The New Yorker:

Each month since last June has been the hottest on record. Amid this crisis, several big banks recently left the Climate Action 100+ group, reneging on their commitment to support the energy transition with their lending practices. In the financial and tech sectors, support for saving the Earth has stalled. What will it take to get it moving again?

By Bill McKibben

The morally right side doesn’t lose the crucial battles: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it does bend toward justice. We know that lesson too well, which may be a problem, in that it gives us undue confidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us that we need to cut carbon emissions by nearly fifty per cent by 2030 in order to have a chance of meeting the targets set in Paris in 2015—and 2030 is five years and nine months away. It’s not impossible. Progress is being made around the world—including in this country, where the provisions of the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act are beginning to kick in, and in China—but as a planet we’re still using more fossil fuel each year. That’s why the signs of backsliding in recent weeks are particularly painful: they come at precisely the moment when we need to be accelerating the transition to renewable power.

In February, several big financial institutions announced that they were leaving the Climate Action 100+ group, which many had joined following the Glasgow climate-change conference, in 2021, making broad but vague commitments to support an energy transition with their lending practices. They said that they would continue to work to reduce emissions, but reports have suggested that they may also have been trying to avoid the risk of lawsuits accusing them of E.S.G.ism—that is, caring about the environmental and social effects of their loans—or, worse, of woke capitalism.

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