Tag Archives: net zero greenhouse emissions

Transparency against Free Speech? Exxon v. California, the Climate Risks

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Exxon Mobil says rules requiring it to disclose climate risks infringe on the company’s right to free speech. The oil-and-gas giant made the argument in a suit filed October 24, 2025 (pdf) against the state of California, which is rolling out requirements for businesses to report ton their greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risks. Exxon Mobil asked the court to halt the rules, arguing that they would violate free speech protections by forcing the business to use frameworks that put “disproportionate blame on large companies” such as the energy producer itself. The rules would require Exxon Mobil “to serve as a mouthpiece for ideas with which it disagrees,” the company said in the complaint, which was submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.

The California regulations were set up by state laws SB 253 and SB 261: the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act and the Climate-Related Financial Act. The first requires companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, while the second mandates disclosures of climate-related financial risks.

The rules are specific to California but their oversight reaches businesses across the globe. Under SB 253, companies doing business in the state with an annual total revenue exceeding $1 billion, be they public or private, will have to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions—the ones from their immediate operations, such as electricity intake, and those from their… supply chain. Even if they are based elsewhere in the U.S. or overseas, the rules will apply.

The climate risk reporting rule, SB 261, will affect more companies. It requires public and private firms doing business in California with annual revenue of more than $500 million to disclose climate-related financial risks, along with the measures they are taking to mitigate and adapt to such risks, starting Jan. 1, 2026

Companies are also preparing for coming climate reporting rules in Europe known as the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive.

Excerpt from Clara Hudson, Exxon Mobil Sues California Over Looming Climate Disclosure Rules, WSJ, Oct. 27, 2025

Laughingstock: The Net-Zero Banking Alliance

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The Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) said in August 2025 that it was pausing operations and initiating a vote to decide on whether to continue working as a membership-based alliance or operate as a framework initiative…The move by the NZBA to suspend activities comes after numerous banks from the U.S. and Europe left the alliance. Those banks said that being part of such an organization was no longer necessary and that their business practices now incorporated the ESG principles learned over the past five years…Shortly after President Trump’s electoral win, major banks including JPMorgan, Citi and Morgan Stanley exited the alliance that they had proudly been a member of for years. The departure of the banks came as many faced strong pressure from the Trump administration and Republican attorneys generals to oppose climate groups and ESG investing more generally…

A sister organization, the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative was also set up, with a similar remit but instead focused on the activities of asset managers. It suspended activities in January 2025 after a wave of departures from the likes of BlackRock and Vanguard…. BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard were sued in November2024 by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who alleged that the asset managers were violating antitrust law by being part of alliances like the NZAM initiative, which worked to move investments away from fossil fuels, especially coal. Paxton said this raised energy costs for consumers by not providing the full remit of energy sources.

In August 2025, a federal-district court judge denied the asset manager’s motion to dismiss the case, allowing litigation to continue under Texas and federal antitrust laws. “Today’s victory represents a major step in holding them accountable. I will continue fighting to protect Texas and defend America’s energy independence from this unlawful conspiracy,” Paxton said…

Excerpt from Yusuf Khan,, Net-Zero Banking Alliance Suspends Activities Amid Wave of Departures, WSJ, Aug. 27, 2025

Can We Change Path? Saving Forests and Cutting Carbon

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No ecosystem is more important in mitigating the effects of climate change than tropical rainforest. And South-East Asia is home to the world’s third-biggest patch of it, behind the Amazon and Congo basins. Even though humans release carbon from these forests through logging, clear-felling for agriculture and other disruptions, some are so vast and fecund that the growth of the plants within them absorbs even more from the atmosphere. The Congo basin, for instance, locks up 600m tonnes of carbon a year more than it releases, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI), an international NGO that is equivalent to about a third of emissions from all American transport.

In contrast, such is the extent of clearing for plantations in South-East Asia’s rainforests, which run from Myanmar to Indonesia, that over the past 20 years they have turned from a growing carbon sink to a significant source of emissions—nearly 500m tonnes a year. Indonesia and Malaysia, home to the biggest expanses of pristine forest, have lost more than a third of it this century. Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, relative newcomers to deforestation, are making up for lost time.

