Climate advocates often highlight the transformative potential of emergent products, while noting on the margins potential impediments due to technological constraints, higher costs, or fixed consumer preferences. By contrast, a new paper from the Sabin Center, Platform Gatekeeping in the Building-Materials Sector: Competition Law and the Pace of Low-Carbon Construction, […]
Cynthia Hanawalt
34 posts
For nearly twenty years, climate advocates have argued that fiduciary duty obligations require pension fund managers and other fiduciaries to account for climate risk. Legal scholars and investor advocates have advanced the theory in law journals, industry guidance, and conferences like The Sabin Center’s New Climate Fiduciaries Colloquium. It will […]
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC’s) proposal to rescind its 2024 climate-disclosure rule marked a significant reversal of efforts to surface and standardize information about climate-related financial risk. But underlying that high-profile rollback is a broader trend toward securities deregulation that carries real implications for the management of climate risk […]
At every level of government, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions disclosure regulations that saw meaningful progress only a few years ago are now in retreat. Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed rescinding its 2024 corporate climate-disclosure rule, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul persuaded legislators to weaken the […]
Climate advocates may hope to see dramatic commercial breakthroughs over the next several decades that reshape emissions-intensive components of our everyday lives, such as our dietary choices, household energy use, and transportation habits. Yet transforming these consumer sectors will require not only scientific ingenuity and entrepreneurial ambition, but also nimble […]
Compounding their significant climate and environmental harms, fossil fuels are also volatile commodities. In 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine disrupted the supply of natural gas, causing prices to spike. More recently, the United States’ war on Iran resulted in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, one of the most […]
Corporate coordination to mitigate climate change raises complex questions for competition policy. From a structural antitrust perspective, climate alliances comprised of large asset managers can raise the specter of unaccountable “private governance,” if effectively imposing clean-energy restraints across an entire sector. But from an econometric perspective, which seeks to optimize […]
Last week, Texas v. BlackRock (E.D. Tex.), the first antitrust case challenging climate collaborations by financial institutions, reached an initial resolution. Texas Attorney General (“AG”) Ken Paxton announced that one of three institutional-investor defendants, Vanguard, had settled. As part of the settlement, Vanguard pledged not to “direct” its portfolio companies’ […]