(The New Yorker) The world’s biggest companies—and, indeed, any company or individual with cash in the bank—have been inadvertently fuelling the climate crisis. Such cash, left in banks and other financial institutions that lend to the fossil-fuel industry, builds pipelines and funds oil exploration and, in the process, produces truly immense amounts of carbon. The report raises deep questions about the sanity of our financial system, but it also suggests a potential realignment of corporate players that could move decisively to change the balance of power which has so far thwarted rapid climate action.
…Efforts have missed perhaps the most important source of corporate emissions: the money that these companies earn and then store in banks, equities, and bonds. The consortium of environmental groups—the Climate Safe Lending Network, the Outdoor Policy Outfit, and BankFWD—examined corporate financial statements to find out how much cash the world’s biggest companies had on hand, and then calculated how much carbon each dollar sitting in the financial system may have generated. According to these calculations, Google’s carbon emissions, in effect, would have risen a hundred and eleven per cent overnight. Meta’s emissions would have increased by a hundred and twelve per cent, and Apple’s by sixty-four per cent. For Microsoft in 2021, the report claims, “the emissions generated by the company’s $130 billion in cash and investments were comparable to the cumulative emissions generated by the manufacturing, transporting, and use of every Microsoft product in the world.”
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