This coverage is made possible through a partnership with Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan.
Those involved in the Line 5 pipeline controversy have been waiting for the United States Department of Justice — and the Biden administration — to come forward with its opinion on a case that involves tribal sovereignty and foreign relations.
But when the legal brief came down on Wednesday, no one was satisfied.
The Justice Department amicus brief backed claims from a Wisconsin tribe that Enbridge, a Canadian company, was trespassing on its lands by continuing to operate the Line 5 pipeline there. The 71-year-old pipeline carries up to 540,000 barrels of oil and natural gas liquids daily from Superior, Wisconsin, to Sarnia, Ontario.
The DOJ also agreed that Enbridge has been trespassing on the band’s lands for over a decade, and specified the company should pay more than the court-ordered $5.15 million to the band, since the company has made over $1 billion in that time.
“We are grateful the U.S. urged the court not to let Enbridge profit from its unlawful trespass,” said Robert Blanchard, chairman of the Bad River Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, located in northern Wisconsin.
But, Blanchard added in a statement, they’re disappointed the U.S. didn’t call for the company to stop trespassing immediately: “Enbridge should be required to promptly leave our Reservation, just like other companies that have trespassed on tribal land.”
The legal trail began in 2019, when the band sued Enbridge for trespassing. The district ruling came out last June. Both Enbridge and the band appealed.
In their appeal, Enbridge and the Canadian government pointed to the 1977 Transit Pipeline Treaty between the United States and Canada, which promised an uninterrupted flow of oil and gas products between the nations.
Both Enbridge and Canada argue that shutting down the pipeline before relocating it would violate the pipeline treaty, and would impact energy supplies across the northern U.S. and Canada.
The court waiting for the DOJ brief, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, was looking for guidance on that question.
But the department stopped short of saying how the court should interpret the 1977 treaty, only recommending that the case be sent back to the district court to more fully consider public interests, including diplomatic relations with Canada, energy concerns around Line 5, and protecting the band’s sovereign rights.
“The brief does not provide an interpretation of the transit treaty’s provisions, and that was pretty stunning, given that the court asked specifically for that interpretation,” said the band’s attorney, Riyaz Kanji.
The Bad River Band disagrees with Enbridge and Canada’s interpretation of the pipeline treaty. The band refers to its 1854 treaty with the U.S., which recognizes its sovereign authority over those lands.
Even if the pipeline treaty applies, according to the band, it still allows for pipelines to be regulated, including for pipeline safety and environmental protection.
That has worried the band’s supporters. Some say the U.S. is failing to meaningfully support tribal sovereignty, instead protecting its interests with Canada.
“From the point of view of the tribe and its allies, this is incredibly concerning that the United States is not advocating for the shutdown or removal of that pipeline” said Matthew Fletcher, a citizen of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians and a law professor at the University of Michigan.
Other Great Lakes tribes have argued that accepting Canada and Enbridge’s interpretation of the pipeline treaty would undermine foundational principles of tribal sovereignty and would have major implications for property rights.
In a letter to the Biden administration in late February, representatives from 30 tribal nations across the region said the U.S. should fulfill its trust responsibility by rejecting that interpretation of the pipeline treaty.
Enbridge declined Grist’s request for an interview. In an emailed statement, company spokesperson Ryan Duffy said, “The Government of Canada has made its position clear. Such a shutdown is not in the public interest as it would negatively impact businesses, communities and millions of individuals who depend on Line 5 for energy in both the U.S. and Canada.”
The band, Enbridge, and Canada have until April 24 to respond to the DOJ’s brief. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals will then decide how to move forward.
Editor’s note: Enbridge is an advertiser with Interlochen Public Radio. Advertisers have no role in IPR’s editorial decisions.
Major rivers in Russia and Kazakhstan have risen above their embankments, causing more than 120,000 people to have to flee their homes in the worst flooding in some areas in almost a century.
Residents along the 1,509-mile Ural River, which flows through Russia and Kazakhstan, were forced to evacuate by its fast-rising waters, reported Reuters.
Orenburg, a Russian city of about 550,000, was one of the hardest hit.
“It came very quickly at night,” 71-year-old Taisiya told Reuters in the city about 900 miles southeast of Moscow. “By the time I got ready, I couldn’t get out.”
