Editor’s note: dilly-dallying, defamation and due diligence
The latest edition of our Sustainable Views newsletter
Dear reader,
First, we bring you the much-awaited breaking news that the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive lives to see another day. There were fears that Germany’s decision not to support the bill would kill it, but instead Belgium, holder of the six-month rotating EU presidency, opted to take the issue off the agenda in today’s meeting of EU member states.
Sustainable Views understands that various countries, including France, Luxembourg, Hungary and Bulgaria, also came up with last-minute objections to some of the finer details of the directive. The CSDDD now totters on into next week.
Meanwhile, Claudia has done a sterling job of trawling through all the regulatory, business and financial changes to bring you this week’s ESG news.
Alex and I covered yesterday’s decision by the UK opposition Labour party to ditch its flagship pledge to invest £28bn annually in green energy. Instead, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer announced his party, if elected to lead the UK in the next general election, would spend £24bn over the entire next parliament, equivalent to just under £5bn a year.
While some commentators were phlegmatic about the decision, others expressed their deep dismay, suggesting that scaling down investment plans was sending very much the wrong message to the cleantech industry about the UK’s industrial intentions.
“This is a terrible, terrible signal that Labour is sending to investors.The more we hesitate [and] make U-turns and zigzags and flip-flopping on these commitments to invest, the more investors will be scared and reluctant,” says François Gemenne, a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report and finance professor at HEC business school in Paris.
In other climate news, US climate scientist Michael Mann, who I have had the pleasure to interview on several occasions, has won in his case against rightwing bloggers, who had accused him of academic fraud and compared him to a notorious child molester. The verdict, in which he has won more than $1mn in damages, ends a 12-year defamation case.
Mann said in a statement he hoped the verdict would send a message “that falsely attacking climate scientists is not protected speech”.
Best known for his “hockey stick” graph that showed the dramatic rise in global warming since the industrial revolution, Mann has been director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania since September 2022.
For anyone looking for some weekend (or holiday) reading, I can thoroughly recommend Mann’s last two books. His 2021 book The New Climate War deals with the politics of climate change and the solutions needed to bring down emissions, while his latest tome, Our Fragile Moment, is aimed at “explaining to climate activists and advocates that it is not too late” to act, though he is clear about the need for urgent political action.
Next week, Alex will be in charge of the newsletter as I hopefully enjoy some winter sun and snow in the Alps.
Have a good weekend,
Philippa
Philippa Nuttall is the deputy editor of Sustainable Views
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