The Battle To Unionize Amazon's Alabama Warehouse Started Right Here

Dave Jamieson
·Labor Reporter, HuffPost
Tue, March 16, 2021

Union organizers from the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union rally support as workers change shifts outside Amazon's fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, in March. (Photo: Bob Miller for HuffPost)

BESSEMER, Ala. ― The most closely watched union campaign in years began at the entrances to an Amazon warehouse here last October. Five months later, workers and organizers are still standing at the same posts day and night, determined not to let up until the ballots are counted at the end of March.

If the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union wins this fight to create the first union within Amazon’s U.S. workforce, the victory will have been seeded right here.

“Every gate is really important. It’s how you start organizing,” said José Aguilar, a union representative stationed at an entrance one day last week.


Aguilar, 48, was working the evening shift as the sun set and the temperature hung near 70 degrees ― the most pleasant weather he could ask for while standing on a sidewalk for a few hours. He held a union sign and waved as a worker leaving the parking lot pulled up to the traffic light, headed home. Aguilar’s colleagues stood at two other spots down the road.

He tried to explain why he’s stood at the entrances since the fall, sometimes for 10 consecutive days.

“If [workers] stop and have questions, we answer the questions,” Aguilar said. “If they come and we left, and they don’t see nobody, they’re gonna say, ‘They don’t care.’”

Union representative José Aguilar has stood at the warehouse entrances to talk to workers about the union since the fall, sometimes for 10 consecutive days. (Photo: Bob Miller for HuffPost)

Posting workers and organizers at the facility gates is a standard feature of industrial organizing campaigns, since unions don’t have access to worksites and don’t receive workers’ contact information until an election is scheduled. That means having to approach workers on public property right outside to make the case for why they should organize.

The entrance is where organizers amassed many of the 3,000 union cards workers signed. Signing a card indicates you authorize the union to represent you, but in reality it just means you’re game for a secret-ballot election. Once a union gathers cards from 30% of the expected bargaining unit, it can trigger an election through the National Labor Relations Board, though unions typically try to gather a greater share, to be more confident they have majority support.

The entrance is also where union organizers built trust and relationships with workers coming and going from the warehouse. And it’s where they endured frigid temperatures, the occasional cussing, and a lot of boredom between warehouse shift changes.

The RWDSU’s work at the gates has been unusually important for this campaign, given the size of the potential bargaining unit. With 5,800 workers, it appears to be the biggest union election under the National Labor Relations Board in two decades. Their conversations have also been a crucial source of intelligence on Amazon’s anti-union campaign unfolding inside the facility.

Mona Darby, 63, said she has spent so much time interacting with workers at the entrances that she knows which ones would make good union reps if the RWDSU wins. She said some workers will specifically ask to see “Ms. Mona” on their way out.

“You remember the cars. You remember the faces,” said Darby, who works as an inspector at a poultry plant a few hours away and serves as the president of her union local. “Certain ones stop by all the time to talk to you. If the light changes [green], they’ll keep going and holler at you.”

Mona Darby, who works as an inspector at a poultry plant a few hours away and serves as the president of her union local, said she has spent so much time interacting with workers at the Amazon warehouse entrances that she knows which ones would make good reps if the employees unionize. (Photo: Bob Miller for HuffPost)

Working the entrances takes backbone. Darby said one particular man leaving the facility ― “the white guy in the truck” ― often heckles them. There have been times when someone would pull up in a car, post up across the street at night and watch the organizers in silence. Early on in the campaign, she said, a white man told her he didn’t want her “Black ass” around the warehouse.

Joshua Brewer, the RWDSU’s lead organizer for the Amazon campaign, said the union made a strategic decision early on to never leave their spots ― except for Christmas Day. At first, union members and organizers held the posts around the clock, so that no worker left the facility without passing them.

Several of the union members who are organizing work in poultry plants, and they wore industrial freezer gear to battle temperatures that dropped into the teens. Warehouse workers could see them jumping around to stay warm. Eventually, the union pulled back on the midshift hours, when they were unlikely to encounter much traffic.

Brewer, who spent many days at the entrances himself, said there is a fine line between showing dedication and looking a little sad.

“We didn’t want the workers worrying about us,” he said with a laugh.

In Brewer’s office in downtown Birmingham, about 25 minutes from the warehouse, there is a laminated poster showing a blown-up satellite image of the warehouse, with symbols at each spot where workers enter or leave, along with organizers’ names in dry-erase marker denoting their schedules there.

Brewer said he and other organizers were stunned at how rapidly Amazon workers signed union cards in the fall. Some of those cards were signed online due to the pandemic, but the union says a majority of them were paper cards with signatures. That legwork is essential to any organizing effort.

The red light at the main entrance offers organizers only a short window of time to talk to workers. As the news organization More Perfect Union reported, the light sequence was changed in the middle of the union campaign, allowing less time. Amazon had asked the county to alter the sequence late last year, and the county said it changed it because of traffic backups.

Some union organizers anticipate still being at the warehouse gates even after the union organizing ballots are counted. Either Amazon or the union may challenge ballots that are cast, and it could be several days or weeks before it’s clear whether the union won. (Photo: Bob Miller for HuffPost)

Tray Ragland, a poultry worker who has been at the entrances for several weeks, said he often ends up swapping numbers with employees so an organizer can speak to them later.

“I’m trying to get everything out as fast as I can at the red light,” Ragland said.

Darby said her most productive shift led to a dozen cards in a three-hour span. Some workers hopped out of their cars at the red light and signed them right against a streetlight pole; some signed them in a nearby bus shelter. Others were understandably afraid of managers seeing them talking to organizers near the property, so the union set up a tent with RWDSU signage a little less than a mile away, outside a Circle K. Organizers at the entrances would steer workers to the tent.

Randy Hadley, president of the RWDSU’s Mid-South Council, recalled that the day after they erected the tent he noticed the car dealership across the street had run an Amazon flag up one of the flagpoles. He took it as a sign of disapproval of the union.

But the cards kept coming. Brewer would stash them in piles on top of a bookshelf in his office. One day when he encountered some Amazon managers at the warehouse entrance, he held up a stack of signed cards. He suggested Amazon voluntarily recognize the union, eliminating the need for an election, and then “everyone can go home.” They declined Brewer’s offer.

The union stopped gathering cards once an election was scheduled to begin in February. Since then, the effort on the ground has mostly been about building rapport. Ragland said most of those who will vote seem to have made up their minds already, with less than two weeks left in voting. In recent days he has spoken to a few workers who already voted against the union but regret it.

