Latest news with #ClimateBacktracker
Mint
09-07-2025
- Business
- Mint
The Paranjpe paradox: Sustainability in an era of shareholder scrutiny
Nitin Paranjpe, Chairman of Hindustan Unilever (HUL), articulates a sentiment echoed by many leaders of global corporations: the pressing need for environmentally responsible growth. Addressing shareholders at HUL's 92nd AGM, Paranjpe spelt it out in unambiguous words: 'While the government is taking significant steps, 'India Inc. must play a crucial role in ensuring this growth is inclusive and environmentally responsible". Laudable and unquestionable as the sentiment is, it flies in the face of multiple external realities. Unilever's own journey offers a stark illustration. A decade-long pursuit of sustainable growth, championed initially by former CEO Paul Polman and continued by his successor Alan Jope, has been considerably diluted. The primary force behind the retreat is the resistance from US investors, who collectively own almost half of the company and increasingly viewed sustainability initiatives as a drain on financial returns. Under Hein Schumacher, who replaced Jope in July 2023, there's been a sharp cut-down on many of the goals the company had set for itself. That includes, as Bloomberg reported in an April 2024 piece, previous commitments to halving its use of virgin plastics by 2025 with a fresh target of cutting it to one-third by 2026. The company also dropped other pledges like ensuring 100% biodegradable ingredients by 2030, slashing food waste in its operations by half by 2025 and a commitment that 5% of the workforce would be made up of people with disabilities by the same year. Schumacher's concern has been shoring up the company's flagging performance. A hefty rise in its market cap since he took over suggests that shareholders believe refocusing on financials, away from sustainability, is the right way. Unilever isn't the only company to play down the mantra of sustainable growth. In a reversal of earlier commitments to 'Net Zero' by 2050 and other climate goals, oil majors like BP and Shell, have scaled back investments in renewable energy and are pivoting to increased production of fossil fuels. While the oil and gas sector has a long history of climate scepticism, even consumer giants like Nestle and Coca-Cola have diluted earlier plans of reducing their use of plastic. Political pressures in the US do account for a part of the reversal. But there's also some justification for it. The money spent on sustainability initiatives doesn't guarantee immediate or even foreseeable returns, making it difficult for executives to justify such investments to their shareholders. It's a role that responsible governments were expected to take on. Instead, the US government seems to be going after all major policies that were put in place to counter the deleterious effects of the climate crisis. The Climate Backtracker by the Columbia Law School lists dozens of steps taken by the Trump-Vance administration to scale back or wholly eliminate federal climate mitigation and adaptation measures. Thus, in June, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced plans to rescind the Roadless Rule, which prohibited road construction, reconstruction, and timber harvest on National Forest System lands. Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill also proposes drastic rollbacks in existing tax credits for renewable energy projects. Mercifully, the Indian government is no climate-denier though it's some stretch from being called 'inclusive and environmentally responsible". Despite a steady upward trend over the last few years, India is still ranked 99th out of 167 countries on environmentally sustainable growth, according to the Sustainable Development Report 2025. While breaking into the top 100 for the first time is being hailed, much of that is owed to the country's success in poverty reduction (one of major goals of SDG), itself a contested claim. More worrying is that on the parameter of 'Climate action", India's score has actually declined, with the report recommending 'urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts." In particular, the report flagged 'CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustions and cement production", as an area of concern. With countries like the US, India and notably China, which is the world's largest climate polluter contributing nearly 30 percent of global emissions, dragging their feet, all bets on saving the earth from itself are currently off. According to the World Meteorological Organization, as of May 2025, global climate indicators show continued warming trends, with the world experiencing its second-warmest May on record. This summer, parts of India recorded some of the lowest average maximum temperatures in the last 100 years, marking a significant departure from historical trends. Clearly, pious pronouncements from corporate boardrooms and the halting steps of governments are not enough to mitigate the relentless march of climate change. Until the economic incentives for environmental responsibility align with the imperative of our planet, the chatter around sustainable growth will remain mere rhetoric, a green facade for a world rapidly warming.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Earth Day 2025: How the Trump administration's policies will impact global decarbonization
