Transition Finance Weekly - December 5, 2024
Texas Attacks ESG Again, Vought’s Plan to Fire Scientists, Fla. Insurance Collapse
1. Republican AGs Accuse Asset Managers of Coordination Over Coal Policies
GOP states have gone judge-shopping in Texas to protect dirty energy.
11 states led by Texas have filed a dangerous federal lawsuit charging BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street with violating antitrust law by using shareholder resolutions and other tactics to press coal plants to lower emissions and by applying ESG principles to investment decisions. It’s part of a broader right-wing campaign to put politics ahead of rational investing and postpone the inevitable decline of fossil fuels.
The suit’s claims are a perversion of cartel law, given that climate change is objectively real and driven by emissions. Furthermore, the decline of the coal industry is largely the result of the shale boom, not the strategies of asset managers with massive investments in fossil fuels.
Texans have suffered as the state’s grid faltered following failures in fossil fuel generation. But the Northern District of Texas is so politicized that a bad-faith ruling is possible, which would constrain the rights of investors to act rationally — and set an alarming precedent.
Axios’s Felix Salmon: “Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, along with 10 of his colleagues, is attempting to use the U.S. judicial system to forcibly derail the global consensus that investors can and must play an important role in the transition to a net-zero world.”
2. Clean Energy Is Transforming Texas — and Saving Lives
Solar makes the grid resilient to storms, and even fossil-backed legislators can’t stop it.
Texas has installed more solar capacity in less than a year than 39 states have installed in total — and it’s going to save lives. The growth of solar cuts the risk of a winter blackout like the one caused by natural gas failures in 2021, which killed hundreds.
State legislators tried in 2023 to stall the growth of renewables, and they’ll try again in 2025. They’re subsidizing fossil fuel generation to try to help it stay ahead of the increasingly favorable economics of renewables. But Texas solar capacity keeps growing — by a factor of 15 in just five years.
3. Florida’s Public Insurer Rejects Claims, as Regulators Attack Critics
The state’s insurance system is “on the brink of collapse.”
As climate events cause rain and flooding to spike and the state’s insurance crisis escalates, a Weiss Ratings analysis shows Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance rejected more than half of claims last year, more than any other insurer — even though it made a $746 million profit after years of double-digit premium increases.
How is the state responding to the mounting alarm? By harassing Weiss Ratings with a subpoena from insurance regulators who aim to silence them, demanding text messages and other corporate records, even though public data already substantiates Weiss’s conclusions.
Things are poised to get worse in Florida, with new state laws that allow unregulated insurers and help Citizens dump policyholders. That could potentially further hollow out coverage and send premiums even higher. And by law, homeowners can’t even sue; disputes go to an administrative law court headed by a DeSantis appointee.
Sun-Sentinel editorial board: “Don’t mistake these demands for anything other than yet another Tallahassee attack on independent thought. Gov. Ron DeSantis has turned Florida into a petri dish for some of Project 2025’s most noxious goals, including quashing any truth contradicting the government’s official line.”
4. Virginia Must Stay in Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative
Gov. Youngkin tried to bypass the law, but a judge said no.
In 2021, by action of the General Assembly, Virginia joined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state cap-and-trade partnership requiring utilities to buy allowances for their emissions. The money comes back to the states, to spend on energy efficiency and flood resiliency.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin withdrew from the program last year through a regulatory change, but in a lawsuit by environmental groups, Floyd County Judge Randall Lowe has ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, saying the Governor had no authority to countermand legislators. He ordered the state to repeal the regulatory change and remain in the partnership.
Walton Shepherd, League of Conservation Voters Virginia director: “[A]s we witness the grim toll of the increasingly dangerous weather in a warming world, today’s decision is good news for all Virginians.”
5. Trump Administration Aims to Unwind Climate-Related Worker Protections
Draft OSHA rules protecting workers from extreme heat will likely stall.
Biden Administration OSHA standards for heat safety in the workplace, which would protect vulnerable outdoor workers in industries like farming and construction, are likely to be killed by the Trump administration. Employer-side law firms expect the new rules will simply “melt away” after the transition.
As we continue seeing record-breaking summers, states have been taking action. Colorado, Washington, and California, among others, already have state rules. But workers in states like Florida count on federal rules. Gov. Jeb Bush disbanded Florida’s state workplace safety program in 2000, and a 2021 GOP proposal to create a new one went nowhere. DeSantis has signed a law prohibiting local heat protection ordinances, and some local governments are unsympathetic; Orange County rejected teachers’ demands for heat protections in classrooms without air conditioning.
6. Trump Picks Project 2025 Author Russell Vought to Purge Federal Employees
With Vought at the OMB, 50,000 career civil servants will be at risk, including every climate scientist.
Project 2025 is the blueprint for the next Trump term, and Russell Vought wrote the section detailing how to derail and dismantle climate action. If he’s confirmed as Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), he could realize his goal of a “whole-of–government unwinding” — including killing almost every federal climate program.
Terminating climate action at the federal level starts with firing scientists. Vought has vowed to “purge federal agencies of nonpartisan experts” and replace them with “partisan loyalists who would willingly follow any order without question, regardless of whether it was legal, constitutional, or the right thing to do for the people.” In practice, this starts by reclassifying civil servants under Schedule F as “at-will” employees.
Mass firings would destroy the credibility of world-leading federal agencies like NOAA and the National Weather Service, essentially withdrawing the United States from the global scientific effort to understand and react to climate change — with damaging consequences for generations.
This alarming video of Vought being interviewed by Tucker Carlson will give you an idea of how much destruction he could wreak.