“They say, ‘Dang, I wish I voted yes now,’” he said.

Darby and Aguilar anticipate still being at the gates even after the ballots are counted. Either Amazon or the union may challenge ballots that are cast, and it could be several days or weeks before it’s clear whether the union won. In the meantime, Darby said it’s important that workers still see her face.

“We didn’t want them to think we got these cards and then abandoned them,” she said.

Related...

Why Amazon Insisted On An In-Person Union Election During A Raging Pandemic

Amazon Workers' Fight To Unionize Draws Help From Around The World

The Amazon Union Election Is Unusual. Amazon's Robust Anti-Union Campaign Isn't.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

Democrats saved union pensions after Teamsters Hoffa's long campaign

Jonathan Allen
Tue, March 16, 2021

WASHINGTON — No one knows better that elections have consequences than labor union leaders, who secured an $83 billion pension-fund bailout in President Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan Act.

"Without Joe Biden winning, and we won the two Senate seats in Georgia and we were able to do reconciliation, none of this would’ve happened," James P. Hoffa, the general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said in a telephone interview with NBC News. "The Republicans weren’t going to do it.

The Teamsters' Central States pension fund, covering nearly 400,000 workers and retirees, is the marquee beneficiary of pension provisions attached to the larger relief bill. But labor leaders say as many as 200 plans will be shored up, providing direct benefit to as many as 1.5 million people in the short term, and many more overall.

"That means the difference between eating and not eating, and having a good retirement and one where you’re basically out there working trying to survive," Hoffa said. "The No. 1 priority, we've solved it."

This account of the Teamsters' drive to save retirement plans for millions of pensioners is drawn from interviews with several of the union's officials, congressional sources and the public record. It begins with one Hoffa, the late Teamsters chief James R. Hoffa, and the Central States pension fund he started. And it ends with a years long campaign by his son, James P. Hoffa, to work the levers of influence in Washington to salvage the retirement money of union members.

Every Republican voted against the Covid-19 relief measure, and many of them specifically targeted the pension legislation for derision because they said it was an expensive gift from Democratic leaders to labor allies that would be funded by taxpayers.

"Americans know this bill will benefit states and unions that have been poorly mismanaged," Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., said on the House floor.

Over time, union rolls have dwindled, meaning there have not been enough active workers contributing to pension funds to meet the obligations owed to retirees. Officials with the Teamsters union point to Washington's deregulation of transportation industries in the 1970s and '80s as a driver of the problem. The markets played a role, too, with busts taking an enormous toll on the Central States fund and similar multiemployer union pensions.

The Central States fund was due to go broke by 2025 without assistance, and many of its beneficiaries had already suffered cuts in their checks as a result of a 2014 law that allowed pension trustees to approve reductions in an effort to remain solvent.

That law, part of a broader budget measure signed by President Barack Obama, kicked the Teamsters into overdrive because it paved the way for pension plans to slash benefits for retirees to stay afloat. Worse yet, the unfunded liabilities were massive enough to push the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation into oblivion.

Democrats stepped in this month with the proposal to pump money into the troubled pensions.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., said during House consideration of the American Rescue Plan Act that he doesn't think of the pension provisions as a bailout.

"It's a backstop," said Neal, who sponsored the pension measure before it was folded into the American Rescue Plan Act. "If we didn't come to the support of these pensions, it would take down the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures pensions for Americans in the private sector."

Republicans, of course, saw things differently.

"They will continue to be chronically underfunded," Rep. Tom Rice of South Carolina, said. "This problem needs to be fixed, but this plan does nothing to fix the problem."

Teamsters labour union James P. Hoffa speaks at a news conference regarding truck drivers striking against what they say are misclassification of workers at the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles in Long Beach (Bob Riha Jr / Reuters file)

About seven years ago, Hoffa tapped John Murphy, a senior vice president for the Teamsters, to build a lobbying campaign that combined a dedicated team in the union's Washington office and grassroots pressure from union-retiree constituents calling and visiting lawmakers.

The Teamsters and other labor leaders brought Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to a town hall meeting in Detroit in July 2018 to talk to several hundred union members. At the time, they were pushing Washington to help with a less-generous loan program backed by Treasury bonds.

"We have a defined challenge to our country that we should not be facing, because it's just not fair and it's just not right," Pelosi told the crowd, according to The Detroit News. Every time she saw Hoffa in recent years, she would greet him with the word "pensions" before he could get it out. When Democrats took control of the House in 2019, Pelosi moved the loan-program bill through the House. But it was dead on arrival in the Senate, where then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., opposed the costly fix.

Then, when Democrats won power in the Senate in January on the strength of a pair of run-off election victories in Georgia, the dynamics of the pension issue changed dramatically. Instead of asking unions to address their pension liabilities through a loan program, Democrats saw an opportunity to inject tens of billions of dollars of relief into the multiemployer pensions to keep them solvent for the next few decades.

Biden, who framed much of his campaign around rebuilding unions as a path to strengthening the middle class, was on board. Hoffa spoke to him repeatedly about the issue during the 2020 election cycle.

"He said 'I'll be there,'" Hoffa said. "He was very well aware of it."

But Democrats hold very thin margins in the House and Senate. Any defection could have scrapped the provision or the whole bill.

Murphy was so glued to his television screen during overnight Senate votes on March 5 and 6 that his wife told him he needed to "get a hobby" that didn't involve tracking procedural maneuvers in the wee hours.

He grew more nervous when Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., voted with Republicans on an unrelated amendment that would have shortened the relief bill's bonus unemployment benefits from September to July. But when Manchin later gave Democrats a 50-49 majority on an amendment changing the horizon to Sept. 6, Murphy's spirits lifted.

"It wasn’t until he came back home on that unemployment that I really felt good that we were going to do it," Murphy said. "It was razor-thin."

'Our ancestors' dreams come true': 

Deb Haaland becomes the nation's most powerful Native American leader

Marco della Cava and Deborah Barfield Berry, USA TODAY

Mon, March 15, 2021, 

LONG READ

More than a dozen years ago, Alvin Warren’s phone rang. He was handling Indian affairs for New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and knew all the key people in his field.

“She said her name was Deb Haaland,” Warren recalled. “I’d never heard of her.”

Haaland was volunteering for the presidential campaign of a senator named Barack Obama, and she wanted Warren to travel to the Laguna Pueblo, the Native American enclave Haaland hailed from, to speak to locals about the election’s importance.

