they control the financial institutions

[OldRiverRat]

this is how green is going to be rammed down our throats. this rich don't care if it makes sense or not.

JPMorgan Chase Releases Carbon Reduction Targets for Paris-Aligned Financing Commitment

• Carbon CompassSM methodology outlines how the firm established its targets and will measure
• performance over time
• Annual ESG Report provides updates about the firm’s approach to help clients transition to a low-carbon economy
• Firm achieves operational carbon neutrality and establishes new operational goals

JPMorgan Chase today released comprehensive steps it is taking in its efforts to align its financing activities with the climate goals of the Paris Agreement. As part of its Paris-aligned financing commitment announced last fall, the firm has published 2030 carbon intensity targets for the Oil & Gas, Electric Power and Auto Manufacturing sectors. JPMorgan Chase also released its new Carbon CompassSM methodology that describes how the firm set its targets and how it will monitor progress over time.

“There must be collective ambition and cooperation by business and government to tackle climate change,” said Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase. “Setting our Paris-aligned targets is an important step toward accelerating the transition to a low-carbon economy and meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement. JPMorgan Chase is committed to doing its part by working with clients around the world to reduce emissions and by ensuring our own operations remain carbon neutral.”

A Commitment to Paris

JPMorgan Chase first announced its Paris-aligned financing commitment in October 2020, aiming to work with clients to drive near-term actions that help set a path for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. As part of this effort, JPMorgan Chase also created the Center for Carbon Transition to engage with clients on sustainability-focused financing, research and advisory solutions.

More recently, the firm’s Commercial Banking business launched a Green Economy specialized industry team to support the development and growth of companies in Renewable Energy, Efficiency Technology, Sustainable Finance, and Agriculture and Food Technology. To help our clients access capital needed for innovation, JPMorgan Chase announced in April 2021 a target to finance and facilitate more than $2.5 trillion over 10 years - including $1 trillion for green activities - to advance long-term solutions that address climate change and contribute to sustainable development.

Carbon CompassSM Methodology and Targets

JPMorgan Chase has built Carbon CompassSM, a methodology that guides its approach for Paris-aligned target setting, measuring clients’ carbon intensity, evaluating ongoing progress and integrating carbon performance considerations into business decision-making. The targets are based on credible third-party energy and emissions scenarios, including the International Energy Agency’s Sustainable Development Scenario.

To challenge and enhance the firm’s efforts in creating Carbon CompassSM, JPMorgan Chase enlisted the support of ERM, a global sustainability consultancy with deep sectoral, technical and business expertise in the low-carbon economy transition.

Key aspects of JPMorgan Chase’s approach and its portfolio targets, established against a 2019 baseline, include:

Auto Manufacturing:

• 2030 target: 41% reduction in the carbon intensity from manufacturing of new vehicles, and tailpipe emissions from such vehicles.
o Covers global manufacturers of light duty vehicles, such as global passenger cars and U.S. light trucks. The firm will work with clients to help accelerate the transition to electric vehicles, and over time, quantify and address emissions from the automotive supply chain.
Electric Power:

• 2030 target: 69% reduction in carbon intensity from electric power generation, which accounts for the vast majority of the sector’s climate impact.
o Covers companies engaged in power generation. The firm will work to accelerate the power sector’s shift to low- and zero-carbon sources, like solar and wind, to help reduce emissions from electricity grids globally.
Oil & Gas:

• 2030 target: 35% reduction in operational carbon intensity, as well as a 15% reduction in end-use carbon intensity – reflecting a decrease in emissions from the combustion of oil & natural gas downstream and increase in renewable energy generation.
o Covers producers of oil & natural gas, as well as refiners and integrated companies. The firm intends to work with clients to address methane leakage and flaring activity, in addition to encouraging shifts to renewable electricity to reduce operational emissions. JPMorgan Chase will also work with clients to address end-use emissions, including by shifting to lower-carbon fuels and exploring other business diversification strategies.