The Global Forest Watch, which uses satellite data to track tree cover, loss of virgin forest in Indonesia and Malaysia has slowed for the fourth year in row—a contrast with other parts of the world…The Leaf Coalition, backed by America, Britain and Norway, along with such corporate giants as Amazon, Airbnb, and Unilever, aims to create an international marketplace in which carbon credits can be sold for deforestation avoided. An initial $1bn has been pledged to reward countries for protecting forests. South-East Asia could be a big beneficiary,

Admittedly, curbing deforestation has been a cherished but elusive goal of climate campaigners for ages. A big un initiative to that end, called REDD+, was launched a decade ago, with Indonesia notably due for help. It never achieved its potential. Projects for conservation must jump through many hoops before approval. The risk is often that a patch of forest here may be preserved at the expense of another patch there. Projects are hard to monitor. The price set for carbon under the scheme, $5 a tonne, has been too low to overcome these hurdles.

The Leaf Initiative would double the price of carbon, making conservation more attractive. Whereas buyers of carbon credits under REDD+ pocketed profits from a rise in carbon prices, windfalls will now go to the country that sold the credits. Standards of monitoring are much improved. Crucially, the scheme will involve bigger units of land than previous efforts, the so-called jurisdictional approach. That reduces the risk of deforestation simply being displaced from a protected patch to an unprotected one.

Excerpts from Banyan: There is hope for South-East Asia’s beleaguered tropical forests, Economist, May 1, 2021

Cut or Pay up: Net Negative Carbon Emissions

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Sweden’s parliament passed a law in June which obliges the country to have “no net emissions” of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by 2045. The clue is in the wording. This does not mean that three decades from now Swedes must emit no planet-heating substances; even if all their electricity came from renewables and they only drove Teslas, they would presumably still want to fly in aeroplanes, or use cement and fertiliser, the making of which releases plenty of carbon dioxide. Indeed, the law only requires gross emissions to drop by 85% compared with 1990 levels. But it demands that remaining carbon sources are offset with new carbon sinks. In other words greenhouse gases will need to be extracted from the air…

[I]f the global temperature is to have a good chance of not rising more than 2ºC above its pre-industrial level, as stipulated in the Paris climate agreement of 2015, worldwide emissions must similarly hit “net zero” no later than 2090. After that, emissions must go “net negative”, with more carbon removed from the stock than is emitted…

To keep the temperature below a certain level means keeping within a certain “carbon budget”—allowing only so much to accumulate, and no more. Once you have spent that budget, you have to balance all new emissions with removals. If you overspend it…you have a brief opportunity to put things right by taking out more than you are putting in…

Climate scientists like Mr Henderson have been discussing negative-emissions technologies (NETs) with economists and policy wonks since the 1990s. [But] NETs were conspicuous by their absence from the agenda of the annual UN climate jamboree which ended in Bonn on November 17th 2017.

 Reforesting logged areas or “afforesting” previously treeless ones presents no great technical challenges. More controversially, they also tend to invoke “bioenergy with carbon capture and storage” (BECCS). In BECCS, power stations fuelled by crops that can be burned to make energy have their carbon-dioxide emissions injected into deep geological strata, rather than released into the atmosphere….

The Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)  technologies that exist today, under development by companies such as Global Thermostat in America, Carbon Engineering in Canada or Climeworks of Switzerland, remain pricey. In 2011 a review by the American Physical Society to which Ms Wilcox contributed put extraction costs above $600 per tonne, compared with an average estimate of $60-250 for BECCS…

Much of the gas captured by Climeworks and other pure NETs firms (as opposed to fossil-fuel CCS) is sold to makers of fizzy drinks or greenhouses to help plants grow. It is hard to imagine that market growing far beyond today’s total of 10m tonnes. And in neither case is the gas stored indefinitely. It is either burped out by consumers of carbonated drinks or otherwise exuded by eaters of greenhouse-grown produce…..

One way to create a market for NETs would be for governments to put a price on carbon. Where they have done so, the technologies have been adopted. Take Norway, which in 1991 told oil firms drilling in the North Sea to capture carbon dioxide from their operations or pay up. This cost is now around $50 per tonne emitted; in one field, called Sleipner, the firms have found ways to pump it back underground for less than that. A broader carbon price—either a tax or tradable emissions permits—would promote negative emissions elsewhere, too…

Another concern is the impact on politicians and the dangers of moral hazard. NETs allow politicians to go easy on emission cuts now in the hope that a quick fix will appear in the future.

Excerpt from Sucking up Carbon, Combating Climate Change, Economist,  Nov. 18, 2017