When Warren arrived, he found potluck food and 20 people. Haaland apologized for the low turnout. He waved her off, impressed by the unknown activist's embrace of grassroots politics and tireless work ethic.

Fast forward since then and the number of people who have heard of Haaland has grown exponentially. Now that same political savvy she used to mobilize Native voters in 2008 for a victorious Obama has helped her once again make history.

Haaland, 60, was confirmed Monday as President Joe Biden's Interior Secretary, making the former New Mexico congresswoman, who took office in 2019, not just the most powerful Native American politician in the nation's history, but also the first one to run a department whose centuries of broken promises and benign neglect has contributed to the slow erosion of Indigenous culture.

Deb Haaland has become the first Native American to be secretary of the Interior, a position that traditionally has held negative sway over Indian country. Native activists are hopeful Haaland's confirmation leads to changes for the nearly 600 federal tribes across the United States.

The Cabinet post requires balancing the competing needs of disparate factions, including energy companies looking to extract mineral rights, conservation groups hoping to preserve the national parks, and, significantly, Native activists who will look to Haaland's oversight of the department's Bureau of Indian Affairs to help fix inadequate healthcare, poor education and crumbling infrastructure. Haaland is the nation's first Native American Cabinet member.

Native American hopes already are soaring.

"The history of federal Indian policy has been a history of people who had no idea what was best for us,” said Warren, who works on Native education issues for the non-profit Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation in Española, New Mexico. “To have someone in that position who has lived our experience, who knows the beauty of our culture, of our family traditions, of our struggles, you can’t overstate the impact of that."

Alicia Ortega, founder of Albuquerque-based advocacy group Native Women Lead, said simply, “It’s our ancestors' dreams come true."

South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, the House majority whip making history as the highest-ranking African American in Congress, pushed Biden to nominate Haaland, arguing for the historical importance of having a Native American at Interior.

“It was time to break that ceiling," he said.

Haaland senses the magnitude of the moment.

“A voice like mine has never been a Cabinet secretary or at the head of the Department of the Interior,” she tweeted after her nomination. “It’s profound to think about the history of this country’s policies to exterminate Native Americans and the resilience of our ancestors that gave me a place here today.”

Haaland declined an interview with USA TODAY before her confirmation hearing, but conversations with nearly two dozen friends, peers and critics tell a fundamentally American story whose cinematic arc defies the elitist cliches that often shadow lawmakers.

New Mexico Congresswoman Deb Haaland is shown here in 2018 speaking to supporters during a visit to the Albuquerque Indian Center in Albuquerque, N.M.

Haaland has a hardscrabble, mixed-race, military-family backstory that includes working as a baker after high school and, later, selling salsa from her car to make ends meet. Four days after graduating college at age 33, she gave birth to her only child, daughter Somáh, who is now an activist in her own right supporting Native and LGBTQ causes.

The single mother struggled financially, bunking with friends when money ran short. Then in her 40s and 50s, self-realization: personal passions such as cooking and long-distance running mixed with increasingly important political roles that led to Congress, where she was likely among a few lawmakers still paying off up to $50,000 in student loan debt.

Friends describe a woman with both a huge appetite for life and a natural gift for politics who cares deeply, whether it's mentoring young people of color, collecting food for the homeless or fighting for civil rights causes.

“She’s not in it for the fame or the glory," said New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. "She’s in it to see real results.”

From selling salsa to the halls of Congress

Debra Anne Haaland, known as Deb, was born December 2, 1960, in Winslow, Arizona. A military brat and one of five children, Haaland attended 13 public schools around the country before settling in New Mexico.

Haaland's sense of service was seeded by her parents. Her mother, Mary Toya, was in the Navy and worked as a federal employee in Indian education, while her father, John David, also known as J.D. and "Dutch," was a 30-year Marine who was awarded the Silver Star for saving six lives in Vietnam.

Debra Haaland, a Democratic candidate for Congress, speaks at her Albuquerque, N.M., headquarters in June 2018, as volunteers seek last-minute voters for the Democratic nomination for an open congressional seat in central New Mexico.

Although Haaland is proud of her father's Norwegian heritage — The Norwegian American trumpeted her 2018 Congressional win with the headline "Norwegian American Deb Haaland makes history" — her mother's Pueblo Indian roots are foundational to her identity and were reflected in the elaborate turquoise, black and red outfit Haaland wore for her swearing-in ceremony.

There are upward of 600 Native American federally and state-recognized tribes around the United States and two dozen of them are made up of Pueblo enclaves scattered across New Mexico.

Many Native Americans were marched at gunpoint by federal troops off their land and onto reservations that held no historical meaning. But Pueblo Indians have a history of resistance — including the infamous Pueblo Revolt in 1680 that temporarily chased the Spanish from New Mexico — that has kept them on ancestral lands for the past 7,000 years. Haaland often says she is a 35th generation New Mexican.

A combination of a duty to serve and a dedication to her people quickly came to define Haaland's life.

Although Haaland was an English major, political science professor Fred Harris, who led the Democratic National Committee in the late '60s and ran for president in the early '70s, sensed a likeminded soul when they met in his politics class at the University of New Mexico.

“You could tell right away this was a very smart and very committed person,” said Harris, who successfully convinced Haaland to apply to law school a few years later.

More lean times followed as she worked her way through graduate school doing a variety of jobs, including making and selling Pueblo Salsa. At one particularly dire juncture, she and Somáh were sharing a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate when financial concerns led them to move out and find shelter with friends.

After she graduated from the University of New Mexico Law School in 2006, Haaland's political activism took wing, leading to steady jobs that eased her financial worries.

Leslie Begay, left, speaks with Rep. Deb Haaland, D-New Mexico, in a hallway outside a congressional field hearing in 2019 in Albuquerque, N.M.

After volunteering for Obama's first campaign by getting out the Native vote, she landed top jobs at both the Laguna and San Felipe Pueblos, where she oversaw tribal gaming and implemented environmentally friendly business practices such as recycling. In 2012, she helped Obama win re-election as the state's vote director for Native Americans, and then served as Native caucus chair for the state Democratic party.

Haaland's horizons, once clouded by financial and housing insecurity, were becoming as vast and inviting as the great desert plains of her home state.
Why run for office? 'Why not?'

