Treasury Department Releases ‘Net-Zero’ Principles to Guide Financial Firms on Climate Commitments

The Treasury Department published a series of principles this week to guide financial institutions on “emerging best practices” toward implementing and achieving net-zero climate commitments, a move that critics say is part of the Biden administration’s ongoing war on consumers.

According to the Treasury Department, the new principles will support “the mobilization of more private sector capital to address the physical and economic impacts of climate change and to seize on the historic economic opportunity presented by the green transition.”

Folded into the announcement on Tuesday was a more-than-$300 million commitment by “philanthropic organizations including Bezos Earth Fund, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Climate Arc, ClimateWorks Foundation, Hewlett Foundation, and Sequoia Climate Foundation” geared toward helping “financial institutions develop and execute robust, voluntary net-zero commitments.”

“There is extensive evidence showing that the changing climate has significant financial impacts,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said during a speech at the Bloomberg Transition Finance Action Forum in New York on Tuesday.

“Without considering these factors,” she said, “financial institutions risk being left behind with stranded assets, outdated business models, and missed opportunities to invest in the growing clean energy economy.”

Yellen said the goal of releasing the principles is to “affirm the importance of credible net-zero commitments and to encourage financial institutions that make them to take consistent approaches to implementation.”

Will Hild, executive director of the consumer advocacy organization Consumers’ Research, said in an email that Yellen has made it clear that the Treasury Department “is working with and for ESG activists” who are pushing progressive, anti-consumer policies on Americans.

“Make no misake,” Hild said, “the Biden administration is running cover for the financial industry’s net-zero cartel … and leaving consumers with nothing.”

West Virginia treasurer Riley Moore denounced the move as “yet another attempt by the Biden Administration to use command-and-control central planning tactics to implement the Green New Deal policies that are repeatedly rebuked in Congress.”

“It’s sad that when consumers are facing skyrocketing gas and electricity prices this Administration’s solution is to double-down on the failed policies that have triggered the rampant inflation of recent years,” Moore told National Review in a statement. “We need to restore investment in traditional energy sources like coal, oil and natural gas and restore America’s energy independence and quit propping up failed technologies that do not make economic sense.”

Last week, 22 state attorneys general warned a group of financial firms that its commitment to achieving “global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or sooner” might amount to collusion and violate federal and state antitrust and consumer protection laws.

The group of Republican attorneys general sent a public letter to the Net Zero Financial Service Providers Alliance, or NZFSPA, a consortium of industry-leading firms, including Bloomberg, Deloitte, Ernst & Young,  and KPMG. The providers are united by a shared mission of limiting “the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.”

To achieve that objective, the signatories have vowed to “align all relevant services and products to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions,” to “build internal capability to understand the risks and opportunities of the net zero transition,” and to “consistently raise with our key stakeholders the importance and implications of setting net zero targets and strategies,” according to the alliance.

Led by Tennessee attorney general Jonathan Skrmetti, the letter said that while the alliances’ signatories “are direct competitors with each other, they nevertheless commit to using their market influence to enforce their collective climate agenda in the broader economy and to ‘[w]ork in coordination’ with other UN-convened ‘Net Zero’ groups.”

“Given the extraordinary market power of participants in the agreement, many companies may have no choice but to comply with your policy preferences, requiring them to restrict further the variety and output of goods and services that are not ‘aligned’ with your activist climate agenda,” the letter states. “Moreover, many of the companies you influence will be forced to stop dealing with other companies whose practices are inconsistent with your standards.”

This week’s Treasury Department announcement also coincided with the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, where the issue of climate change featured prominently.

On Wednesday, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres led a climate summit in Manhattan demanding urgency on behalf of world leaders and business titans to remove fossil fuels from energy grids.

“The move from fossil fuels to renewables is happening — but we are decades behind,” Guterres said. “We must make up time lost to foot-dragging, arm-twisting and the naked greed of entrenched interests raking in billions from fossil fuels.”

“Many of the poorest nations have every right to be angry — angry that they are suffering most from a climate crisis they did nothing to create, angry that promised finance has not materialized, and angry that their borrowing costs are sky-high,” he added.