Danielle Fugere, a shareholder advocacy nonprofit, said it is a prerequisite for keeping your bank at climate goals when you wear so clothes. “I want to understand what they’re doing,” she said. Laws like California reveal the financial instability brought about by fossil fuel-driven climate change, and at least in theory, in light of future funding that exacerbate it.
Of course, simply requiring banks to disclose emissions and climate-related risks would not prevent the worst impacts of global warming. According to Landmarks 2021 Report If the International Energy Agency limits global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), new oil, gas and coal infrastructure cannot be built. That’s why Patrick McCully, a senior energy transition analyst at Reclaim Finance, a French nonprofit advocate for a more sustainable banking sector, said lawmakers should “promote banks to cut fossil fuel funds.”
“These companies are acting against the interests of humanity, so we need to stop them,” he told Grist.
However, Fajans-Turner said policies of this nature are difficult to write in law, and even the most progressive states are likely to face legal challenges, even in the most progressive states, even in the case of a new construction natural gas ban. He was retaken by industry groups.
Ann Lipton, a business law professor at Tulane University, said a better way for policymakers to limit new fossil fuel projects is to look beyond the banking sector. For example, lawmakers can require insurers to take climate-related financial risks into consideration when designing insurance contracts. “We want banks to stop funding risky activities, but at the end of the day, the bank’s job is to fund something predictable and profitable,” she said. “It’s the rest of society’s work to make it [thing] It’s not beneficial. ”
Another strategy is to require banks to publish clear decarbonization plans. In theory it could be a kind of backdoor to block new fossil fuel investments. “Being implicit about having a target means that the bank is taking some action to ensure that it meets that target,” Hughelle said. If the plan mentions “net zero” on a particular date, it must involve some kind of scaling of fossil fuel financing to be reliable. If you claim to be tailored to a route to limit global warming to 1.5°C, you should not allow for fossil fuel expansion.