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| | | | |  | | By Debra Kahn | | | | | 
National Union of Healthcare Workers, courtesy Sen. Scott Wiener | California state Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) is trying to make the private sector disclose its entire contribution to climate change. His "Climate Corporate Accountability Act" moving through the state Legislature would require all large U.S. companies that do business in California — which is pretty much all of them — to report all of the greenhouse gas emissions stemming from their direct operations, energy use and supply chain across the world. This interview has been edited and condensed.
| | | | BECOME A GLOBAL INSIDER: The world is more connected than ever. It has never been more essential to identify, unpack and analyze important news, trends and decisions shaping our future — and we’ve got you covered! Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Global Insider author Ryan Heath navigates the global news maze and connects you to power players and events changing our world. Don’t miss out on this influential global community. Subscribe now. | | | | | Long Game: Your bill would require U.S. companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue that do business in California to disclose their carbon footprint. What would that do to bring down greenhouse gas emissions? Wiener: There are large corporations that portray themselves as very green and it's part of their marketing and their branding, and they make a big deal out of it. And they may not be so green. And so by having to disclose, it will be very embarrassing to some companies that are greenwashing. It'll look really good for the companies that are not, and it will create pressure from the public, from customers, from investors to reduce their carbon footprint, and so this kind of transparency is extremely powerful. Long Game: It would cover all the big U.S. companies: Amazon, Target, Walmart, Exxon, Facebook, Apple, FedEx... Wiener: All of the above. It's somewhere between 5,500 and 6,000 corporations. There are a number of these large corporations that are already doing this, and we think doing it well. For example, Walmart and PepsiCo and some others. But then there are other companies that are either not doing it, or doing it and not disclosing it, or doing it in an incomplete way. Long Game: What about companies that aren't U.S.-based, like BP or Shell? Would it get at their U.S. operations, or no? Wiener: We were very, very careful to make sure that this bill is constitutional under the U.S. Constitution. And we think it is. We think it's rock-solid, in terms of its legal basis, but when you start getting into foreign corporations, it gets a little more complicated. So we decided to focus on U.S. corporations, public and private, with revenue of a billion dollars or more. Long Game: How have you amended the bill to address industry concerns? Wiener: The concern was specific to the supply chain, what we call the Scope 3 emissions. If a company has a large international supply chain, you may have far-flung suppliers all over the world where it's really hard to get precise carbon footprint data from them. In addition, the focus of the bill is on the largest corporations, but obviously, in their supply chain, there will be small businesses. And so there was a concern this will effectively sweep in these small businesses who don't really have a capacity to calculate their exact carbon footprint. So what we did was we allowed for formulas and estimates with respect to the supply chain, which is already happening. There's actually software for this and there are companies that do this, where you can calculate an estimate of your supply chain's carbon footprint. So we made that amendment to ensure that the bill can be implemented and complied with and I think it makes it a stronger bill. | 
| Long Game: You have the same broad opposition that you had before the amendments: Airlines, automakers, agriculture, the building industry, Silicon Valley, retailers, manufacturing, oil companies, chambers of commerce. Wiener: There are large corporations who quietly tell us that they're fine with the bill and that they think the bill is good. There are plenty of businesses that think it's a good idea that are already doing it, that want their competitors to do it as well so it's a level playing field. There's a lot of peer pressure. There are businesses that support the bill; they just aren't doing it publicly. But in terms of some of these associations, they just have a knee-jerk opposition to ever being told what to do. I think it's a really bad look to oppose a simple transparency bill that requires transparency for information that companies have been disclosing for years where there's an established methodology. We're not asking to do some sort of new experimental thing. This is an established process. So I think it's a really bad look that the business community is opposing us. And some of them say, 'Well, it should be done at the federal level.' Well, then, why are you not supporting it at the federal level? That's an argument we hear a lot, 'Don't do it at the state level, do it at the federal level, but then we're going to oppose it at the federal level, too.' But the reality is we had a strong vote in the Senate and if you look at our vote tally in the Senate, it's a diverse array of Democrats. We had obviously strong progressive Democrat support, but we had some moderate Democrats too. Long Game: The bill didn't move forward last year — it got held in the Senate Appropriations Committee. Wiener: This is not a hard bill, politically. If you asked members of the public, 'Should the largest billion-dollar corporations disclose their carbon footprint,' I think the public would overwhelmingly say yes, so this is a very popular idea. And yes, the business community is opposing it, but I don't think that the opposition is as intense as with some other issues. Long Game: Your name often comes up as someone who would run to succeed Nancy Pelosi when she retires. Do you think that you can accomplish more on sustainability in California or in Congress? Wiener: We have a member of Congress who's amazing. So I'm not going to comment on the speaker's future, who might succeed her. Having a good partnership between state governments and federal government on these issues is really important. And we work with members of Congress regularly on different issues, and I know that Sen. Warren and others have talked about this issue. So we'll definitely be looking for opportunities to work with members of Congress on carbon transparency.
| | | — European financial regulators say fund managers are still passing off ordinary investments as ESG-oriented, Bloomberg reports. — This Eurasia Review op-ed arguing that green investing is like fascism makes a Hitler reference in the first paragraph. — An Italian ESG-themed photo contest sponsored by investment firm PIMCO is dangling €15,000 in prize money, Vogue reports.
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