Entire areas of Orenburg were submerged as snowmelt caused the Ural to swell to a level much higher than what was deemed safe by authorities.
The flooding “might be the biggest disaster in terms of its scale and impact in more than 80 years,” said President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, as CNN reported.
In Orenburg, the local government said the flooding caused the evacuation of more than 7,700 people from almost 13,000 residential buildings.
The city’s water levels rose to approximately 33 feet, the mayor said, higher than the critical level of 30.5 feet.
Flooding in the region looked to be far from over.
“The forecast is unfavorable. The water level continues to rise in flood-affected areas,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Wednesday, according to CNN.
Earlier this week, Orsk, a city downstream from Orenburg, was inundated when a dam embankment burst, reported BBC News.
Springtime flooding is common in Russia, but the scale of the event was rare.
The worst of the flooding hit northern Kazakhstan and the Russian Ural Mountains. Waters also rose in the southern portions of Western Siberia, as well as some areas near Europe’s largest river, the Volga, Reuters reported.
According to Kazakhstan’s ministry of emergency situations, emergency crews had removed 310 million cubic feet of floodwaters.
Emergency workers said the extreme flooding was caused by a combination of waterlogged soils, extensive snowpack, rapidly warming temperatures and heavy rainfall.
Residents of flooded regions have asked the president for assistance, while social media posts showed protestors outside Orsk city hall yelling, “Shame! Shame!” reported CNN.
In other footage, demonstrators criticized the Mayor of Orsk, Vasily Kozupitsa.
“We feed emergency ministry workers with pies and dumplings and bring them thermoses… Kozupitsa cannot even provide for emergency workers. Shame!” said one woman, as CNN reported.
The annual Global Energy Monitor (GEM) survey, Boom and Bust Coal, has found that coal-fired operating capacity worldwide rose by two percent last year — the highest annual increase since 2016.
China was responsible for two-thirds of the expansion, with a small amount of growth in other parts of the globe, a press release from GEM said.
“Coal’s fortunes this year are an anomaly, as all signs point to reversing course from this accelerated expansion. But countries that have coal plants to retire need to do so more quickly, and countries that have plans for new coal plants must make sure these are never built. Otherwise we can forget about meeting our goals in the Paris Agreement and reaping the benefits that a swift transition to clean energy will bring,” said Flora Champenois, coal program director for GEM.
According to Global Coal Plant Tracker data, 69.5 gigawatts (GW) of coal capacity were commissioned in 2023, while 21.1 GW were retired — a net yearly increase of 48.4 GW and a total capacity worldwide of 2,130 GW.
Beyond the additions in China, new capacity coming online in India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, Japan, Bangladesh, South Korea, Zimbabwe and Greece drove the increase.
Outside of China, a total of 22.1 GW were commissioned, with 17.4 GW retired — a net increase of 4.7 GW.
Last year marked the lowest retirement of coal capacity of any year in over a decade.
Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, 25 countries have reduced their coal-fired capacity, while 35 have increased it.
“The world is heading in the right direction in terms of coal’s role in the energy sector, but not quickly enough, and with some risky detours along the way,” said Champenois, as Reuters reported.
Lower coal plant retirements last year in Europe and the United States contributed to the uptick in operating capacity. Nearly half of retirements in 2023 were in the U.S. — 9.7 GW — down from the country’s record high of 21.7 GW in 2015.
European Union countries and the United Kingdom made up about a quarter of retirements, led by the UK, Italy and Poland.
“But the accelerated growth in coal capacity may be short-lived, as low retirement rates in 2023 that contributed to coal’s rise are expected to pick up speed in the U.S. and Europe, offsetting the blip. Heightened capacity additions would also be tempered if China takes immediate action to ensure it meets its target of shutting down 30 gigawatts (GW) of coal capacity by 2025,” GEM said.
In Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and EU nations, coal operating and pre-construction capacity decreased last year to a total of 7.1 GW, the lowest level on record. Just four of these countries — the U.S., Türkiye, Australia and Japan — are still considering new coal projects.
“The global coal landscape has been in transformation for almost a decade, marked by a collapse in the amount of planned coal power plants following the adoption of the Paris Agreement in late 2015. There has been a 68% reduction in global pre-construction capacity since then, and new construction starts are at their lowest outside of China since data collection began,” the press release said.