The actions of President Donald Trump's administration will significantly decelerate the race to decarbonize economies around the world, according to energy and climate change experts. Since taking office in January, Trump has signed several executive orders aiming to dismantle climate action in the U.S. While these actions have spurred uncertainty in the environmental community, they won't cause global efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions to come to a screeching halt, the experts said. MORE: How Trump's executive order on coal could impact energy use in the US This is how these policies will affect America's international standing in the climate fight and the collective aim to reach a carbon net-zero economy, according to the experts: In the four months since Trump took office for his second term, he has declared an energy crisis in the U.S.; removed the U.S. from the Paris Agreement for the second time; increased timber production in national forests and expanded the mining and use of coal in the U.S. Trump's administration has rolled back dozens of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations aimed at protecting the environment; laid off hundreds of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and removed mentions of climate change from public websites. Last week, Trump issued executive orders to protect "American energy from state overreach." These orders contain language that could block enforcement of state and local laws that are obstacles to production or use of coal, oil, natural gas, hydropower, geothermal, biofuel and nuclear energy and potentially withdraw regulations that affect energy projects and the environment. The Department of the Interior also announced a new offshore leasing plan on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf last week. "It's past time to phase out offshore drilling and oil spills, not make way for more," Rachel Mathews, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement to ABC News. "It's clear that oil and gas doesn't mix with a clean and safe ocean environment." The "Climate Backtracker," a database by Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change that tracks steps taken by the Trump administration to scale back or eliminate federal climate mitigation and adaption measures, lists nearly 100 actions taken since Jan. 9. MORE: These are the impacts some scientists fear most from EPA deregulation Trump's actions are largely shrouded in the idea of lessening American dependence on the rest of the world. "We have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it," Trump said during his inauguration speech in January. "We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it." But these executive orders could significantly slow down global progress on reaching their net-zero goals -- something individual countries are already struggling with, experts told ABC News. Countries around the globe, including some of the biggest emitters, have made ambitious goals to decarbonize their economies in the coming decades. China is aiming to get its economy to net-zero, or a carbon neutral impact, by 2060. India has pledged to reach net-zero by 2070. Brazil, the host of the 30th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP30, has promised to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 -- as has the U.S., under the Biden administration. While no one country is on track to meet those goals, the momentum in the climate fight seen in recent years, spurred domestically by the Biden administration, has now been reversed, Frances Colon, senior fellow of international climate at the Center for American Progress, told ABC News. But as the top historical emitter of greenhouse gases, the U.S. should be among the countries setting an example for the rest of the world to decarbonize while helping smaller, poorer countries achieve net-zero goals as well, according to the United Nations. The U.S. is responsible for 20% of the carbon dioxide emissions released since 1850, according to Carbon Brief, a climate science database. The next-highest historical emitters are China at 11%; Russia at 7%; Brazil at 5% and Indonesia at 4%. Europe has been the global leader of transitioning its energy sectors to renewables, while China has been the leader of clean tech, Noah Kaufman, a senior researcher at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, told ABC News. The lost momentum will send the U.S. lagging even further behind, which will result in missed opportunities for Americans to save on their energy bills and for American-based firms to profit from the development of clean tech, David Victor, a professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California San Diego, told ABC News. MORE: Why the Trump administration is wrong about an energy crisis in the US, according to experts Trump's policies, especially the ones targeting renewable energy, may be the GOP's last hurrah to bring fossil fuels back to the forefront, Michael Lenox, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, told ABC News. Eventually, major technological shifts in a number of core industries will cause markets to take over and force economies to adopt clean energy, according to Lenox. "I don't think the momentum has stopped," Victor said. "I think the federal policy is in chaos right now." The transition from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles is already happening on a large scale in several countries. In Norway, nearly 90% of new car sales are EVs. More than 50% of new car sales in China are EVs. Once the cost of EVs begins to drop lower than internal combustion vehicles, the U.S., which has been lagging behind the rest of the world in EV sales, will likely start to catch up, Lenox said. The adoption of renewable energy for a host of sectors that are harder to decarbonize, like the production of steel and cement, will eventually lead to the end of utilization of fossil fuels to power those supply chains as well, Lenox said. "Clean energy investments are outpacing fossil fuel investments two-to-one globally," Colon said. China is among the countries leading the technologies that are going to allow for decarbonization, the experts said. "They have made huge investments in battery technology, EVs, solar and wind, and basically own the supply chain of especially the kind of upstream part of things like batteries," Lenox said. While the Trump administration may be trying to bring coal, gas and oil back to the forefront of energy sources, it's not likely to happen, the experts said. Increasing production and flooding the market with excess supply will cause prices to go down -- something the fossil fuel industry wants to avoid. "The reality is, a lot of this stuff makes sense commercially, and that continues forward," Victor said. Earth Day 2025: How the Trump administration's policies will impact global decarbonization originally appeared on