In 2014, Haaland decided to run for New Mexico lieutenant governor alongside gubernatorial hopeful and state Attorney General Gary King. Native activist Warren, who stayed in touch with Haaland after their meeting at the Laguna Pueblo, remembers asking her why she had decided to run for a state leadership post.

Haaland looked at Warren and said simply, "Why not?"

"That struck me. So many of us, especially Native women, have had the message delivered to us that we aren’t the ones who run for office," said Warren. "But Deb said ‘I won’t let that restrict me.’”

It is a message she has been keen to pass along to a new generation of activists. While running for lieutenant governor, Haaland received an email from a college student who was inspired by seeing a Native American woman aiming for high office. The student, Paulene Abeyta, asked how she could help.

Rep. Debra Haaland, at the podium, seeks support from local party delegates at the Democratic Party preprimary convention in Pojoaque, N.M., in March 2020. Haaland has been working on Native American causes since volunteering for presidential hopeful Barack Obama's campaign in 2008.

Haaland replied immediately. “She told me, ‘You can run for office, too,’ So I did,” said Abeyta, who went on to win a school board seat. She is now a third-year law student at the University of Arizona and president of the National Native American Law School Students Association.

“There’s tons of us she’s inspired, she’s awakened," said Abeyta, who is Navajo.

Haaland lost her bid for lieutenant governor, but instead of retreating she successfully set her sights on leading the state's Democratic Party. The two-year term started in 2015, a job that often found her visiting the state's 33 geographically distant counties to increase Democratic voter rolls alongside vice-chair Juan Sanchez.

Haaland's passion for the state and its deep Native history was always on display. “We couldn’t drive past a hill or a mountain without her telling me the significance of it to her people," said Sanchez.

He also bore witness to her kindness toward strangers, something often observed by the congresswoman's friends. One cross-state trip started at 4 a.m., and by the time the pair stopped at a filling station in the town of Truth or Consequences, they were famished.

As gas filled the tank, Haaland stocked up on Cheez-Its and Chex Mix.

"I was so excited to eat,” Sanchez recalled. “As we pulled out, we saw a guy with a sign, ‘Hungry, anything helps.’ Deb stopped, gave him all our food and four hours later we finally ate. That's just who she is."

Haaland's dedicated work across New Mexico did not go unnoticed. Lujan Grisham remains impressed by the way Haaland took the state’s Democratic party “and rebuilt it and cemented a platform for success that continues to this day.”

Much like Stacey Abrams' groundbreaking work in Georgia for the Democrats, Haaland is credited with helping members of her party regain New Mexico's House of Representatives and secretary of state posts in 2016.

Democratic Congressional candidate Sharice Davids talks to supporters at her campaign office in October 2018 in Overland Park, Kansas.

In 2018, she ran against five Democrats in the state's 1st Congressional District, which is 68% white. With a progressive platform that included Medicare-for-all, $15 minimum wage and renewable energy, she won 40% of the vote. She then handily beat Republican counterpart Janice Arnold-Jones for the congressional seat — in doing so becoming only the second Native American woman in Congress after Kansas Democrat Sharice Davids, who hails from Wisconsin's Ho-Chunk Nation.

Last fall, Haaland's campaign efforts helped her handily win again, helped by the blue tide that surged in reaction to the presidency of Donald Trump. In a few Instagram posts last fall under the name CoffeeQueer, daughter Somáh shared photos of her mother washing the family dogs ahead of Election Day.

“You guys, my mom is working so hard every single day,” she wrote of her mother’s campaign fundraising efforts. “On top of all this she somehow finds time to do things like cook dinner and bake cakes and gives the pups a trim. She genuinely cares so much and she would do absolutely anything for her community.”

Haaland can train a spotlight on Native issues

On Capitol Hill, Haaland became known as someone who would not be ignored.

“She’s very, very respectful and pleasant to work with, but she wasn’t going to wait for her turn to speak up,’’ said Florida Rep. Lois Frankel, co-chair of the Democratic Women's Caucus, where Haaland is caucus vice-chair.

“She’s one of those who is willing to listen to people, to work across the aisle,’’ Frankel added. “She’s not a flamethrower.”

Haaland supported the bipartisan Great American Outdoor Act, which among other things provided money for the Land and Water Conservation Fund and funds maintenance backlog at national parks. She also was co-sponsor of the bipartisan Not Invisible Act of 2019, which aimed to reduce violent crime on Native American lands and against Native Americans.

Last spring, as the novel coronavirus began to ravage healthcare-challenged Native American communities, Haaland pushed to improve broadband service on reservations, eliminate some bureaucratic red tape for access to federal aid and address concerns about the lack of running water on some reservations.

"We just have ignored or neglected certain communities of color along the way and it's come to this," she told USA TODAY in an interview in April. "Indian country has been left behind for decades."

With Haaland's new role as Interior secretary, many Native American leaders said she will face great expectations tempered by the historical reality.

“We know these problems we’ve had with the federal government can’t be solved overnight, because they’ve been going on for 400 years,” said Fawn Sharp, president of the National Congress of American Indians and Quinault Tribal Nation in Washington State.

Judith LeBlanc, director of the Native Organizers Alliance, a national political organizing group, said Haaland’s big tasks will include helping Native Americans deal with the disproportionate COVID-19 virus sickening and killing people of color, who are three times more likely to die than white Americans, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She also has a chance to “reset the relationship” between Indigenous people and the Interior Department, LeBlanc said.

But the voices looking to bend her ear will be many, including conservation groups, ranchers, hunters and fishermen and mining companies. “Every environmentalist would love this job, but it comes with an incredible number of challenges," said Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club’s land protection program.

Angeline Cheek, left, a community organizer from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, speaks about the potential environmental damage from the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada during a demonstration in Billings, Montana, in October 2019.

Haaland's task will be a giant balancing act, often weighing her own passion for environmental issues with the financial realities of many stakeholders — including some Native American tribes whose incomes weigh heavily on energy exploration.

"Deb will have to deal with tribes who still need to be convinced that taking the billions of dollars from those companies for the rights to their land rights isn’t worth it,” said O.J. Semans, co-executive director of Four Directions, a legal advocacy group headquartered on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation.

About a dozen House Republicans voiced their opposition to Haaland and asked Biden to recall her nomination. Their January 26 letter said Haaland, a vice-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is a “direct threat to working men and women and a rejection of responsible development of America’s natural resources.”

In her new role, she joins the ranks of the many, mostly white men who have served in presidential cabinets.