Since January, 101 countries have either abandoned the last decade’s plans for new coal or have officially committed to the United Nations No New Coal Energy Compact.
“Thankfully, various countries are making clear that shutting coal down is possible, and most of the world is closing in on ‘no new coal.’ Of 82 countries with coal power, 47 have reduced or kept operating capacity flat since the 2015 Paris Agreement,” GEM said. “Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Portugal, Peru, and the United Arab Emirates have retired or converted their last operating coal plants, while Slovakia, the UK, and potentially others are projected to join them in 2024.”
However, coal capacity around the world has actually gone up 11 percent since 2015.
China and India are the two largest coal consumers in the world, together accounting for 82 percent of total pre-construction coal capacity.
Along with China and India, nine other countries — Bangladesh, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Kazakhstan, Russia, Pakistan, Laos, Türkiye and Vietnam — account for 95 percent of coal capacity under consideration, with India accounting for nearly 50 percent outside of China.
“In order to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement goals and put the world on a pathway to no more than 1.5°C of global warming, reducing the use of coal for power generation is the single most important source of emissions reductions,” the press release said. “To align with that goal, modeling by the International Energy Agency and others finds that OECD countries should eliminate coal power by 2030 and the rest of the world by 2040.”
Just 317 GW — 15 percent — of the world’s coal operating capacity has been committed to be retired in accordance with those goals. An additional 210 GW — 10 percent — has a closure commitment in place that must be sped up in order to keep pace with global climate targets.
While most global coal operating capacity is currently under some sort of net zero or similar pledge, 1,626 GW — 75 percent — continues to be without a closure commitment.
“Phasing out operating coal power by 2040 would require an average of 126 GW of retirements per year for the next 17 years, the equivalent of about two coal plants per week. Accounting for coal plants under construction and in pre-construction (578 GW) would require even steeper cuts,” the press release said.
The impacts of climate change on marine life, from rising sea surface temperatures to ocean acidification, have long been studied, but new research is shedding light on the extent of these effects both currently and in the future.
Scientists developed a method that fully considers the consequences of warming oceans and acidification on fish and invertebrate animals, without canceling out certain other impacts, such as when one species begins eating more and another eats less.
“To gain a better understanding of the overall worldwide impact of climate change, marine biologists calculate its effects on all fish or all invertebrate species lumped together,” Katharina Alter, of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and lead author of the study, explained in a statement. “Yet, effects determined in different individual studies can cancel each other out: for example if invertebrate animals such as snails profit from a certain environmental change and other invertebrates, such as sea urchins, suffer from it, the overall effect for invertebrates is concluded to be zero, although both animal groups are affected.”
Previously, scientists determined three main ways that climate change can affect marine life, including reduced chances of survival, increased metabolism and weakened skeletons of invertebrates. By using the new method to evaluate the effects of climate change on marine life, researchers found negative impacts on behavior, physiology, reproduction and physical development for fish and invertebrates.
According to Alter, these findings, which were published in the journal Nature Communications, showed that the negative consequences on marine life are likely greater than previously thought.
The researchers also estimated how acidification, which happens as increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the air dissolve into the ocean, could continue to impact marine life in the future, both with and without intervention.
“Our new approach suggests that if ocean warming and acidification continue on the current trajectory, up to 100% of the biological processes in fish and invertebrate species will be affected, while previous research methods found changes in only about 20 and 25% of all processes, respectively,” Alter said.
Even in a lower carbon emissions scenario, the researchers determined that acidification will impact about 50% of biological processes in invertebrates and 30% of biological processes in fish, still higher than previous estimates.
In addition to calculating negative impacts of climate change on fish and invertebrates, the researchers considered any potential beneficial outcomes for species for a more comprehensive look at all “hidden impacts” that ocean warming and acidification have on marine life.
“The new calculation method weighs the significant deviation from the current state irrespective of its direction — be it beneficial or detrimental — and counts it as impact of warming and acidifying seawater,” Alter said. “With our new approach, you can include the broadest range of measured responses and detect impacts that were hidden in the traditional approach.”
The study authors noted that more research is needed to determine links between the changes to biological processes, both positive and negative, in marine life and how these could affect ecosystems at large.
When it comes to a green future, money isn’t everything.
In the case of Indigenous peoples, there also needs to be a variety of support and cultural understanding.