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Earth Day 2025: How the Trump administration's policies will impact global decarbonization
The actions of President Donald Trump's administration will significantly decelerate the race to decarbonize economies around the world, according to energy and climate change experts. Since taking office in January, Trump has signed several executive orders aiming to dismantle climate action in the U.S. While these actions have spurred uncertainty in the environmental community, they won't cause global efforts to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions to come to a screeching halt, the experts said. MORE: How Trump's executive order on coal could impact energy use in the US This is how these policies will affect America's international standing in the climate fight and the collective aim to reach a carbon net-zero economy, according to the experts: In the four months since Trump took office for his second term, he has declared an energy crisis in the U.S.; removed the U.S. from the Paris Agreement for the second time; increased timber production in national forests and expanded the mining and use of coal in the U.S. Trump's administration has rolled back dozens of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations aimed at protecting the environment; laid off hundreds of employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and removed mentions of climate change from public websites. Last week, Trump issued executive orders to protect "American energy from state overreach." These orders contain language that could block enforcement of state and local laws that are obstacles to production or use of coal, oil, natural gas, hydropower, geothermal, biofuel and nuclear energy and potentially withdraw regulations that affect energy projects and the environment. The Department of the Interior also announced a new offshore leasing plan on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf last week. "It's past time to phase out offshore drilling and oil spills, not make way for more," Rachel Mathews, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement to ABC News. "It's clear that oil and gas doesn't mix with a clean and safe ocean environment." The "Climate Backtracker," a database by Columbia University's Sabin Center for Climate Change that tracks steps taken by the Trump administration to scale back or eliminate federal climate mitigation and adaption measures, lists nearly 100 actions taken since Jan. 9. MORE: These are the impacts some scientists fear most from EPA deregulation Trump's actions are largely shrouded in the idea of lessening American dependence on the rest of the world. "We have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it," Trump said during his inauguration speech in January. "We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it." But these executive orders could significantly slow down global progress on reaching their net-zero goals -- something individual countries are already struggling with, experts told ABC News. Countries around the globe, including some of the biggest emitters, have made ambitious goals to decarbonize their economies in the coming decades. China is aiming to get its economy to net-zero, or a carbon neutral impact, by 2060. India has pledged to reach net-zero by 2070. Brazil, the host of the 30th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP30, has promised to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 -- as has the U.S., under the Biden administration. While no one country is on track to meet those goals, the momentum in the climate fight seen in recent years, spurred domestically by the Biden administration, has now been reversed, Frances Colon, senior fellow of international climate at the Center for American Progress, told ABC News. But as the top historical emitter of greenhouse gases, the U.S. should be among the countries setting an example for the rest of the world to decarbonize while helping smaller, poorer countries achieve net-zero goals as well, according to the United Nations. The U.S. is responsible for 20% of the carbon dioxide emissions released since 1850, according to Carbon Brief, a climate science database. The next-highest historical emitters are China at 11%; Russia at 7%; Brazil at 5% and Indonesia at 4%. Europe has been the global leader of transitioning its energy sectors to renewables, while China has been the leader of clean tech, Noah Kaufman, a senior researcher at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, told ABC News. The lost momentum will send the U.S. lagging even further behind, which will result is missed opportunities for Americans to save on their energy bills and for American-based firms to profit from the development of clean tech, David Victor, a professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California San Diego, told ABC News. MORE: Why the Trump administration is wrong about