Months ago, just before the start of a hearing of the National Parks, Forests and Public Lands subcommittee, U.S. Rep. Steven Horsford, a Democrat from Nevada and first vice-chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, was talking with Haaland, who chairs the panel, about the portraits of the past chairman that lined the walls.

Newly-elected House Members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, left, and Deb Haaland, D-NM, depart following a class photo outside of the U.S. Capitol, Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2018, in Washington

.
Horsford remembered Haaland pointing out the frontiersmen and other white men being honored in the room.

“That’s one of the things that sticks with me about my interactions with her," he said, noting the importance of challenging symbols when they offend others.

“She brings a perspective that is very unique and that only she can," said Horsford. "I’m excited about the fact that she will now be over the very agency that can make those kinds of advances. It’s not on her to do it alone, but she will be able to lead it.”

Elizabeth Day, community engagement project manager at the Native American Community Development Institute in Minneapolis, said Haaland’s reputation across Indian country is “one of great respect,” even more so “now that she’s going into the heart of the beast.”

Day said Native activists across the nation will be energized like never before by Haaland's position as Interior secretary.

“I always repeat this, we need more than a seat at the table, we need to create the menu,” she said. “This could be it. Deb can be the cook in the kitchen.”

Follow USA TODAY national correspondents @marcodellacava and @dberrygannett

Enbridge asks Canadian government to support oil pipeline in dispute with Michigan


A sign warning of a high pressure petroleum pipeline is seen on the "Line 9" Enbridge oil pipeline route along the Don Rive in East Don Parkland in Toronto

Nia Williams
Tue, March 16, 2021

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) - Enbridge Inc asked the Canadian government on Tuesday to champion its Line 5 oil pipeline in a legal battle with the state of Michigan, which is trying to shut down the pipeline over concerns it could leak into the Great Lakes.

Calgary-based Enbridge is also asking Ottawa to provide support for its U.S. federal court filings on Line 5, Vern Yu, Enbridge executive vice president of liquids pipelines, told a federal parliamentary committee.


The dispute between Enbridge and Michigan has escalated as a May deadline to shut down the 540,000-barrel-per-day pipeline looms closer.

Line 5 is a key part of the Enbridge pipeline network supplying refineries in eastern Canada and the U.S. Midwest with western Canadian crude. Leaders in both countries are trying to reduce their economies' dependence on fossil fuels, although Canada is supporting the ongoing operation of Line 5, especially after U.S. President Joe Biden canceled permits for the cross-border Keystone XL pipeline project.

Late last year, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer ordered Line 5 to cease operating by May over concerns a 4-mile (6.4-km) section running along the lakebed of the Straits of Mackinac could leak.

Enbridge is challenging that order in U.S. federal court, and the company has proposed building a $500 million underwater tunnel to protect the pipeline beneath the Straits.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberal government has already said it will look at all options to keep Line 5 operating, including invoking the 1977 Transit Pipelines Treaty.

"We request the government of Canada use every pathway to assert that Line 5 is an important binational pipeline protected by the treaty, whose shutdown would have grave impacts for both the United States and Canada," Enbridge's Yu said.

Enbridge does not expect the pipeline will be forced to shut down in May, Yu said, because Michigan needs a court injunction to enforce its order. He added, however, that court battles over the pipeline could go on for "many, many" years.

"I think it's essential that we try to come up with a mediated, negotiated diplomatic solution that takes us out of the hands of the court and provides a reasonable outcome for everyone involved," Yu said.

Enbridge and Michigan had their first meeting with a court-appointed joint mediator last weekend, Yu said, but he declined to comment on how that went.

(Reporting by Nia Williams; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Peter Cooney)

Jane Fonda visits Minnesota to protest Line 3 oil pipeline replacement



Torey Van Oot
Tue, March 16, 2021

Actress and activist Jane Fonda made a cameo in Northern Minnesota yesterday to protest the Line 3 oil pipeline replacement project.

What she's saying: "We're here to try to stop it," Fonda said in a video posted to Twitter.

The backdrop: Construction on the Minnesota portion of the Enbridge Energy project began in December, following approval from state regulators.

Opponents, who want the Biden administration to halt progress, have been demonstrating near the site for months.

The other side: A group of House Republicans who support the project slammed Fonda's claims as "truly Oscar worthy" in a statement:

"This project has been studied time and time again and found to be safe for the environment and good for the economy."

School's solar panel savings give every teacher up to $15,000 raises

Tue, March 16, 2021

Renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar are generating more power in the U.S. than coal. Ben Tracy visits a rural Arkansas school district using the sun's rays in an unusual way.

Video Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

- In our "Eye on Earth" series, we can share a bit of good news in the battle against climate change. Cleaner renewable sources of energy such as wind and solar are generating more power in the US than coal. That's encouraging because burning coal produces planet-warming emissions. It makes sea levels rise and weather more extreme. CBS News senior environmental correspondent Ben Tracy visited a school district in Arkansas that's turning sunrays into paydays.

JEANNE ROEPCKE: Let's review real quickly.

BEN TRACY: Jeanne Roepcke has been a teacher in Arkansas for 24 years.

Why are you a teacher?

JEANNE ROEPCKE: Oh my gosh, the students. Absolutely, completely the students.

BEN TRACY: Can I assume you don't do this for the money?

JEANNE ROEPCKE: (LAUGHING) If you're in it for the money, it's the wrong profession. You know, its not the right choice.

BEN TRACY: Roepcke's school district in Batesville, Arkansas, prides itself on putting students first, but when it came to paying its teachers, Batesville was next to last in this part of the state. Salaries averaged about $45,000.

MICHAEL HESTER: And we weren't keeping people because of that.

BEN TRACY: Michael Hester is Batesville's superintendent. He was losing teachers and having a hard time getting new ones to move to this rural Arkansas town of about 10,000 people.

MICHAEL HESTER: People aren't in this business obviously for the money, but they should not have a vow to poverty to teach either.

JEANNE ROEPCKE: Thank you.

BEN TRACY: Jeanne Roepcke has been working five nights a week at the local community center just to make ends meet. But then she started hearing a rumor--

JEANNE ROEPCKE: Oh yeah. Teachers love to talk.

BEN TRACY: --about an unusual solution to Batesville's budget problems--

JEANNE ROEPCKE: Well, at first you're like, what is that about? Really what's that about?

BEN TRACY: --that would allow this school district to truly live up to its name.

JEANNE ROEPCKE: Don't sleep on Arkansas. We'll surprise you every time.

