A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it

Amid a week—and really, several years—full of news that Americans can’t agree that life is good and death is bad, that the sky is up and 2 + 2 = 4, I am pleased to report one bit of promising news: We’re finally ditching wasteful light bulbs. 

The U.S. Department of Energy on Tuesday announced new energy efficiency standards that would phase out sales of incandescent bulbs. As New York Times reporter Hiroko Tabuchi pointed out, “much of the country is already lit by LED lights, which the Department of Energy estimates last as much as 50 times as long as incandescent bulbs and use a fraction of the electricity.” Ensuring the entire country is lit by LEDs should have been a no-brainer, since it will save consumers around $3 billion annually on their electric bills and cut over 200 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the next 30 years.

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But in a move framed as “protect[ing] consumer choice,” Trump Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette hit pause on the process in late 2019 (this despite the phaseout of incandescent bulbs having been initiated under a Republican president—George W. Bush). 

There’s hope the phaseout could help address a troubling pattern that’s developed in the past decade, wherein stores serving lower-income communities offer only incandescent or halogen bulbs, which often have a lower sticker price but result in far more money being paid in the long term, both in replacement costs and electrical costs. One analysis from 2017 found that incandescent and halogen bulbs cost four to five times as much over time as LEDs and that “a household using at least 20 light bulbs can save $1,000 or more in a decade” by switching.

Light-bulb news might not sound like the sexiest stuff, but it lands in a week when a shocking number of people have failed to do the absolute bare minimum on climate change. In particular, I’d like to point you to Kate Aronoff’s report on Tuesday’s shareholder meetings at Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo. At each of these meetings, shareholder resolutions were introduced proposing that the banks phase out any lending that would finance new fossil fuel projects. 

This is not radical fare. All these resolutions asked was “that the banks actually act in accordance with the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Roadmap and the U.N. Environment Program Finance Initiative recommendations to the G20 Sustainable Finance Working Group for credible net-zero commitments,” Kate explained. The IEA has been very clear that limiting global warming means no more new fossil fuel projects.

But all three of these resolutions were voted down, despite the support of both New York City and New York state comptrollers and the pension funds they administer. Kate looked at why. Resistance from top executives was one factor:

Bank management … fought these resolutions tooth and nail. The three banks that met today and the three that will meet in coming weeks all asked shareholders to vote against the resolution in public proxy statements distributed to investors in advance of the meeting.

Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley even requested (unsuccessfully) that the Securities and Exchange Commission toss out the nonbinding resolution, arguing it would “impose inflexible and far-reaching restrictions” on the bank’s day-to-day business. 

Asset management companies like Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard likely also played a role. I’d urge you to read Kate’s piece in full. And for the ultimate shot-chaser pairing, I’d suggest reading it alongside these banks’ tweets from just four days ago, congratulating themselves on their Earth Day environmentalism:

Just don’t get involved by introducing shareholder resolutions to reduce lending to fossil fuels, apparently.

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