an energy crisis in the US, according to experts Trump's policies, especially the ones targeting renewable energy, may be the GOP's last hurrah to bring fossil fuels back to the forefront, Michael Lenox, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, told ABC News. Eventually, major technological shifts in a number of core industries will cause markets to take over and force economies to adopt clean energy, according to Lenox. "I don't think the momentum has stopped," Victor said. "I think the federal policy is in chaos right now." The transition from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles is already happening on a large scale in several countries. In Norway, nearly 90% of new car sales are EVs. More than 50% of new car sales in China are EVs. Once the cost of EVs begins to drop lower than internal combustion vehicles, the U.S., which has been lagging behind the rest of the world in EV sales, will likely start to catch up, Lenox said. The adoption of renewable energy for a host of sectors that are harder to decarbonize, like the production of steel and cement, will eventually lead to the end of utilization of fossil fuels to power those supply chains as well, Lenox said. "Clean energy investments are outpacing fossil fuel investments two-to-one globally," Colon said. China is among the countries leading the technologies that are going to allow for decarbonization, the experts said. "They have made huge investments in battery technology, EVs, solar and wind, and basically own the supply chain of especially the kind of upstream part of things like batteries," Lenox said. While the Trump administration may be trying to bring coal, gas and oil back to the forefront of energy sources, it's not likely to happen, the experts said. Increasing production and flooding the market with excess supply will cause prices to go down -- something the fossil fuel industry wants to avoid. "The reality is, a lot of this stuff makes sense commercially, and that continues forward," Victor said. Earth Day 2025: How the Trump administration's policies will impact global decarbonization originally appeared on
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Sanity Check After Trump's First Week Back in Office
IF YOU EXPECTED THE SECOND SEASON of Donald Trump: Dictator-President to start off with doom and gloom, you were right. There was plenty to agonize about. But to my surprise, there were also other types of moments—encouraging, inspirational, even funny. Smiles? Hope? In the middle of this mess that's going to hurt so many people, derail so many lives, and, if we fail, erase the country we know and very much want to keep? Yup. To be clear, Trump himself was not a source of light, by his words or, especially, his actions. But at least he hasn't totally blotted out the sun. Yet. As we embark on Week Two, here are some of the people and moments that got me through Week One: • Marc Elias, the Democracy Docket lawyer who fights for voting rights, created a list of '10 things we can all do to protect democracy.' He's constructive about what to do and not do if you think Democrats aren't meeting the moment, and using your own personal 'town square,' be it the book club, the dinner table, or social media, to have difficult conversations. He won't stand for cynicism, and any cheer he offers is well grounded. One surprising suggestion: Believe in the courts. The Supreme Court handles relatively few cases, 'and in some of those, the Court has sided with democracy,' Elias says. And it's not the only court. As he said on a podcast last week, 'Look at the voting cases that I litigated. Look at the record, and then tell me the courts don't matter.' Elias also urged Americans not to accept Trump's bravado about his powers to do things like cancel the constitutional right to birthright citizenship via executive order. Later the same day, underscoring his point, a federal judge in Seattle—a Ronald Reagan appointee—called that order 'blatantly unconstitutional' and temporarily blocked it. • Amid an opening tsunami of anti-science moves, I was thrilled to see that the Silencing Science Tracker is back, accompanied by the Climate Backtracker and the Inflation Reduction Act Tracker. Information and data will be key to documenting setbacks, setting priorities, and jump-starting a recovery. The real-time record of science degradation in the first Trump administration helped us emerge from that dark age during the Biden administration, and we can do it again. Lists. We need lists. And—thanks in this case to Columbia Law School's Sabin Center and its partners—we will have them. • On Day Four of Trump the sequel, Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to Elon Musk—the real leader of a fake department to cut government spending—and offered thirty ideas she said would save least $2 trillion (his original ten-year goal). They include negotiating better defense contracts, cracking down on health insurers who commit Medicare fraud, expanding Medicare price negotiations, closing tax loopholes for the wealthy, and fully funding the IRS to catch tax cheats. Makes sense, right? But Musk, Trump, and the GOP won't be on board for much if any of that. They've been trying to protect corporations and wealthy Americans from IRS audits and higher taxes. As for contracts, Musk's SpaceX company alone has received at least $21 billion in government contracts since its 2002 founding and would win tens or hundreds of billions more if the United States embarks on a mission to Mars. Let us help you prioritize what's important in the news while filtering out the noise. Sign up for a free or paid subscription today: This was not Warren's first shock-and-awe missive to a friend of Trump. On January 16, she sent health