“JPMorgan Chase is leading the way for the banking industry by developing and transparently sharing a practical methodology which tackles key challenges, such as the urgency of reducing methane emissions in the oil and gas sector, and the prominence of light duty trucks in the non-commercial U.S. fleet,” said Keryn James, CEO of ERM. “They have embraced the enormous opportunity for the banking industry to finance the transition to a low-carbon economy and provided clarity to their corporate clients on credible decarbonization trajectories.”

Over time, the firm intends to integrate additional sectors into its Paris-aligned financing commitment. As a next step, JPMorgan Chase is analyzing target setting for the Aviation and Pulp & Paper sectors by the end of 2022.

“We have carefully chosen our targets and put the resources in place to help our clients transition to a low-carbon world,” said Ashley Bacon, Chief Risk Officer, JPMorgan Chase. “Our Carbon CompassSM methodology creates incentives to deliver capital and advice to our global clients for the purpose of improving carbon efficiency, to help put us on a path to net zero.”

Measurement and Reporting

The firm’s 2020 ESG report, which was released today, provides updates on how environmental, social and governance matters are considered in the way JPMorgan Chase manages its business, as well as how the firm is putting its business to work for its stakeholders. This includes information about the firm’s approach to managing climate-related risks and opportunities, which has been informed by the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD).

[OldRiverRat]

The agenda is being pushed by many of the biggest names in finance, including major banks, investment houses, and wealth managers. If successful, the financial institutions’ agenda would create a two-tiered economy, with the “woke” class slated for preferential treatment and dissenters relegated to picking up the scraps, the experts said.

“Woke” in this sense refers to a set of progressive views that have dominated establishment circles in government, academia, and the corporate world.

The companies are promising they will give preferential treatment to clients that run their operations in a “sustainable” manner.



Banks’ Climate Pledges Would Downgrade Non-Woke Businesses to 2nd-Tier Economy, Experts Say
BY PETR SVAB May 19, 2021 Updated: May 19, 2021biggersmaller Print
News Analysis

Businesses seeking financing may soon face a flurry of requirements that will, in effect, determine whether they are “woke” enough to be approved by financial institutions for loans or investment.

While the requirements are presented as goodwill toward the downtrodden and the environment, they are underpinned by an ideology with totalitarian tendencies, according to several experts on totalitarianism and market economy.

The agenda is being pushed by many of the biggest names in finance, including major banks, investment houses, and wealth managers. If successful, the financial institutions’ agenda would create a two-tiered economy, with the “woke” class slated for preferential treatment and dissenters relegated to picking up the scraps, the experts said.

“Woke” in this sense refers to a set of progressive views that have dominated establishment circles in government, academia, and the corporate world.

The companies are promising they will give preferential treatment to clients that run their operations in a “sustainable” manner. That means clients will have to implement policies that, in the banks’ view, reduce carbon emissions or promote a number of other goals, such as “gender equality” and “racial equity.” Clients that don’t support carbon reductions should face penalties such as “exclusion” and “divestment,” according to the guidelines of the United Nations-backed Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which counts dozens of major banks among its members.

Many scientists predict that unless carbon emissions are drastically cut, the planet will get warmer and experience more severe natural disasters, such as flooding and droughts. Other scientists question such catastrophic climate predictions, which hold a poor track record of coming true.

But the implications of the climate agenda that have prompted such concerns have little to do with the effects of global warming.

Pragmatically, the financiers’ agenda aligns with the policies of the Biden administration, giving them an opportunity to capture some of the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that the president promises to bankroll. At the same time, they can try to influence the setting up of the regulatory framework, making sure it benefits them, rather than newcomers.

After all, banking executives have a fiduciary duty to bring profit to shareholders, even if the profits are backed by government intervention, according to Peter Klein, Baylor University entrepreneurship professor and research fellow at the libertarian Mises Institute.

“If they can do so by taking advantage of the regulatory system, by taking advantage of the legal system … why wouldn’t they do that?” he told The Epoch Times.

Some experts have warned that if the investment push fails, it could end up in a colossal bailout—another transfer of wealth to corporations from taxpayers.

Yet, such an agenda poses even more fundamental risks, as it requires assent to an ideology that is, in essence, totalitarian, scholars have pointed out.

Two-Tiered Economy
Advocates of freedom usually warn against the government’s attempts at central planning. But “it’s not just government officials who have the planner’s mentality,” Klein points out. “It can often be top executives as well.

