The last weeks have brought clear evidence of the dismantling of global climate governance, driven mainly by the performance of the new US government.
Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) has announced a “break” in its activities to consult its members regarding the convenience of slowing down its internal rules, becoming only guidance and no longer direction.
As a result, the alliance created in 2021 with the support of the UN, which came to gather 140 of the world’s largest banks for the purpose of aligning global finances to the goal of zero net emissions, capitula before.
Meanwhile, in the US, a report commissioned by the Secretary of Energy from five divergent climate consensus scientists is used by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as the basis for reversing the 2009 jurisprudence, which legally recognizes the risks of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG).
In Brazil,, in force since 2006, the agreement prohibits the acquisition of soy produced in the Amazonian biome in deforested lands after 2008.
Both in the US and Brazil, the measures face judicial contestation. In the US, environmental groups processed the Department of Energy (DOE) and EPA for flagrant violations of the law that regulates advisory committees. One can anticipate a fierce and possibly long dispute in both cases.
The common element of the three cases – Nzba, EPA and soybean moratorium – is the state’s inability to provide solid legal basis to ensure emissions and deforestation control.
NZBA members have created internal rules to gradually reduce companies in their credit portfolios, supplying the lack of clear and one. Without legal support, they succumbed to attacks by prosecutors of republican states who accused them of formation of cartel, as there would be a collective and illegal decision to deny credit to the oil and gas sector, especially.
In the case of the soy moratorium, the accusation was also of cartelization. The initiative was a private agreement between exporters, born in 2006 under international pressure, as the Brazilian State does not guarantee. It should have become unnecessary from 2012, with the Forest Code, which established clear criteria for the occupation of the territory.
But the state failed to implement: Car (Rural Environmental Registry), an essential condition for the law, has never been effectively implemented, and the PRAs (Environmental Regularization Programs) did not advance. Thus, the moratorium, which should be temporary, became an indispensable instrument for the control of deforestation, but subject to contestations such as the current one.
Similarly, a specific law of the US Congress is lacking that clearly attributes powers to EPA to regulate GHG emissions. In the event of no, the agency supports the “Endangerment Finding”, an administrative act supported by the decision of the Supreme Court, but subject to judicial reinterpretations.
This absence of legal basis is not fortuitous: it follows from the resistance of legislators to impose immediate burden on their voters in exchange for distant benefits in time. It is also due, and above all, as it was evident in the last US elections.
There are, however, countries such as members of the European Union, who have been able to establish a solid legal and normative basis to promote emissions reduction. In this case, the oil and gas industry strategy has been hard to criticize climate policies and their economic impacts, as well as using US weight on tariff negotiations to try to exempt US exports from European environmental requirements.
Exxon Mobil’s recent “Global Outlook Report”, the largest private company in the industry, is exemplary in this regard. In a section entitled “Lessons from Europe” states that, as a result of decarbonization policies, industrial production is declining: “Energy prices in heavy industry and commercial transportation are rising. As a result, public support for low emission technologies needed to be weakened.”
A director of the company, quoted by the Financial Times, states: “I do not want this to sound as if the energy transition could not or should not occur. What we mean is that we must act intelligently in this process.” Where it reads “intelligence”, I understand slow, a lot of slowness.
Thus, while the “hard line” of the sector persists in the policy of denial and misinformation about climate change adopted in the last 30 years, a “pseudo-moderate wing” that admits the facts, but disputes the strategy to face them arises. They preach that in 2050 – as it foresees the European Union – they would be excessive for society. They advocate a slower process, without specifying deadlines, pleased with any policy that postpone the point of inflection in sales of two or three decades.
What I called at the beginning of the “dismantling of global climate governance” is precisely the mechanism by which it is intended to guarantee another 20 or 30 years of. Oil companies appropriate gains, while the burden are arcado throughout humanity, especially the most vulnerable and future generations. Sector executives may then say, like the lover of Luis 15, MME of Pompadour: “After us, the flood.”
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