That’s according to Kimberly Yazzie, a Diné researcher in ecology at Stanford University, who has seen how Indigenous communities have been harmed in the race to establish wind, solar and mining projects.
“There’s this history of tribes not getting a fair deal, and so this history needs to be addressed,” she said. “There’s work that needs to be done.”
As lead author in an article published this week in Science, she outlined ways Indigenous peoples can move forward on the journey to save the planet.
Many green projects over the last few years have been criticized for not including tribes in important decisions that infringes or even destroys ancestral land.
Yazzie cautioned that building a just and equitable energy future will take relationship building, research, and consultation. That can take time, she admitted, and while it’s not a luxury many feel we have, it’s essential so mistakes of the past are not repeated.
“To go fast, start slow,” she said.
The three big takeaways from the paper include: flexible application deadlines, equal access to updated and accurate information, and resources to build stronger infrastructure within tribes for projects. Since 2021, federal money has been available for tribal renewable energy projects — an amount that now stands at around $14 billion dollars — and Yazzie hopes that the paper can help tribes access those dollars.
Strict deadlines, for instance,can shut tribes out from funding due to how long it takes to identify resources, secure other funding sources, and tailor competitive applications. The paper calls for rolling deadlines, and specifically mentions the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program as an example of how more applications should accept applications at any time.
A second solution includes increasing access to updated and accurate information for tribal green energy projects. Although the federal government has a database, it can be hard to find state or private information. One solution could be a database updated with funding sources, not only from federal programs but philanthropic organizations, with funding amounts and requirements clearly outlined for easy reference. Or having readily available technical information or experts to answer nuts-and-bolts type questions about solar and electrical projects.
Clara Pratte is a Diné researcher and a tribal government consultant. She’s a co-author on the paper and said that having a more effective way to share information was very important.
“There’s no best practice guide on how to run projects like these,” she said. “And at the end of the day, we want better, more mindful, culturally competent development to happen on tribal lands.”
It’s also important that funding goes to the people on the ground and not just to the project, a way to make sure tribal members are involved. Pratte specifically said the role of “tribal energy champions” can make or break a idea. These are tribal members who stick with a given endeavor through the very early stages till its completion, and can pool information and resources from other tribal energy projects.
Pratte said that ideally this work would be done by tribal members who have cultural knowledge valuable to the ethical development of these projects.
“Just because it’s ‘green’ doesn’t mean it’s going to be done in a thoughtful way, so I think tribes and tribal people really have to be at the forefront of defining what that process looks like,” she said.
Yazzie said she’d also like to take a closer look at the future, especially when the Biden administration’s financial support ends.
“I think a question we’re going to have to ask ourselves is what are we going to do when that administration changes and when funding programs run out,” she said.
Shortly after being elected president, Joe Biden made a sweeping promise on environmental justice: With a 2021 executive order, he vowed that a full 40 percent of the benefits of certain federal government climate and environmental investments would reach historically disadvantaged communities. This initiative, known as Justice40, was the centerpiece of the administration’s environmental justice efforts and was intended to compensate for both underinvestment and environmental harms that have disproportionately burdened communities of color throughout U.S. history.
Justice40 is striking both for the simplicity and specificity of its objective and also for the big open questions that the goal depends on. For one, Justice40 was conceived before hundreds of billions of dollars in climate funding were unlocked by the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, so it’s unclear what the grand total is from which the 40 percent figure will be drawn. Second, the president promised not 40 percent of spending but 40 percent of the benefits of said spending, and it’s not obvious how the latter is derived from the former. Finally, it’s not entirely clear where exactly the money is intended to go — in other words, for the purposes of Justice40’s accounting, which communities count as “disadvantaged?”
That last question alone was the target of a yearslong, open-source White House project, which resulted in a specialized screening tool for federal agencies to use to identify disadvantaged communities. And the original executive order itself stipulated an accountability mechanism: the creation of a scorecard “detailing agency environmental justice performance measures.” Three years on, however, environmental justice advocates Grist spoke to expressed disappointment in the quality of this progress report, saying the administration’s scorecard is confusing and provides little information about whether or not federal funding is on track to meet Justice40’s lofty goal.