“In government, but, of course, also in private sector, you have sort of a cadre of elite decision-makers who view themselves as being better positioned to make important decisions than other market participants,” he said.

In fact, economist Friedrich Hayek predicted that monopolistic corporations would be first to take on the task of planning the economy under growing opposition to free-market competition.

“The universal struggle against competition promises to produce in the first instance something in many respects even worse. A state of affairs which can satisfy neither planners nor [free market] liberals, a sort of syndicalist or corporative organization of industry in which competition is more or less suppressed, but planning is left in the hands of the independent monopolies of the separate industries,” he wrote in his 1943 book “The Road to Serfdom.”

“This is the inevitable first result of a situation in which the people are united in their hostility to competition, but agree on little else. By destroying competition in industry after industry, this policy puts the consumer at the mercy of the joint monopolist action of capitalists and workers in their best-organized industries.

“Once this stage is reached, the only alternative to a return to competition is the control of the monopolies by the state. A control which, if it is to be made effective, must become progressively more complete and more detailed.”

This is “an apt characterization of where the economy stands today,” according to Michael Rectenwald, retired liberal studies professor at New York University and an authority on corporate socialism—a convergence of government and business interests in establishing a form of totalitarian, socialist rule.

“Notice that this consortium of banks and asset management firms, the largest in the world, aims ‘to boost private clean-tech finance and press polluting industries that use their services to cut emissions.’ That is, they will use their financial power to squeeze non-compliant producers out of existence by virtue of directing investments toward favored reset partners,” he said in an email, referring to the “Great Reset” toward “a fairer, greener future” proposed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) and its head, Klaus Schwab.

“This financial stranglehold over industries will consolidate the economic status of favored producers and strengthen their monopolization over production and distribution,” Rectenwald said. “The measures will also trickle down to the consumption of end-users, whose carbon emissions will be reduced by default. They won’t have any say about driving gasoline-powered vehicles, because such vehicles will not be produced and gasoline will no longer be available.

“The objective is to curtail the mobility and consumption of the vast majority and reduce them to captives of the Great Reset agenda.”

While the financiers may not be able to completely eliminate non-compliant businesses, “the planners are creating a two-tiered system, with preferred producers/distributors on top and the non-woke producers/distributors beneath them,” he said.

“This is a static hierarchy and will lead to stagnation and likely the need for the state to intervene even more than it is doing already,” he said. “Interestingly, it is the socialists who, in their disdain for competition, aid and abet the formation of monopolies and a static economic hierarchy. The elimination of a thriving middle class is always the road to serfdom.”

Klein acknowledged that what we see now is “not exactly 1940s-style industrial planning.”

“But it’s in the same spirit,” he said.

Despite the complaints about crony capitalism today, “the Great Reset, social responsibility, and stakeholder models [currently advocated by many large corporations] run the risk of getting us even more cronyism than we have now,” he said.

Freedom Argument
The argument that it’s better, necessary, or even inevitable to consciously direct the economy isn’t new. It has been particularly prominent in the past 100 years and usually promoted by socialists of different stripes.

“There’s always been a sense among certain segment[s] of society that unplanned sounds primitive, sounds wild and crazy,” Klein said.

This notion goes back at least to Karl Marx, co-author of the Communist Manifesto, who described socialism as “socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature,” in his Das Kapital.

Yet, the notion stems from a misunderstanding of the price system in the free market, Klein said.

“Proponents of central planning … claim that defenders of certain market-based systems assume that every individual is very well informed and forward-looking and is always going to make the right decision and so forth. That isn’t the argument at all. The argument is that there’s very deep uncertainty about what is the right thing to do,” he said.

The free marketers’ distributed knowledge premise is that among the myriad decisions that individuals make, at least some of them will be right. The solution that actually works will attract the attention of other market participants, allowing the economy to adapt.

“You want a system in which lots of different people can try lots of different things, everyone is motivated to use his or her knowledge to the best of their abilities because they personally reap the benefits and bear the costs of the actions that they undertake,” he said.

