Janet Yellen faces climate test as environmentalists push for more aggressive financial action

[brooklynite]

Source: Washington Post

While President Biden has called climate change a “code red” crisis, his treasury secretary is poised to resist calls to ask financial regulators to rein in lending to the nation’s worst greenhouse-gas emitters.


Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen is currently leading a review of what federal banking regulators should do to ensure the financial system is protected from climate-related risks. While the Biden administration pursues separate climate legislation with Congress, environmental groups want Yellen to use the lesser-known financial review process to advance measures to curb or discourage lending from Wall Street banks to companies that produce large amounts of carbon emissions.


These advocates insist that existing federal power to ensure financial stability enables regulators to impose new rules to mitigate climate change. They suggest that unfettered lending to companies responsible for greenhouse gas emissions threatens the broader financial system through economic shocks.


For now, however, Treasury officials appear unlikely to embrace the most dramatic steps pushed by climate advocates, according to interviews with four senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect thinking on a matter not yet finalized.



Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/09/18/treasury-yellen-climate-change/

[aocommunalpunch]

1. 2.7 degrees is a-comin

and we just stick our heads in the sand. We deserve what's coming.

[Kaleva]

3. I spend anywhere from a few minutes to several hours most days preparing for what's coming

The Upper Great Lakes region where I live isn't projected to be as hard hit as others but I expect interruptions in access to commodities and services we take for granted now.

[ancianita]

2. This US government has not learned the lessons of denial and delay from covid.

Yellen's, Big Fossil's and central bankers' denials are signing over their descendants and ours to preventably bad futures that will cascade in with the first major harvest failures.

We are in it now.

Biden is right. There is no amount of preparation that can do anything but soften the blows.
But the blows are here and growing, and every year will bring more.

Our children will demand better and deserve better.

[Kaleva]

4. It may be too late to prevent it

There's been numerous articles posted here where it was reported that respected scientists believe we are very near the tipping point or we are already past the point of no return.

While we may still hope it may still be preventable, I'm not betting my life, my wife's life or the children's' and grandchildren's lives on it so I'm preparing, along with my eldest stepson and son-in-law, as best we can.

[ancianita]

5. You're reading it right. We have passed nine of the 15 listed tipping points, so yes,

they put it mildly because they don't want to "panic" the public. But the public must be angry about being lied to and realities downplayed while big business wants to just make a few more trillion for a few more years.

THIS is the BACKEND crisis propping up that Yellen, Big Fossil and central banks want, at what cost to our children's and grandchildren's actual lives.

In all, 2.3 million bpd of processing capacity, or 13% of the country's total, were put offline, the U.S. Department of Energy estimated. One of the largest plants affected, Exxon Mobil's (XOM.N) 520,000-bpd Baton Rouge complex,began preparations to restart on Tuesday, it said.

Most offshore U.S. Gulf of Mexico oil and gas output was halted with 94% of oil and natural gas production suspended on Tuesday, the U.S. offshore regulator said. A total of 278 production platforms and nine rigs remained evacuated.

More than two dozen oil vessels were moored off Louisiana waiting for ports to reopen, with the largest bottlenecks near Baton Rouge and Lake Charles. [nL1N2Q226D]

"With widespread refinery outages and debris on waterways, we expect no imports into the impacted ports in the coming days," analysis firm ClipperData said in a note to clients.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/floods-outages-stall-oil-firms-efforts-restart-after-ida-2021-08-31/



Notice that there's little recorded since 2018, 2019, but this still reveals the "climate events" we see are being DRIVEN by the planetary events shown on the chart below them.

[Kaleva]

8. I don't think we are being outright lied to but I do think we are being told the full story

I'm talking about our leadership in the Party. Repubs do lie to the public about climate change.

Biden's ambitious plan in dealing with climate change has the goal of delaying the onset of the worst of it. Not to prevent it. But that point isn't stressed. People seem to have the idea that climate change can still prevented.

I think that getting people to prepare to adapt to what climate change is bringing and has brought is a political impossibility. There would be no support for the relocation of millions now rather then later when the situation becomes Biblical. So our leaders don't talk about it.

[marie999]

6. We have 13 great-grand children. The family has been buying land in western NC for them.

The family as a whole and some good friends have been learning how to farm and do other things.

[Kaleva]

7. Some parts of the Appalachian region look pretty good

I f one avodis the areas predicted to be hit by flooding and landslides.