In its current iteration, the scorecard consists of links to multiple web pages detailing the various environmental justice efforts undertaken by each federal agency. Most agencies have reported whether or not they have dedicated environmental justice offices, the number of Justice40-related programs announced, the number of staff dedicated to environmental justice programs, and the amount of funding made available through those programs.
But the information collected provides little insight into how much of that funding has been allocated to disadvantaged communities. Since federal agencies currently don’t have a uniform method of tracking funding down to a specific zip code, that information has not been reported. In some cases, such tracking may not even be possible. For example, when the Department of Transportation builds an electric charging station along a highway, it may be used by residents of multiple communities spread out over a large area. The corresponding air quality improvements, to the extent they can be determined, may also span a vast region. Actually quantifying such benefits — whether it’s improvements in air quality or health or any number of other outcomes — is even more challenging. As a result, an interested member of the public can, for example, look at the EPA’s scorecard and see that the agency has 73 Justice40 programs and that it has made $14 billion in funding available. But how much of that money is going to disadvantaged communities — and the impact of those funds — is unknown.
“The scorecard as it was presented was not user-friendly,” said Maria López-Núñez, an environmental justice advocate with the New Jersey-based Ironbound Community Corporation and co-chair of a White House advisory council’s working group on the scorecard. “It wasn’t really showing the public what the intentions of the scorecard are. When people hear a scorecard, they think, ‘Where’s the grade?’ And we obviously didn’t see any of that.”
“Given the amount of funding that we’re talking about, it seems like a remarkable accountability failure,” added Justin Schott, project manager of the Energy Equity Project at the University of Michigan.
Schott analyzed the information provided by each agency and collated the data in a spreadsheet. He found that there were large discrepancies in the quality of information presented: Some agencies had designated hundreds of staff members to work on environmental justice efforts while others did not report any. To add to the confusion, some agencies reported figures that appear incorrect. For instance, the Department of Agriculture noted that it made 12,000 funding announcements in fiscal year 2022 even though it lists just 65 Justice40 programs. Similarly, the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported conducting an eye-popping 1,914 technical assistance outreach events, though what constitutes such an event is not specified. (A spokesperson for the Housing Department confirmed the number is accurate and noted that outreach events can range from Zoom calls between an agency staffer and a state official to in-person meetings with multiple stakeholders; a spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture also confirmed the accuracy of its count of funding announcements, noting that the department included a broad range of appropriations, including those from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.)
The White House launched the first version of the scorecard, which it described as a “baseline assessment of actions taken by federal agencies in 2021 and 2022,” in early 2023. Since then it has requested recommendations from the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, a body made up primarily of community and environmental justice advocates (including López-Núñez), and solicited feedback from the public. Work on the scorecard is iterative, and the agency is expected to release an updated version later this year.
“The Environmental Justice Scorecard alone cannot fully capture the depth or range of active work or the long-term impact of the Biden-Harris Administration’s environmental justice work within communities, including zero-emission school buses, cleaning up legacy pollution, and strengthening protections for clean water and air,” an administration official wrote in response to Grist’s questions. “As future versions of the Environmental Justice Scorecard are released on an annual basis, we will be continually working to improve the tool based on public input and improving data, so that everyone can better track progress and identify opportunities to advance environmental justice.”
“It’s an undeniable fact that this administration has done more for environmental justice than any of the previous administrations,” said Manuel Salgado, a federal research manager with the nonprofit WE ACT for Environmental Justice and a contributor to a White House advisory council report on the scorecard. “If you look at the numbers that are highlighted on the scorecard, that’s not necessarily reflected.”
Salgado and other members of the advisory council drafted a set of recommendations to improve the scorecard last year. Salgado said that a key impediment is the lack of uniformity in how agencies manage and track the implementation of various programs. Some agencies may be managing hundreds of programs and disbursing billions in funding while others may oversee just a handful. In a number of cases, funding is typically allocated to state agencies, which then make decisions about how and where to invest the funds.
“Every agency operates like their own fiefdom,” said López-Núñez. “They have their own set of entrenched customs and traditions that make it difficult to collaborate with other agencies.”
Those vast differences in how agencies operate led the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which has been coordinating work on the scorecard, to take a “common denominator approach,” according to Yukyan Lam, a research director and senior scientist at The New School’s Tishman Environment & Design Center and an independent contributor to the advisory council’s report on the scorecard. “Trying to bring all the agencies to the lowest common denominator made it more confusing and less clear to the public what the purpose was,” added López-Núñez.
