Welcome to the Climate Nexus finance newsletter – a regular update that looks at the big stories and players at the intersection of climate change, finance, regulation, and energy, with tips for the week ahead.
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Women and rural poor suffer worst climate-linked financial impacts
Happy (belated) International Women’s Day! A new study from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization finds women and the rural poor foot the biggest bills when it comes to climate change. The findings add yet more evidence that climate change is worsening inequality by imposing the greatest impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable. For every additional degree C° of warming, the authors estimate, women face a 34% greater loss of income compared to men.
Another new study examining women sugarcane workers in India’s Maharashtra state reveals a darker side of this story: Rural women are increasingly choosing to have hysterectomies to avoid taking breaks to cope with menstrual pain. The authors estimate the financial costs of this drastic choice — among the other losses and damages these women incur working in conditions made harsher by climate change — and find women who migrated to the fields are losing money equal to 164% of their household income. But it’s also undeniable that women are the key to fixing this hot mess, We Mean Business CEO Maria Mendiluce concludes in a new Forbes op-ed. She points to the recent elections of women prime ministers and presidents as a sign of hope, and lists all the qualities that make them top picks for tackling the climate crisis.
Pared-back climate risk rule still faces legal gauntlet
While analysts are busy reviewing the Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) climate risk disclosure rule to see what was dropped in the final proposal, polluting corporations and state Republican attorneys general immediately filed suit against the pared-back transparency reporting requirements before the ink was even dry. Ten Republican attorneys general were first out of the gate with a lawsuit filed in the corporate-friendly 11th federal judicial circuit. Republican attorneys general from Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi and industry quickly followed by filing two separate suits in the 5th Circuit, another region where conservative judges hold a majority. Additional legal challenges are expected from both sides. Where all the lawsuits are filed will factor into where the case is ultimately heard.
Anticipating the legal gauntlet this rule would face, former SEC attorney turned-commissioner Caroline Crenshaw laid out the agency’s “well-established authority” to require greenhouse gas pollution disclosure, pointing to non-financial metric reporting requirements such as executive compensation, environmental legal compliance, and director background and qualifications. The Big Oil-friendly Chamber of Commerce is still on the sidelines but has made its anti-regulatory intentionsabundantly clear. The LA Times Business Columnist recalled this important rule of thumb regarding the Chamber: If it’s on one side of a lawsuit, “you can rarely go wrong in assuming the public interest is on the other side.”
Treasury backs off insurance data collection
The U.S. The Department of Treasury is abandoning a plan to make insurers disclose information about climate change’s impact on policies, premiums, and business plans. Instead, the Treasury’s Federal Insurance Office (FIO) will collaborate with state insurance regulators on a joint data collection effort that they say will cover more than 80% of the US property insurance market by premium volume. Treasury’s insurance transparency push dates back to October 2022. Last November, the FIO received permission from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to make its own request for data. Nevertheless, Treasury will allow the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), a group of state insurance commissioners that previously opposed the probe, to carry out data collection.
“The NAIC’s foot-dragging on addressing the risks posed by climate change, and its cozy relationship with the industry should raise concerns about the likelihood it will provide federal financial regulators, researchers, and the public with all the necessary data,” said Carly Fabian, insurance policy advocate with Public Citizen’s Climate Program. And considering over six million Americans lack homeowner’s insurance, federal decision makers need all the climate risk information they can get to help address our uninsurability crisis.
Gaslight, gatekeep, greenwash: Exxon edition
Last week, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods used an interview with Fortune to gaslight viewers about the true scourge of the climate crisis — not fossil fuels themselves, he claimed, but consumers unwilling to pay for lower-carbon products. While investigations reveal the company has known about the climate-wrecking implications of its products since the 1970s, this interview marks the latest in a long trend of Exxon attempting to distance itself from culpability for the climate crisis through a mixture of disinformation, denial, and distortion of scientific facts.
Exxon’s legal team is keeping busy. They’re currently embroiled in multiple lawsuits over the company’s role in the climate crisis, and have also taken to gatekeeping the shareholder proposal process by suing “activist investors” who want the company to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, Exxon would prefer to self-monitor, regulate, certify, and celebrate their efforts to clean up and green up. “Certified” gas represents just one of many ways the company has tried to improve its climate-destroying image by greenwashing while offering little tangible evidence of real-world benefit.