Morning!

I’m reading about… climate change action that’s already happening.

Starting off in San Francisco where the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously yesterday to ban natural gas in new buildings starting not in 2025, 2030 or whatever but… next year. 

The legislation that will apply to more than 54,000 homes and 32 million square feet of commercial space in the pipeline with a small loophole for restaurants. They get an extra year. 

Chris Naso of the San Francisco Climate Emergency Coalition praised the legislation.

“With respect to global warming, the federal and state governments have utterly failed us, but local governments are now leading the way towards equitable and rapid decarbonization,” Naso said.

On the corporate side, fracking giant Occidental petroleum has taken an unexpected European style green turn by becoming the first major U.S. oil producer to aim for net-zero emissions from everything it extracts and sells.

The Houston-based company announced a target to reach net-zero emissions from its own operations by 2040 and an ambition to do the same from customers’ use of its products by 2050.

The target is dependent on a massive project to capture and store carbon dioxide from the air, a neat trick which doesn’t exist at scale yet and may not work long term. But that doesn’t necessarily make it worse then rival corporate promises to move emissions off the books by repeatedly selling newly developed oil and gas assets to other firms.

“Net-zero for Scope 3 emissions is impressive even when you take European companies into consideration,” said Kyle Harrison, a BloombergNEF analyst. “Shell, Total, BP and Eni all have intensity targets that include Scope 3, but these emissions never reach zero.”

Over in Europe BP and Danish wind power group Orsted are teaming up to develop a green hydrogen project in… Germany in the oil major’s first foray into this business.

 “Heavy industries such as refineries use large quantities of hydrogen in their manufacturing processes,” said Martin Neubert, who heads the offshore wind business at Orsted. “They will continue to need hydrogen, but replacing the current fossil-based hydrogen with hydrogen produced from renewable energy can help these industries dramatically lower their CO2 footprint.”

In the UK Finance Minister Rishi Sunak is asking firms to start disclosing the extent to which their operations are exposed to the risks posed by global warming. The largest firms will have to start next year – but smaller companies will have until 2025. 

Coming from a market dominated by oil, mining and finance stocks, the move could accelerate a global trend. The UK has backed the creation of a global sustainability standards board (SSB) to set mandatory requirements on company disclosures regarding risks from climate change. 

“It’s like financial accounting: If it wasn’t mandatory, some companies would do it very late and some companies probably wouldn’t even do it,” said said Paul Simpson, chief executive officer of CDP, a London-based nonprofit focused on environmental disclosures. “That’s why we do need mandatory disclosure requirements in all major markets. The U.K. is the first to announce that and we would very much hope that other G20 countries will quickly adopt the same approach.”

And what could happen…

Politico reports that things could go even further on the finance side in the US – following Biden’s win.

Big Wall Street banks are claiming to be acting on climate and trying to influence the new administration – ahead of what is expected to be a slew of new rules. 

The Securities and Exchange Commission under a Biden administration could impose new climate disclosure requirements on corporations. Bank regulators may consider climate-related stress tests for lenders, but things could go further.

“Even some Democratic regulators who do acknowledge climate change is real and action is needed are unfortunately at this point proposing baby steps, like disclosure,” said Moira Birss, climate and finance director at Amazon Watch and a leader of the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition. “The goal should be phasing out the financial support for the things that are causing this planetary crisis.”

Some oil companies are playing the same game as the banks. Whilst Occidental (see above) has pivoted to offsetting Shell is pushing for a roll-back of Trump’s roll-back.

Royal Dutch Shell Plc will push for the reversal of President Donald Trump’s roll-back of methane emissions rules and the introduction of carbon pricing when Joe Biden moves into the White House next year, Bloomberg reports. 

“Some of the regulatory roll-backs that we’ve seen under the current administration haven’t actually benefited our industry,” Shell U.S. President Gretchen Watkins said Tuesday on a webcast hosted by the Greater Houston Partnership.

The news comes as the western energy think tank, the IEA, forecasts that Biden could dramatically accelerate the global switch from coal to renewable energy. 

Fatih Birol, executive director of the Paris-based organization, said US solar and wind capacity could more than double in five years if Mr Biden stuck to his campaign trail pledges, including a promise to decarbonize US power generation by 2035. “This would have major implications for the decarbonization of the US energy system as well as global implications for the growth of renewable energies and release of global CO2 emissions,” Mr Birol said, adding that renewables could, as a result, become the biggest power source globally “much earlier” than current forecast – as soon as 2022 in fact.

Stepping back a little The Nation muses on how Biden could use the presidential “bully pulpit” – and the support of 70% of voters – to push for action on climate change. 

“Biden and his fellow Democrats should put a bill on McConnell’s desk and then go out across the country and fight for it—and make McConnell and his followers own their opposition to an agenda most Americans support.

This barnstorming tour could visit communities being poisoned because Republicans won’t crackdown on pollution. It could visit solar companies that could hire more workers if the government would just act. I live in Utah, where we’ve got a growing clean-energy sector—and a senator named Romney who might just be convinced to vote for a stimulus package if local businesses were organized to apply pressure,” writes Jamie Henn.

And something to consider…

New research reveals that once anthropogenic carbon emissions drop, so too will the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide. That could make it seem like emission reduction efforts aren’t working.

The research shows that as the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere falls there comes a point when the ocean will start releasing its stored carbon, flipping from a carbon sink to a carbon source. The longer it takes to cut emissions, the longer this equilibration phase will take, simply because there will be more carbon in the ocean to balance out.

On the plus side, that would fit into the category of “good problems to have” as it would mean atmospheric carbon concentrations are falling. We’re a way off from that yet.