A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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Sarah Bloom Raskin at a meeting in Beijing in 2014 Diego Azubel/EPA/Shutterstock |
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Pay close attention to Sarah Bloom Raskin’s appearance before the Senate Banking Committee tomorrow, as part of her confirmation process. If Federal Reserve politics aren’t usually your thing, make an exception. Raskin’s nomination to vice chair for supervision at the Fed could be monumental for climate policy, Kate Aronoff explains in a piece published today. Raskin is a former member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. And she’s been open about her belief that the Fed should start factoring climate change into its regulation of America’s financial system: |
In The New York Times, Bloom Raskin has criticized no-strings-attached Federal Reserve funds being used to prop up risky, overleveraged fossil fuel companies as part of pandemic bond-buying programs. “The Fed,” she wrote, “is ignoring clear warning signs about the economic repercussions of the impending climate crisis by taking action that will lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions at a time when, even in the short term, fossil fuels are a terrible investment.” In testimony before the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, she said, “Informed decisions allow us to mitigate the financial impact of climate risks and fashion timely remedies ahead of a crisis,” noting the need for financial regulators to “foster the development of climate-related financial risk management technology,” including climate-related financial disclosures and stress tests, like those endorsed by both Jay Powell and the European Central Bank. |
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{{#if }} Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help. Here’s a special offer to subscribe to The New Republic. |
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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{{/if}} Incorporating more realism about climate change into financial regulation could have far-reaching consequences for energy markets—and particularly fossil fuel investment. Naturally, this means that the Chamber of Commerce is going nuts about the nomination. The Chamber’s executive vice president, Tom Quaadman, has already penned a letter to ranking members of both parties suggesting that Raskin is biased against fossil fuels. (This is an emerging narrative on the right: that ending preferential treatment for fossil fuels is somehow discriminatory.) Tomorrow’s hearing could get heated. And the ramifications could be profound, Kate argues: |
The Fed is tasked with ensuring the stability of the financial system as well as full employment, and its policies ripple well beyond U.S. borders, due to the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. Given the estimated $343 billion that climate disasters cost last year, and the 1.1 degrees Celsius of warming of the planet, financial regulators can either consider the threat posed by climate change and the fossil fuel industry’s stranded assets or ignore them and see what happens—as several senators are likely to argue on Thursday. The main threat the right has identified, then, is that Sarah Bloom Raskin might actually do her job. |
Check out Kate’s full piece. You can watch the hearing, beginning at 8:45 a.m. tomorrow, here. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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Samples from protected (and allegedly healthy) old-growth forest in the Peruvian Amazon that lies near small-scale gold-mining operations display 15 times the mercury levels found in other areas, according to an alarming new study in Nature. The songbirds in the area have mercury levels two to 12 times higher than songbirds farther away. |
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Last Thursday, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia handed those concerned about climate change a stunning and unexpected win by ruling against the Biden administration’s enormous oil and gas lease auction in the Gulf of Mexico last November. The administration, the judge ruled, didn’t adequately consider climate change and greenhouse gas emissions from the leases when it held the sale. |
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Eighty percent of the Great Barrier Reef last month experienced temperature minimums higher than previous maximums, putting nearly the entire reef in danger of mass bleaching. At this point, despite Australia’s frantic lobbying, there is every reason to believe the reef will soon be on Unesco’s “in danger” list. |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
The New York Times has a cool feature on groundhogs for Groundhog Day. The animals are typically assumed to be solitary. But observing a network of neighboring groundhogs at the 65-acre Gilsland Farm Audubon Center in Maine, behavioral ecologist Christine Maher has actually found that they have a complex social structure. |
At Gilsland, Dr. Maher has found that roughly half the juveniles remain for a full year in the territory of their birth. When they finally depart, they often stay nearby. “It depends on whether they can strike an agreement with their mother,” Dr. Maher said. “Some moms are willing to do that. Others are not.” Mothers may even bequeath territories to their daughters. Dr. Maher suspected that Athos’s mom had left Athos the family burrow.… The result is a community of related groundhogs whose territories overlap. Some individuals do venture farther afield or arrive from afar, which helps keep the gene pool fresh—but a kinship-based structure remains. Gilsland Farm’s groundhogs could be understood as living in something like a loose-knit clan, its members keeping their distance but still crossing paths and maintaining relations. |
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What Subscribers Are Reading |
The New York Times’ David Leonhardt and others would have you believe that liberal overreaction to the pandemic is as big a problem as the anti-vax right. |
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Legislation with bipartisan support might bring more natural gas online, further imperiling climate targets. |
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