How Wall Street Turned Its Back on Climate Change | Six years after the financial industry pledged to use trillions to fight climate change and reshape finance, its efforts have largely collapsed.
How Wall Street Turned Its Back on Climate Change | Six years after the financial industry pledged to use trillions to fight climate change and reshape finance, its efforts have largely collapsed.
It’s useful to know more than a trillion dollars was invested in addressing climate change in 2025, and on practical things like EVs, BESS, solar farms, wind farms and grid upgrades.
With Tesla being part of the S&P 500 we are all investors in fighting climate change.
tech01x on
Reality is that folks started to adopt ESG as a means to look like they are doing something, and that ended up being a disaster. It made the appearance of doing something much more important than actually doing something, and DEI was a center piece of how they could appear to be doing something useful when they really were not.
Meanwhile, actual energy investors know that renewables had become the smart business decision, between lower costs and government incentives and regulations. Therefore most of the new capacity being built has been renewables.
BigMax on
A lot changes when the government (and seemingly a lot of the people) do an about face on the topic.
“Hey, if we do the right thing, the government will support us and people will like us too! Let’s do it!”
Later…
“Hmm, if we do the right thing, the government won’t care and might even get angry with us, and it turns out people don’t really care all that much anyway…”
Splenda on
>Republican politicians joined conservative activists, including groups funded by the fossil fuel industry, to engineer a sweeping pushback at what they saw as corporate America’s attempt to advance liberal policies. Their tactics involved filing lawsuits, passing laws, pulling funds out of Wall Street accounts and using social media to tarnish the reputation of individual executives
It’s almost as if Republicans have been paid to do this.
6 Comments
As Al Gore called it, an inconvenient truth.
It’s useful to know more than a trillion dollars was invested in addressing climate change in 2025, and on practical things like EVs, BESS, solar farms, wind farms and grid upgrades.
With Tesla being part of the S&P 500 we are all investors in fighting climate change.
Reality is that folks started to adopt ESG as a means to look like they are doing something, and that ended up being a disaster. It made the appearance of doing something much more important than actually doing something, and DEI was a center piece of how they could appear to be doing something useful when they really were not.
Meanwhile, actual energy investors know that renewables had become the smart business decision, between lower costs and government incentives and regulations. Therefore most of the new capacity being built has been renewables.
A lot changes when the government (and seemingly a lot of the people) do an about face on the topic.
“Hey, if we do the right thing, the government will support us and people will like us too! Let’s do it!”
Later…
“Hmm, if we do the right thing, the government won’t care and might even get angry with us, and it turns out people don’t really care all that much anyway…”
>Republican politicians joined conservative activists, including groups funded by the fossil fuel industry, to engineer a sweeping pushback at what they saw as corporate America’s attempt to advance liberal policies. Their tactics involved filing lawsuits, passing laws, pulling funds out of Wall Street accounts and using social media to tarnish the reputation of individual executives
It’s almost as if Republicans have been paid to do this.
People don’t care about climate change