A United Nations Climate Change Conference is scheduled for October 31 to November 12 in Glasgow, Scotland. Participants will include more than 190 government representatives and businesses leaders who are expected to discuss efforts to ensure countries and companies live up to climate change agreements made at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference. The U.S. delegation is headed by Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry and will include a number of cabinet members. President Biden is also scheduled to attend. Biden and the U.S. delegation The U.S. delegation is expected to call on nations to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions required to limit global warming to a still devastating 1.5 degrees Celsius. Unfortunately, the Biden administration has still not been able to get its climate agenda approved by a divided United States Senate. Climate villains include Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and virtually every Republican in the Senate and House of Representatives. Manchin’s political career is largely funded by fossil fuel companies and he personally owns millions of dollars in coal company stock. He is trying to force the Biden administration to drop subsidies to renewable energy from the federal budget. The United States is also the only country that has not signed and international treaty to protect bio-diversity because of Republican Party opposition. A vote for any Republican candidate in upcoming elections is a vote for global catastrophe.
Corporate America likes to claim it is a good citizen and climate responsible, although
companies rarely specify what that means. The investment firm BlackRock presents itself as a champion of clean energy. It’s “ambition” is that the companies it invests in will be carbon neutral by 2050, but “ambition” is not a solid commitment. According to Alberto Carrillo Pineda of the Science Based Targets initiative, “You can look at a company’s website and see their sustainability report and it will look great, but then when you look at what is behind it, you’ll see there is not a lot of substance behind those commitments or the commitments are not comprehensive enough.”
A recently released report by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project highlights how the short-term hunt for profit and market manipulation makes U.S. finance capitalism one of the world’s biggest climate villains. While the world heats up, countries including the United States are plagued by drought, forest fires, and hurricanes, the secretive private equity industry invested over a trillion dollars during the last decade in fossil fuel producing companies. It keeps some of the worst polluting oil wells, natural gas-leaking towers, and coal-burning power plants pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. According to Alyssa Giachino of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, “You see oil majors feeling the heat. But private equity is quietly picking up the dregs, perpetuating operations of the least desirable assets.”
Three of the corporate malefactors highlighted in the Private Equity Stakeholder Project report are the Blackstone Group, KKR & Co., and the Carlyle Group/NGP Energy Capital. The Blackstone Group is the world’s largest “alternative” asset manager. While its ClearGen subsidy is committed to promoting “sustainable energy infrastructure,” Blackstone invests in 25 fossil fuel companies. Among Blackstone’s recent acquisitions is the pipeline company Tallgrass Energy. Tallgrass is developing an “oil export terminal in Louisiana that would emit more than 500,000 tons of greenhouse gasses annually.” Tallgrass is also responsible for releasing thousands of gallons of oilfield wastewater contaminating North Dakota farmland. Blackstone is also notorious for “heavily invests in polluting plants located in proximity to communities of color.”
KKR plans to partner with the renewable energy consultant firm Crossover Energy Partners to develop solar and wind power projects. However, it also partners with the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company to produce and distribute petroleum products and is expanding natural gas fracking projects in Wyoming. Overall, KKR invests in 28 fossil fuel companies. The Carlyle Group/NGP Energy Capital plans to invest in Amp Solar Group, “a Canadian-based global energy transition platform,” but it is also investing in expanding oil production in Colombia and Ghana. Overall, it holds assets in 68 fossil fuel producing companies.
While capitalists pollute the Earth and speed up global warming, nominally socialist countries like China are not doing much better and belong on the climate villains list. Xi Jinping, General Secretary of China’s Communist Party, promises that China will start reducing greenhouse gases by 2030 and will be carbon neutral by 2060, but in the meantime it is increasing coal production and the use of coal-fired power plants. The polluting plants get tax deductions and are green-lighted for bank loans.
The list of climate villains has to include Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Libya, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil, all nations that are expected to attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference. Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Aramco, is the world’s leading oil producer. It recently announced plans to increase its oil production capacity by at least a million barrels a day by the 2030s. State-owned oil companies in the other countries are also planning to increase production. The United Arab Emirates was the first Persian Gulf country to pledge net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Meanwhile it is investing over a hundred billion dollars in new oil and gas projects.
Follow Alan Singer on twitter at https://twitter.com/AlanJSinger1