Pushing economic decision-making down to the smallest unit of an individual or a family also limits the negative impact of any single wrong choice.

“A decentralized market system limits the harm mistakes can impose whereas in a centralized system small mistakes can have huge harmful effects,” Klein explained.

Positing climate change as a crisis that justifies economic intervention isn’t enough of a saving grace, according to James Taylor, president of The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank skeptical about catastrophic climate predictions.

At the very least, he said, it should be up for a vote, not pushed from the top.

“Believing strongly that something bad will happen does not justify subverting the democratic process, does not justify taking away people’s rights without at least giving people the right to defend them through the democratic political process,” he told The Epoch Times.

The institution of a corporation itself is a product of government bestowing “certain benefits and protections” on such entities, he argued.

“If they were solely creatures of the economy, then I would agree … that we should leave them alone. But again, these are created with the assistance of the government power and now they’re being used to impose political agendas on American citizens. That’s very troubling,” he said, noting that “this is the very type of unaccountable authoritarianism that the left used to always be concerned about.”

Environmental efforts don’t necessarily need to conflict with prosperity, Taylor says.

It was exactly its prosperity that allowed America to develop new, cleaner technologies that have helped cut air and water pollution by more than half over the past 40 years, he noted.

“When you have a wealthy economy, then you’re able to afford to have policies that are very helpful for the environment,” he said.

Update: The article’s headline has been updated.

[txpitdog]

This is much much larger than the Biden Administration. I’ve sat in webinars and global forums hosted by Capital Link, Det Norske Veritas, American Bureau of Shipping, International Chamber of Shipping, The World Bank, and others. The momentum behind this is waaaaaaaaaaaay bigger than a single country or single administration. Even under Trump ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute began pushing for a carbon tax.

As I’ve said before, it no longer matters if climate change is real. The money and innovation and demand are ALL racing forward as though it is. It will create a new economy, and governments and companies are all positioning themselves to surf the tidal wave of new revenue and power instead of being destroyed by it.

We are beginning to see instances of resistance emerge. Texas’ state run retirement funding will divest from any company that takes an activist role against oil and gas. Biden has been criticized for the obvious gap in his climate plan that requires environmentally destructive strip mining to support the rare earth metals needed for electrification. The LNG industry has ramped up its advocacy as the only realistic alternative fuel. Round 1 went to the pro-decarbonization team. Now the other side is regrouping and preparing to make a stand. It will be interesting, but follow the money and technology closely. There’s going to be a crap load of wealth generated from all this, and strategically times investments will pay off big.

[TeamAmerica]

Perception is reality indeed. Who cares if China uses slave and child labor to build solar panels. Who cares if lithium has to be mined from the ground. Just stop burning coal and fossil fuels and our great grandchildren will be rich!

[txpitdog]

I think this is a worthwhile read. It is a scathing rebuttal to ESG as an investment basis and shows that while the momentum is already overwhelming, there is strong resistance beginning to be organized. One other thing to keep an eye out for around Jan/Feb of each year is the global greenhouse gas emissions inventory and (claimed) increase in global temperature. 2020 was a write off. 2021 is as well, since it’s all focused on economic recovery. But as each year’s emissions stray further and further from the so-called required trajectory for decarbonization by 2050, the alarmism will increase, and technology development will become a major investment focus. The wildcard is reports like the one linked below and the reality/futility of transforming all of mankind away from fossil fuels and towards technology that doesn’t yet exist.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/docs/2021/rupert_darwall_capitalism_socialism_and_esg_may_2021.pdf

[OldRiverRat]

The winners in all of this will will be china. They go to bed every night laughing.


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[Johnny44]

Me Chinese me play joke me put pee-pee in your coke

[4wheels]

The billionaire class is also using investment companies to influence various corporate boards to go green. Exxon is spending a bunch on green junk because the shareholders are demanding it. But the shareholders are the big investment companies that have the billion dollar holdings that are pushing this.

One company is called Blackstone Group Inc. This company is buying massive shares and even taking over companies. They are using their influence to force companies to spend money on green junk. Why would a pipeline company purchase solar power? Do pipelines work at night? How do they work without power?

This junk is being pushed by George sorros and his ilk.