BEN TRACY: This school took an unused field out back and filled it with hundreds of solar panels. It also put up a new solar canopy stretching across the entire front of the high school-- in all, nearly 1,500 panels aimed at recharging Batesville's budget.

RICK VANCE: Now Batesville is the Pioneers. And they really did pioneer solar in Arkansas.

BEN TRACY: Rick Vance works for the local energy company that helped the district save more than $600,000 in utility costs.

RICK VANCE: They did it at a time when no one else was doing it. Well now, everybody's doing it.

BEN TRACY: Solar power costs a lot less than it used to, mainly because it's now cheaper to make the panels. In the past decade the price of solar has dropped 89%. So to both save money and the planet, more than 7,000 schools across the country are now using solar power. That's up 81% in just five years.

But as far as anyone can tell, Batesville is the only school district that's turn panels into paychecks.

RICK VANCE: Batesville has reduced the checks they write to utilities and increased the checks they write to teachers.

BEN TRACY: With the money it saved and made by selling electricity back to the grid, Batesville has handed out bonuses two years in a row, boosting every teacher's salary by as much as $15,000. The district, once one of the worst, is now the best paying in the county.

Are you getting more resumes these days from teachers who want to come work here?

MICHAEL HESTER: Not only are we getting more resumes, we're getting fewer resignations.

JEANNE ROEPCKE: That's good.

BEN TRACY: Jeanne Roepcke has seen her pay go up by thousands of dollars, enough to dig out of debt and cut way back on her hours at the community center.

JEANNE ROEPCKE: Thank you.

BEN TRACY: Did you ever in your life imagine you'd get a raise because of solar panels?

JEANNE ROEPCKE: Nope. No, it would not have been one of the things that I thought. But, what a great idea. The sun is going to be shining anyway, so why not cash in on that?

BEN TRACY: And she's grateful her school realizes that putting students first starts with their teachers.

JEANNE ROEPCKE: It's good to know that they care about us. It feels really, really good.

BEN TRACY: Now our teacher, Jeanne, says one of the best parts about not having to work all those hours at her second job is she has more time to help out her students who are learning from home because of COVID. And, you know, schools across the country are using their solar panels in different ways. Here in Washington, DC, this school put their solar installation above their parking lot. Anthony, you get a little solar shade here when you park your car.

- (LAUGHING) I like everything about this story, Ben. Thank you very much. More pay for teachers, solar panels--

- And we like teacher Jeanne.

- Yeah, we do.

- Yeah.

- I wish she was on of my teachers. You can feel her energy just jump off the screen.

- Put a solar panel in front of her. You'll pick up the power.

- Yeah, we like her.

- She's great.

- That was great, Ben.

The Tell
‘ESG’ funds have more energy stocks than you might think

Last Updated: March 16, 2021
By Andrea Riquier

If it looks like a duck and invests like a duck…

GREENWASHING? PHOTO COURTESY ISTOCKPHOTO

Referenced Symbols

XLE
-2.85% IVV
-0.14% ESGU
-0.24% SNPE
+0.06%

Many of the largest exchange-traded funds that market themselves as having environmental, social and governance characteristics offer sector exposure that’s very similar to the broadest equity funds, according to an analysis published Tuesday from CFRA.

Those similarities may be most meaningful, and questionable, when it comes to energy, which is among the more controversial sectors of the market — not to mention one of the more financially weighty.

“While some investors think of ESG ETFs solely based on the Environmentally friendly pillar and presume there is little to no energy exposure, the most popular U.S. ESG ETFs look a lot like the broader equity market from the top-down,” CFRA’s head of mutual fund and ETF research, Todd Rosenbluth, wrote.

Related: Sustainable-investing flows have smashed records in 2020. What’s going on?

The Energy Select Sector SPDR XLE, -2.85%, which tracks the S&P 500 Index’s energy sector, lost 33% in 2020 as OPEC+ members splintered over production cuts and the coronavirus lockdowns rippled across the globe. But this year, with more discipline among the producers and investor enthusiasm over economic reopenings, the fund gained 41% through March 12.

Rosenbluth offers one example of what that means in real life: the iShares Core S&P 500 ETF IVV, -0.14%, one of the biggest, broadest, stock trackers in the market, has 3% of its portfolio devoted to energy. That compares to a 2.9% weighting for the iShares ESG Aware MSCI USA ETF ESGU, -0.24% and 3.1% – that is, more than the broader ETF – for another ESG-themed fund, the Xtrackers S&P 500 ESG ETF SNPE, +0.06%.

With holdings that track each other so closely, it may not be surprising that ESG ETFs and the S&P 500 index are performing relatively the same in the year to date.

Through March 12, IVV had returned 5.4%; three broad ESG ETFs in Rosenbluth’s analysis outperformed it slightly and three underperformed it slightly, with returns ranging from 4.9% to 5.9%.

“Some investors have a false impression that they need to give up market-like returns when prioritizing doing good,” Rosenbluth wrote. “However, Broad ESG ETFs were built to serve as the potential core of the portfolio by choosing companies with relatively strong ESG attributes within a sector.”

Still, some investors may question the validity of funds calling themselves “ESG” if they seem to simply mimic traditional broad-market trackers. For many, “relatively strong ESG attributes” may simply not apply to fossil-fuel companies.

Financial world greenwashing the public with deadly distraction in sustainable investing practices

Tariq Fancy
Tue, March 16, 2021, 

The financial services industry is duping the American public with its pro-environment, sustainable investing practices. This multitrillion dollar arena of socially conscious investing is being presented as something it's not. In essence, Wall Street is greenwashing the economic system and, in the process, creating a deadly distraction. I should know; I was at the heart of it.

As the former chief investment officer of Sustainable Investing at BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world with $8.7 trillion in assets, I led the charge to incorporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) into our global investments. In fact, our messaging helped mainstream the concept that pursuing social good was also good for the bottom line. Sadly, that's all it is, a hopeful idea. In truth, sustainable investing boils down to little more than marketing hype, PR spin and disingenuous promises from the investment community.

SEC looking to 'proactively identify ESG-related misconduct'

In many instances across the industry, existing mutual funds are cynically rebranded as “green” — with no discernible change to the fund itself or its underlying strategies — simply for the sake of appearances and marketing purposes. In other cases, ESG products contain irresponsible companies such as petroleum majors and other large polluters like “fast fashion” manufacturing to boost the fund's performance. There are even portfolio managers who actively mine ESG data to bet against environmentally responsible companies in the name of profit, a short-selling strategy. Risk managers are focused on protecting their investment portfolios from potential damages done by a worsening climate rather than helping prevent that damage from occurring in the first place.

