets Initiative at High Tide Foundation, says the business case just doesn’t add up. Relying on companies to act because “it’s the right thing to do,” rather than articulating a “compelling reason to spend millions or billions of dollars,” simply won’t cut it, she said.

“Businesses are generally motivated to take action because it makes them money or it enhances their brand,” Kelly said. “We need to make it simple and compelling for companies to take action.”

Businesses are walking away from climate-related virtue-signaling. They can no longer justify or afford it.

Our SEC apparently had a moment of clarity last month and decided to remove that third reporting requirement – the one which said companies had to amend previous years’ disclosures via footnotes – because they realized we are not Europe, and it would never withstand a court challenge.

But in a further sign of the times and the increasing unpopularity of the entire NetZero push, not to mention mounting skepticism over the cost to businesses and consumers of questionable, strangling regulatory requirements and pressure from those same cranky GOP state types (as well as the difference in corporate accounting principles between the US and EU), it appears as if the SEC’s “rules” are morphing into…well…suggestions.

…It was expected that there would be multiple legal challenges to the rule from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as well as Republican controlled states. In order to draft a rule that could withstand the legal challenges, it is believed that the SEC has completely dropped Scope 3 reporting and made Scope 1 and Scope 2 voluntary, based on materiality. Materiality is based on the company’s decision as to whether something is relevant to the investors.

In the European Union, and other jurisdictions including China, materiality for sustainability disclosures is based on the double materiality standards. Double materiality is divided into two dimensions: impact materiality and financial materiality.

Generally, impact materiality is the short-, medium-, and long-term impacts a company has on people and the environment, which would influence the decisions of shareholders. These are environmental, social, and governance factors. Most notably, this includes climate change, GHG emissions, and other environmental concerns, even if they are not linked to the financial performance of the company.

Financial materiality is strictly about impacts on the profitability of a company. Examples include significant changes to a company’s revenue or expenses, major acquisitions or divestitures, and changes in accounting policies or estimates.

…Notably, the materiality standard in the U.S. uses the single materiality of financial. The use of financial materiality is rooted in several core legal principles, starting with fiduciary duty. Fiduciary duty is the responsibility a corporate director, officer, or fund manager owes to the investors and shareholders. The U.S. is a shareholder jurisdiction, meaning the only consideration that may be considered is making a profit for the investors and shareholders. Alternatively, the EU is a stakeholder jurisdiction. Stakeholder jurisdictions still consider the shareholders, but may also consider the interest of stakeholders like the community, employees, and the environment. This gives the company discretion to consider outside factors, like those found in impact materiality. In the US, impact materiality that does not cross over into financial materiality could be considered a breach of fiduciary duty.

There’s that ugly “fiduciary duty” again, ruining everything. The SEC couldn’t direct companies to account for every carbon molecule because it would be a breach of their fiduciary duty to provide a profit to their investors.

Don’t you know some dang red state AG would sue.

And oh, my gosh – are the believers ever bent out of shape about this whole thing blowing up.

S.E.C. to Approve New Climate Rules Far Weaker Than Originally Proposed

The rules, designed to inform investors of business risks from climate change, were rolled back amid opposition from the G.O.P., fossil fuel producers, farmers and others.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is expected on Wednesday to approve new rules detailing if and how public companies should disclose climate risks and how much greenhouse gas emissions they produce, but there are fewer demands on businesses than the original proposal made about two years ago.

The rules represent a step toward requiring corporations to inform investors of both their climate emissions, as well as the business risks that they face from floods, rising temperatures and weather disasters. An earlier and more all-encompassing proposal faced outspoken Republican backlash and opposition from a range of companies and industries, including fossil fuel producers.

The main difference: Under the original proposal, large companies would have been required to disclose not just planet-warming emissions from their own operations, but also emissions produced along what’s known as a company’s “value chain” — a term that encompasses everything from the parts or services bought from other suppliers, to the way that people who use the products ultimately dispose of them. Pollution created all along this value chain could add up.

Now, that requirement is gone.

FOILED AGAIN

Call a waahmbulance – it’s great.