Category:

Climate, Environment, Renewable Energy

US, Norwegian investors pressure SBI over loan to Adani mine in Australia

BlackRock, which holds shares of both Adani and SBI, has met with the companies tied to the Carmichael project and raised its objections because the plan has ESG-related risks, according to a person familiar with the matter, who declined to be identified because the conversations are private. In February, BlackRock rebuked Siemens AG for similar reasons when it signed an 18 million-euro ($21.8 million) contract to provide rail-signaling systems for the mine.

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North American farmers profit as consumers pressure food business to go green

Investments in sustainability remain a tiny part of overall spending by the agriculture sector, which enjoyed healthy profits in 2020. They may help to head off more costly regulations down the road now that Democratic climate advocate Joe Biden was elected U.S. president.
Sustainable techniques farmers are adopting include refraining from tilling soil at times to preserve carbon. Some are adding an off-season cover crop of rye or grass to restore soil nutrients instead of applying heavy fertilizer loads over the winter that can contaminate local water supplies.

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“Biodiversity provides medicine and food of good quality and fights against climate risk, it makes sense to protect it”

Biodiversity-loss-among-very-top-risks:Axa’s AXA’s Chief Risk and Investment Officer AXA Group’s chief risk and investment officer, Alban de Mailly Nesle is required to ponder myriad dangers to the Paris-based insurer and its 830 billion-euro ($995 billion) asset management arm. He says one of the greatest and most under-appreciated threats to human health, economic vitality and the climate is the rapid reduction of the planet’s biodiversity.

In 1993, when he started his career at BNP Paribas SA, he didn’t imagine the earth’s ecosystems would become a top priority. But last year, AXA – the firm he joined in 2000 – and the WWF presented a report to the environment ministers of the Group of Seven countries about the economic impact of biodiversity loss.

De Mailly Nesle speaks to Bloomberg about biodiversity, its link to the climate, and the challenges of measuring so-called natural capital.

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New Zealand declares climate emergency, promises carbon neutral govt by 2025

In her first term she passed a Zero Carbon Bill, which sets the framework for net zero emissions by 2050 with an exemption for farming, and banned new offshore oil and gas exploration.

Nearly half of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, mainly methane.

The government on Wednesday promised the public sector will achieve carbon neutrality by 2025. Government agencies would have to measure and report emissions and offset any they can’t cut by 2025.

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Battery costs fall, make electric vehicles cheaper – BMI

BMI estimates that between 2014 and 2017 the price of battery cells fell 16.5% per annum, but between 2017 and 2020 the drop was only 5.8% per annum.
“We may have seen the last of the big easy wins for lithium-ion battery producers in reducing cost.It is now about reducing and stabilising the cost of your biggest input raw materials such as lithium, nickel, graphite, cobalt and manganese,”,”BMI Managing Director Simon Moores said.

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Biden plan to end U.S. fossil fuel subsidies faces big challenges

Doing away with tax breaks on producers of fuels that emit greenhouse gases would fit neatly with Biden’s pro-climate agenda, which marks a reversal from Trump’s efforts to roll back climate regulations while boosting fossil fuel output.

It would help establish the United States as a global leader on climate, potentially helping convince other big emitters to axe fossil fuel subsidies.

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