2.8C & counting

Illustration: Kate Dehler

2.8C and counting applies as banks start to renege on supporting environmentally friendly projects because it costs too much to do business due to regulatory demands but you already know that, right?

What might otherwise have been a staid conference took an unexpected turn as Berkey, group head of engagement and regulatory strategy at UBS, interjected. The finance industry was being asked to align loans, investments and capital-markets portfolios with a global warming trajectory of 1.5C, while the planet may in fact be hurtling toward a 2.8C increase from pre-industrial times, he noted.

The upshot: The world’s biggest banks can’t live up to the green regulatory ideal unless they start dumping huge numbers of clients worldwide at a reckless pace and also roil economies in large swathes of the globe that primarily rely on dirty fuels. Faced with that dilemma, many lenders are quietly reeling in their climate ambitions.

Remember, it's all about the money, always has been, always will be.

Fast forward to 2050 and think what the world will be like, frightening to the max comes to mind here.

And so it goes. - K. Vonnegut