secretary hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a 34-page letter with 175 questions she wants him to answer. I often quote her description of herself as a tennis student who kept hitting balls 'over fences, over hedges, over buildings. Once I had a weapon in my hand, I gave it everything I had.' She'll get her chance to question RFK Jr. on Wednesday. Two words, senator: Bring it. • The disorienting disruptions of the first week triggered a heartening rush of creativity, wit, and speed. When Trump & Co. disappeared the website, which had information on medication abortion, emergency care, abortion access, coverage, and privacy rights, the Skimm found it in the Internet Archive and republished the site a day later. A small band of volunteers started a similar backup effort when, after Trump pardoned the January 6th rioters who stormed the Capitol, including those who assaulted police, information about their cases started vanishing from the Department of Justice website. And to make sure people know about Capitol rioters living near them, writer, comedian, and radio host Dean Obeidallah proposed that states 'enact laws to create a 'Jan. 6 Registry' in the same vein that a registry for sex offenders was established under Megan's Law.' • When Trump set up a snitch line for people to tattle on colleagues they suspected of doing 'disguised' DEI work, writer Craig Calcaterra posted a satirical email to the snitch line, reporting suspicious hires 'put in their positions solely because of their race and/or gender despite the fact that they are wholly unqualified for their jobs and, in some cases, have criminal records'—namely Trump, Musk, RFK Jr., JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Stephen Miller. He ends with a plea to 'Please drain the swamp!' This was a couple of days before Trump told World Economic Forum attendees that he would 'once again turn America into a merit-based country.' Eye-roll emoji here. • Trump's scientific ignorance was an irresistible target, starting with his repeated assertions that in America, now that he's in charge, there would be only two genders, male and female. His executive order on the subject inspired a Mashable story by science writer Amanda Yeo headlined, 'Did Trump's executive order just make everyone in the U.S. female?' She notes that n attempting to sidestep a definition of sex based on chromosomes, Trump's order instead defines 'female' as the sex that 'at conception . . . produces the large reproductive cell'—a definition that could be understood to include all embryos. 'All Americans are now AFBT (assigned female by Trump).' Oops. Also, Trump apparently never heard of an intersex person. • Speaking of inspiration, the serious kind that involves sticking to principles, it came from many sources over the past week. Among them: Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., who asked Trump as he sat before her in the National Cathedral 'to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,' then refused to apologize when he later erupted. The nearly unanimous Costco shareholder vote Thursday to keep the company's DEI program, which the board had argued—strongly and in detail—was good for business. And Capitol rioter Pamela Hemphill, who spent sixty days in jail after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge, pointedly refused Trump's pardon. Why? 'I pleaded guilty because I was guilty. I don't want to be a part of contributing to them trying to rewrite history.' Share The Bulwark To be honest, the whole time I was writing up this list of distractions from the main event, reality kept intruding. A Democratic senator turning out to be a lifelong RFK Jr. friend and possible vote for him. A report that Trump, on a 'fiery' January 15 call with Denmark's prime minister, aggressively insisted he needed to control Greenland. The 51–50 Senate vote that gave us an incompetent, misogynist defense secretary with a drinking problem who committed firing offenses while in the military. The debut of the Logoff, a Vox publication designed to limit the space Trump takes up in your head, that lodged him in my head for hours with this headline in the first edition I received: 'A major blow to police reform.' Trump firing at least a dozen inspectors general—the independent watchdogs Congress created to keep federal agencies honest—in a possibly illegal Friday-night massacre. As a hailstorm of executive orders began raining down on America, I literally thought, what can I do to escape this? The answer that came to me was very strange: Go clean out your spice rack. So I did. And discovered that, judging from the sell-by date on a rusted tin of red pepper, I hadn't done a ruthless spice-rack purge since 1984. In the end, there were twenty-two spice tins and jars to recycle. It was cleansing, I admit. It felt good. For about fifteen minutes. What turned out to be more helpful was a sampler-worthy phrase from Greg Dworkin, a friend and retired pediatrician who writes for Daily Kos. 'Rage is motivational,' he told me. Yes it is! So is FOMO, and I'm going to embrace both. As 'recovering lawyer' George Conway put it (and later assured me he was serious), 'I think I'm going to get back into the practice of law. Seems like a lot of fun litigation is erupting, and I don't want to miss out.' That's the right attitude. This is a terrible moment, but it's also a historic and challenging one. We can't avoid it and we shouldn't try to. Even if we occasionally have an inexplicable compulsion to put a blanket over our head, move to another country, or dive into a household chore we've put off for forty years. Share this post with someone you think might do well to take a few minutes to assess the contents of their spice rack. Share