In trying to identify metrics that were relevant to all federal agencies, the White House requested that agencies report environmental justice staffing levels, programs funded, and staff trainings conducted. While that information is useful, it “really failed to capture some of the nuances and specifics of the kinds of work that each individual agency or department was carrying out,” Yam said. When Yam and other members who worked on the report met with agencies, staff were eager to come up with ways to provide specific information relevant to the programs they oversee, she said.
As a result, the advisory council’s report emphasized the need to supplement the standard metrics with granting the agencies flexibility to report customized information most relevant to their work. “Rather than applying uniform expectations for the scorecard to all agencies, we recommend a tailored approach, allowing each agency to provide metrics that are relevant to its activities,” the report noted.
Even with the flexibility to report different metrics, however, tracking the benefits of climate funding will likely prove tricky for agencies. When the EPA provides community grants that increase tree cover in a neighborhood, or the Department of Housing and Urban Development builds more energy-efficient affordable housing, or the Department of Transportation invests in electric charging stations, those investments have environmental and public health benefits. But quantifying those benefits typically involves modeling, which requires expertise and resources. Given the challenges, advocates emphasized the need to at least first track funding.
Salgado said the scorecard is not just an accountability mechanism but also a chance for the administration to communicate its environmental justice work to the public. Most members of the public don’t have an intimate understanding of the inner workings of various federal agencies, and the scorecard could be an opportunity for the Biden administration to explain how environmental justice efforts relate to people’s everyday lives, he said.
“These are big environmental justice wins that should be communicated to the general public, especially in an election year,” said Salgado. “If we want to support our elected officials who provide us with environmental justice benefits, we have to know what they’ve done right. So it’s an opportunity for them to brag and for them to highlight all of these environmental justice wins and the great things that they’ve done over the course of this administration.”
This story has been updated to incorporate comments received from the Department of Agriculture after publication.
Despite minor improvements, major companies’ climate commitments remain “critically insufficient” to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), according to a new analysis.
The 2024 Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor, a report by the European nonprofits Carbon Market Watch and NewClimate Institute, finds that many of the world’s biggest companies are making better climate pledges — for example, by beginning to move away from misleading “carbon neutrality” claims and setting quantitative emissions reduction targets alongside their net-zero pledges.
But huge problems remain. The report finds that 51 major companies’ climate plans would, collectively, only reduce emissions about 30 percent below 2019 values by 2030 — far short of the 43 to 48 percent that scientists say the world must achieve to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C. Most companies’ targets continue to be “ambiguous,” the report says, leaving out critical supply chain emissions and banking on questionable carbon offsets.
“We’re seeing improvements from a very low baseline,” said Gilles Dufrasne, lead on global carbon markets for Carbon Market Watch and a co-author of the report. “There’s still quite a big gap between what they’re pledging to deliver and what they’re actually delivering.”
The companies analyzed span four sectors — automobiles, fashion, electric utilities, and food and agriculture — and account for about 16 percent of the world’s overall greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon Market Watch and the NewClimate Institute selected them because they have been some of the most vocal about their climate efforts.
Thirty-one of the companies were included in previous versions of the Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor, or CCRM. The first report, published in 2022, found that 25 companies’ “net-zero” targets would only reduce aggregate emissions by 40 percent. The report’s 2023 iteration raised similar concerns, describing two dozen companies’ climate commitments as “misleading” and “wholly insufficient.”
This year’s report takes another look at those same companies’ net-zero targets and brings in 20 new ones, but its main focus is on their medium-term goals — stepping stones on the path to decarbonization by 2050. Bodies like the United Nations High Level Expert Group and the International Organization for Standardization have recommended interim targets so that companies (and governments) don’t wait until the last minute to cut their emissions.
Although the analysis finds improvements in 19 of the companies’ interim targets over the past two years, many of them still feature the same flaws as the net-zero ones. Crucially, they tend to gloss over emissions associated with the transportation and production of materials that companies buy and the products they sell to consumers. These so-called “scope 3” emissions represent more than 90 percent of the companies’ collective climate footprint. However, firms including the automaker Toyota, the commercial truck manufacturer Daimler Truck, and the British supermarket chain Tesco have reported no plans or only limited efforts to address them.