As disheartening as this reality is, claiming to be environmentally responsible is profitable. Last year alone, ESG mutual funds and exchange-traded funds nearly doubled. The investment community understandably reacted to this with cheers. But those cheers were only for fund managers and their bottom lines. No matter what they tout as green investing, portfolio managers are legally bound (as well as financially incentivized) to do nothing that compromises profits. To advance real change in the environment simply doesn't yield the same return.

Wall Street on Feb. 8, 2021, in New York City.

In early March, my sentiments were echoed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which announced it was creating a Climate and ESG Task Force to “proactively identify ESG-related misconduct” such as inaccurate or incomplete disclosures by funds and companies — an unprecedented move that suggests there might be abuses that have gone unaddressed.

Ironically, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to learn some painful lessons. The initial response of rosy forecasts, loose half-measures and group denial boosted morale, but it also lulled the public into a false sense of security that prolonged and worsened the crisis.
We need to fix the system before disaster strikes

While how we fight a pandemic and climate change are very different, one aspect is clear. Both threats can only be won through the combined efforts of science and policy. In response to the pandemic, we’ve learned that only top-down government action, such as forcing the closure of high-risk venues and mandating masks indoors, makes a real difference. A “free market” will not correct itself or fix the problem by its own accord.

Imagine the planet is a cancer patient, and climate change is the cancer. Wall Street is prescribing wheatgrass: A well-marketed, profitable idea that has no chance of curing or even slowing down the cancer. In this scenario, wheatgrass is the deadly distraction, misleading the public and delaying lifesaving measures like chemotherapy. But like giving false hope to unproven cures in the midst of a pandemic, the consequences of such irresponsibility are all too obvious. And motivation for why the industry continues to greenwash is all too obvious.

When I left the industry in late 2019, due to family business obligations following the passing of my father-in-law, I was frustrated by the lack of any real change. But I took some comfort in believing that if we weren’t doing as much as we could, at least we weren’t doing any harm. Since my departure, I have had a lot of time to think about this issue, and I’ve reassessed my opinion. I believe we are doing irreversible harm by stalling and greenwashing. And all in the name of profits.

We’re running out of time and need to accept the truth: To fix our system and curb a growing disaster, we need government to fix the rules.

Tariq Fancy is the former chief investment officer for Sustainable Investing at BlackRock.

You can read diverse opinions from our Board of Contributors and other writers on the Opinion front page, on Twitter @usatodayopinion and in our daily Opinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ESGs, sustainable investing are not as green as touted, investor says

Mexico's ex-oil boss quits; Fuel oil burn to increase

THE ONLY FUEL DIRTIER IS BUNKER OIL

López Obrador has said the law is meant protect government-owned fossil fuel plants against what he call unfair competition from private wind, solar and natural gas-fired power plants.

FILE - In this Sept. 29, 2000 file photo, leader of Mexico's oil workers union Carlos Romero Deschamps, right, Labor Secretary Carlos Maria Abascal, center, and Pemex director Raul Munoz Leos, arrive at a press conference in Mexico City. Romero Deschamps will finally be resigning from his symbolic post as a worker at Mexico's state-owned oil company Pemex, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced Tuesday, March 16, 2021. (AP Photo/Ismael Rojas, File)

Carlos Romero Deschamps
Tue, March 16, 2021

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The former leader of Mexico’s oil workers’ union will finally be resigning from his symbolic post as a worker at the state-owned oil company Pemex, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced Tuesday.

The resignation marks an end to the decades-long career of Carlos Romero Deschamps, once considered one of the most powerful and corrupt figures in Mexico.

In October 2019, Romero Deschamps resigned as leader of the union, a post he held since 1993.

López Obrador said Romero Deschamps had not actually been working since he resigned the union post, but rather using up vacation days he accumulated while serving as a union official.

“Even though it may be legal, we considered it was immoral” for Romero Deschamps to continue drawing pay at the beleaguered government oil company, which has been technically bankrupt for some time.

In addition to his union role, Romero Deschamps, 77, long served in Congress for the old ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, and allegedly diverted millions in union and company funds to the party's campaigns in 2000. His family's lavish lifestyle was a frequent cause of scandal.

This week, the beleaguered oil company has reportedly reached a deal with the state-owned electrical power utility to offload stocks of fuel oil that Pemex can't get rid of. The utility will take the heavily polluting fuel oil to burn at power plants, and return natural gas that Pemex cannot produce enough of.

The deal would worsen pollution problems at state-owned generating plants. But López Obrador has enacted a new law that electricity must first be bought from government-owned generating plants, which largely run on fossil fuels like coal, fuel oil and diesel. If any demand remains, power will be purchased from renewable and private natural gas-fired plants.

That has drawn complaints from investors, many of them foreign, who say it violates the U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade pact and Mexico’s commitments to cut carbon emissions. They claim it also creates a de facto government monopoly, hurts competition and will make Mexicans buy dirtier, more expensive electricity.

López Obrador has said the law is meant protect government-owned fossil fuel plants against what he call unfair competition from private wind, solar and natural gas-fired power plants.

‘Reading the writing on the wall’: 

why Wall Street is acting on the climate crisis

Dominic Rushe
Tue, March 16, 2021,

THE GUARDIAN

Wildfires burned nearly 10.4m acres across the US last year. The most costly thunderstorm in US history caused $7.5bn in damage across Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. As the climate crisis swept the globe on a biblical scale it left in its wake a record number of billion-dollar disasters.

And yet out of these ashes has emerged an unlikely savior: Wall Street. After decades of backing polluters and opposing legislation to rein them in, finance says it’s going green.

Related: The race to zero: can America reach net-zero emissions by 2050?

A steadily growing trend in investment went fully mainstream in 2020 as a record number of corporations pledged to go “net zero” and move to cancel out the carbon emissions they produce to halt a catastrophic rise in global temperatures.

The tectonic corporate shift is being led by a strategic detour by some of the world’s biggest investors. It used to be the protesters outside Davos and annual shareholder meetings who talked about greenhouse gases and rising sea levels. Now it’s the bankers. And when money talks, corporations listen. But can Wall Street really save the planet? There are at least positive signs that they are trying.

