Reply To: Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
Business-as-usual
Can we take this report from Australia as indicative of what others are doing?
22 of Australia’s largest companies, worth a combined $121bn and representing 7% of the value of the Australian stock exchange, are actively working to undermine the Paris agreement targets, betting shareholders’ money on strategies that assume global climate change action fails. The Market Forces report singled out “coal cowboys” Whitehaven and New Hope, which it said had plans to establish new coalmines, or expand existing ones, based on forecasts that assume the failure of Paris. Oil and gas companies Woodside, Santos and Oil Search had each “faced increased investor engagement over climate change in recent years, but this has done nothing to dissuade their plans to increase fossil fuel production”, the report said.
“A handful of Australian companies are undermining efforts to limit global warming by pursuing new fossil fuel projects, or basing their business plans on energy projection scenarios that would doom the Paris agreement to failure,” the report says. “These companies have now been given more than three years to align their business with the Paris goals, but have dismissed the notion.”
The study also determined that 199 ASX300 companies, representing 64% of total market capitalisation, faced heightened transitional climate risk but had not yet demonstrated business strategies consistent with the Paris agreement.There were 143 companies with policies “not overtly inconsistent with Paris”, and just eight had aligned their strategy with the agreement.