The report notes efforts from Nestlé to transition toward renewable energy but says the company isn’t doing enough to replace animal products with plant-based alternatives.
Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images
Other companies’ pledges lean too heavily on land-based carbon credits and carbon removal projects, initiatives that attempt to neutralize greenhouse gas emissions by avoiding them elsewhere — like by protecting forests that might otherwise have been chopped down — or by planting trees to suck carbon out of the air. Such projects have a well-documented history of accounting problems, and the carbon they remove is often vulnerable to getting reemitted in the event of wildfires. Experts say carbon removal should only be used to offset the small sliver of global emissions from hard-to-decarbonize activities, but the NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch say companies are using credits and removal as alternatives to emissions reductions.
According to the report, just eight of the companies have 2030 emissions reduction targets that are of “high or reasonable integrity.” Only four of those firms — the food companies Danone and Mars, the Spanish electric utility Iberdrola, and the automaker Volvo Group — back their targets with concrete plans to actually achieve them. Other companies, like the mega-retailer Walmart, have not updated their 2030 targets for several years. The car company Volkswagen dropped its interim target for 2025 three years ago and has not announced a replacement.
John Reilly, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, said the report shows how companies are perhaps too eager to align with science-based emissions reduction goals such as “net-zero by 2050.” They agree to such goals “without much thought about how they would actually achieve them,” he said, adding that weaker but better substantiated emissions targets might be preferable. “If these companies had very concrete, detailed plans to get to even a 20 percent reduction by 2030, I’d feel a lot more comfortable than vague commitments to get to 43 or 48 percent.”
According to Silke Mooldijk, a researcher with the NewClimate Institute and a co-author of the report, the problem is not a lack of clarity around what companies need to do to decarbonize. “It’s very clear what measures they need to take,” she told reporters last week, naming basic steps like setting a phaseout date for coal- and oil-fired electricity generation and the sale of gasoline-powered cars. Rather, companies seem to be resisting radical transformations in favor of small steps and “creative accounting” that allow them to continue business as usual.
For example, the report commends the clothing companies H&M and Inditex — which owns Zara — for setting transparent emissions reduction goals that are of “moderate” integrity, but criticizes them for failing to envision an alternative to the highly polluting fast-fashion business model. For food and agriculture, the report notes efforts from Nestlé to transition toward renewable energy but says the company isn’t doing enough to replace animal products with plant-based alternatives. Plans from other firms like Kepco, an electric utility, appear to use carbon capture to mitigate ongoing climate pollution, potentially justifying a delay in the transition to renewable power generation.
Of the 20 companies named in the report that Grist contacted for comment, six responded in time for publication. Nestlé said it disagreed with the report; a spokesperson said the company is pursuing carbon dioxide removal as a complement to reducing its absolute emissions, a strategy that is based on recommendations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A Mars spokesperson objected to the report as well, saying that the company’s net-zero target does not rely on controversial land-based carbon removal. (Carbon Market Watch and the NewClimate Institute had said it was “unclear” whether this was the case.)
Daimler Truck, the footwear giant Adidas, and H&M outlined their existing climate plans and emissions disclosures, and the latter two highlighted new data for 2023 that was not included in the report. In 2023, Adidas said it reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 24 percent from a 2019 baseline. H&M said it reduced scope 3 emissions by 22 percent.
Five of the companies expressed an ongoing commitment to emissions reductions and highlighted their alignment with the Science-Based Targets initiative, or SBTi, a nonprofit that validates more than 4,000 private-sector climate targets. Indeed, many of the companies’ near-term climate targets fit SBTi-approved pathways to limit global warming to at least 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F), even when the CCRM graded them as “poor” or “very poor.”
Dufrasne acknowledged this discrepancy and said there’s an urgent need for less flexibility across ratings programs and stronger standards overall. “I think it’s quite telling that companies don’t actually engage in the substance of the issues that are being flagged in the report and just say, ‘It’s fine, we’re being certified by SBTi,’” he told Grist.
Based on the NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch’s analysis, Walmart has not updated its 2030 targets for several years.