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and Columbia University economics professor, doesn’t think Wall Street has a choice. “People used to use the analogy that climate change was like boiling a frog and we wouldn’t notice it until it was too late,” said Stiglitz. “Well, we have been boiled. We are trying to jump out of this.”

Countries including the UK, France, Denmark and New Zealand have pledged to go net zero by 2050 and the EU and Canada are working on their own plans.

The financial calculus is obvious. As the climate crisis continues, the risk of doing nothing is rising and the money is moving.

In 2013 Exxon was the world’s largest company, last year it dropped out of the Dow Jones Index, the blue chip index that is synonymous with the “stock markets” for many investors. Last year it lost $22bn and the company, which for decades denied the climate crisis was real and actively lobbied against change, has been forced to elect climate activist investors to its board.

We are not where we need to be. But sitting where I sit I do see a huge amount of change
Edward Mason

By September last year more than 800 cities, 100 regions and 1,500 companies had pledged to decarbonize their societies and economies, according to the research group Data-Driven EnviroLab and the NewClimate Institute. Between them those companies have combined revenue of over $11.4tn and are responsible for 3.5 gigatonnes in greenhouse gas emissions, an amount greater than India’s annual emissions.

More than 1,000 companies have signed on for the Science Based Targets initiative, an initiative to help corporations set measurable emission standards run by the CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project) non-profit organization, the United Nations and others. An analysis of 338 of those companies – including Mastercard, the Italian energy company Enel and UK supermarket chain Tesco – found they have reduced their emissions by 25% since 2015, a difference of 302m tonnes of CO2 equivalent, the same as the annual emissions from 78 coal-fired power plants.

With the planet still warming at an alarming rate an economic crisis looms, said Stiglitz. And the longer we delay the bigger the “transition shock”. “By delaying action we are exacerbating the magnitude of the adjustment that the economy is going to have to go through,” he said.

Some ethical investors have pushed for climate action for decades, but now the major money managers are on board too. Larry Fink, the founder and chief executive of BlackRock, announced that environmental sustainability was now a core goal for his company, one that manages $7tn in investments. Other big money managers including Fidelity and Vanguard are also on board.

But this is not some Damascene conversion. Wall Street isn’t swapping its benchmade wingtips for Birkenstocks. BlackRock still has huge investments in coal and other fossil fuels, but the attitudinal shift should not be underestimated and where it goes others will follow, driven by a huge financial opportunities.

Doing nothing will be bad for business, with 58% of the US suffering economic decline by 2060-2080 if nothing is done. There is also the generational wealth handover from baby boomers to gen X and millennial investors who – as a recent BlackRock report suggested – have a “greater awareness of sustainability”.Chart on wealth transfer over generations.

But, make no mistake, this is about money. Sustainability is “a new source of return across all asset classes” according to Jean Boivin, the head of the BlackRock Investment Institute. BlackRock’s green new deal isn’t so much about excluding bad actors or managing the risk of climate change as it is about “riding a wave that should be a source of return in itself”.

With Joe Biden in power after ousting Donald Trump, the climate denier in chief, trillions of dollars of investment could soon be earmarked for sustainable solutions.

One of Fink’s initiatives is a pledge to publish a “temperature alignment metric” for BlackRock funds – an increasingly popular way for companies and investment funds to measure whether their carbon footprint meets the 2015 Paris agreement treaty to combat climate change by limiting planetary warming to well below 2C.

It is a measure also championed by Generation Investment Management, the investment firm co-founded by the former US vice-president Al Gore and Goldman Sachs’ asset management head, David Blood.

For Edward Mason, director of engagement at Generation Investment Management, the move is part of an encouraging, societal change in how business is reacting to the climate crisis and how investors are helping to drive that change. “The pace is just huge and it is in the right direction,” said Mason. “The challenge is huge as well. I am not being Panglossian about it, we are not where we need to be. But sitting where I sit I do see a huge amount of change.”

Meanwhile, worrying trends continue. Unless action is taken soon, the energy industry’s carbon emissions will soon surpass pre-pandemic levels as economies begin to rebound from Covid-19 restrictions, according to the InternationalEnergy Agency.

Chart showing emissions levels from pre-pandemic to present.

But even environmentalists and longtime activists are – cautiously – optimistic about the direction the investment community is taking. After years of campaigning against corporate damage they see significant signs of progress, albeit with caveats.

“I think there is reason to be optimistic but also to be extremely cautious. It’s both moving in the right direction and greenwashing,” said Josh Axelrod, the senior advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Axelrod focuses on energy and oil and gas issues and notes that BP and Shell have committed to net zero by 2050. “Well what does that really mean? Are they really going to cut emissions or rely on offsets or rely on technology that hasn’t really demonstrated that it can do what it says it’s going to do? The answer, especially for Shell, is unfortunately the latter.”

A large part of Shell’s initiative is a pledge to offset 120m tonnes a year of its emissions by 2030 using “nature-based solutions” – projects that will “protect, transform or restore land”. Axelrod doubts it will be enough. “At the end of the day [for oil and gas production] the only way they are going to deal with their emissions is to stop,” he said.

They are getting pushed by the customer, by the science, by the general public

Father Seamus Finn

Father Seamus Finn of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility has been a longtime campaigner on corporate responsibility and has often had major institutional investors stymie progressive shareholder resolutions he has championed.

“We have tended to be somewhat ambivalent and maybe overly critical about the BlackRocks, the Fidelitys and the Vanguards of this world simply because for too long they were voting against our resolutions at annual meetings,” he said. “But slowly I think they have come around and, let’s be clear, they are doing this because they are reading the writing on the wall. The people who put money in their funds want to know how they voted on resolutions. They are getting pushed by the customer, by the science, by the general public.”

Stiglitz recently joined a new committee of top economic policy thinkers, the Regenerative Crisis Response Committee, which aims to recommend ways to use fiscal and monetary policy and financial regulation to address climate-related financial risks and other risks. The data on climate change looks dark, he concedes, but he is feeling a “qualified optimism”.

“There is a general consensus – not unanimity – that we have to do more,” he said.

Roadblocks remain, not least the “nightmare” of a US political system that has sucked the climate crisis into the divisive culture wars of American politics.

“The main thing that can go wrong is our politics,” said Stiglitz. “Everything is pointing in the right direction, technology, global consensus. The one thing that is not is climate change which is proceeding at a pace and with manifestations that are really depressing,” he said.

But even that is “actually accelerating our willingness to deal with it”.