CLIMATE RECKONING — A series of recent events is challenging a basic assumption adopted after Donald Trump won a second term last month: Blue states and Europe would pick up the climate mantle amid efforts in Washington to reverse progress. Instead, affordability concerns are sweeping the western world — and in some cases stifling efforts to hold polluters accountable and enact steeper emissions reduction targets. The most stark move comes out of California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom’s air regulators recently announced that they will not penalize companies for failing to comply with requirements to fully disclose greenhouse gas emissions for the first year a landmark state law takes effect in 2026. Climate disclosure advocates are warning that the move threatens to undermine California’s claim at leading the nation in the fight for accountability, with Trump’s election likely to result in the complete pullback of a similar federal rule, your host reports. “Even before Trump won, we knew that the SEC had really scaled back its proposed rule, and we knew that as a result, California's climate leadership was more important than before,” said state Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat who authored the climate disclosure law. “If California isn't leading on climate during the most anti-climate presidential administration in history, then boy, that's an issue, and we're not going to let that happen.” When Newsom signed the laws last year, climate disclosure allies halted pushes for copycat measures in other blue states, including New York, Washington and Illinois, for fear of creating a complex array of different disclosure requirements. Now that there is less certainty about how California will move forward, disclosure advocates are reversing course and are cautiously willing to let other states run. California is also defending against legal challenges to its disclosure regime, while the SEC — in the face of litigation — has stayed its own rule that is doomed to be pulled back after Trump returns. “With [the] SEC likely to pull back under the new administration, we are supportive of other states considering new climate disclosure legislation,” Steven Rothstein, managing director of the nonprofit Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets, said in a statement. “We hope these will be consistent so companies will not have a patchwork of climate disclosures.” Meanwhile, Maryland’s Commission on Climate Change changed its vote last week to recommend the state legislature simply study the creation of an economywide carbon cap, instead of recommending that lawmakers actually adopt a cap-and-invest program. “While I am disappointed the MCCC is not recommending that MD design and implement a C&I program, as recommended in the state's Climate Pollution Reduction Plan, I am pleased there are important steps being taken that will eventually lead us to implement such a program,” said Kim Coble, co-chair of the commission and executive director of the Maryland League of Conservation Voters. It can’t all be left to Brussels, either, given that the European Union’s emissions account for only 6 percent of global pollution. “We clearly have entered a geopolitical winter,” EU climate chief Wopke Hoekstra warned recently in an interview with POLITICO, describing “tremendously challenging geopolitical times” that “will get worse before it gets better in the years that we have ahead of us.” Hoekstra said the bloc needs to balance ambitious climate goals with a business environment that can spur the green transition in the face of competition from the U.S. and China. The EU has to make sure that “heavy industry cannot only survive but actually can strive on European soil, that we give way more room for clean tech, and we make this into a positive business case,” Hoekstra said. “So there we truly bridge between climate and business.”
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