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Dufrasne said he’s concerned that SBTi and similar organizations may actually be loosening their standards. Just last week, the SBTi’s board of trustees announced that they would begin allowing companies to use carbon credits toward their annual scope 3 emissions targets, a move critics say could undermine actual emissions reductions. Similarly, the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative, or VCMI — a body that sets guidance on the use of carbon credits — released a proposal last November that would allow companies to use carbon credits for up to 50 percent of their annual scope 3 emissions every year until 2035.
The VCMI says this approach would help companies “bridge the gap” between their advertised scope 3 emissions reduction targets and the reductions they actually achieve. But Carbon Market Watch and the NewClimate Institute’s modeling suggests it could “nullify” companies’ scope 3 climate targets, allowing them to keep emissions steady or even increase them as long as they buy enough credits.
The VCMI did not respond to Grist’s request for comment. An SBTi spokesperson did not address specific parts of the report but said that the organization “urge[s] all interested parties to contribute to the development of our standards through the public consultations.”
Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the University of Michigan’s School for the Environment and Sustainability, said the report suggests a failure of the voluntary approach to corporate climate action. Companies must now be “more proactive in figuring out a better approach,” or risk blowback from consumers and regulators.
“I like the idea of corporations … playing a role in more stringent decarbonization pathways,” Overpeck added, “but if they can’t do it then it will have to be imposed on them.”
Benja Faecks, an expert on global carbon markets for Carbon Market Watch and a co-author of the report, offered some specific ways governments could intervene: by setting binding, sector-specific emissions reduction targets; expanding carbon pricing and cap-and-trade systems to help drive down corporate emissions; and further restricting misleading advertising about companies’ climate pledges, especially around “carbon neutrality.” Earlier this year, the European Union banned companies from labeling products as carbon neutral by 2026, but companies are still allowed to describe themselves that way.
“It doesn’t make sense for Nestlé to be able to say they’re carbon neutral when they’re not allowed to say they sell carbon neutral espresso machines,” Faecks told reporters last week.
We are running out of time to take action on climate change, says Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In a speech titled “Two Years to Save the World,” Stiell emphasized that governments, development banks and business leaders must take steps to avert much more serious impacts of the climate crisis within that time frame, reported Reuters.
“For those who say that climate change is only one of many priorities, like ending poverty, ending hunger, ending pandemics, or improving education, I simply say this: none of these crucial tasks — indeed none of the Sustainable Development Goals — will be possible unless we get the climate crisis under control,” Stiell said in the speech, delivered at London thinktank Chatham House.
“As of today, national climate plans — called Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs — in aggregate will barely cut emissions at all by 2030,” Stiell said. “We still have a chance to make greenhouse gas emissions tumble, with a new generation of national climate plans. But we need these stronger plans, now. And while every country must submit a new plan, the reality is G20 emissions are around 80% of global emissions.”
The focus of the UN COP29 climate conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, will be for nations to come up with new climate finance goals to support developing countries in tackling climate change and making the transition away from fossil fuels, Reuters reported.
“A quantum leap this year in climate finance is both essential and entirely achievable. Every day, finance ministers, CEOs, investors, and development bankers direct trillions of dollars. It’s time to shift those dollars from the energy and infrastructure of the past, towards that of a cleaner, more resilient future… And to ensure that the poorest and most vulnerable countries benefit,” Stiell said at Chatham House.
The climate chief recommended debt relief, shipping emissions taxes, less expensive financing for more impoverished countries and International Monetary Fund and World Bank reforms be used to raise more funds for climate finance, reported Reuters.
“The transformative potential of bold climate action — in tandem with steps to advance gender equality — is one of the fastest ways to move away from business as usual,” Stiell said in the speech. “In fact, business-as-usual will further entrench the gross inequalities between the world’s richest and poorest countries and communities that unchecked climate impacts are making much worse.”
“To start curing this global cancer of inequality, we need to enable bold new national climate plans by all nations that protect people, boost jobs and drive inclusive economic growth. And we need them by early next year,” Stiell added.
Stiell stressed that the necessary changes don’t just sit with governments and lawmakers, but with individuals everywhere.
“A recent survey by Gallup of 130,000 people in 125 countries found that 89% want stronger climate action by governments. Yet too often we’re seeing signs of climate action slipping down cabinet agendas,” Stiell said. “The only surefire way to get climate up the cabinet agenda is if enough people raise their voices. So my final message today is for people everywhere. Every voice matters. Yours have never been more important. If you want bolder climate action, now is the time to make yours count.”
