“Facts that don’t align with ill-informed prejudice are often infuriating. That doesn’t make them wrong. Someone needs to tell the truth about what it’s going to take to get to a net-zero future,” Emily Mir, a spokeswoman for Exxon, said earlier this month.
And that’s exactly what Judson Berkey at UBS has done, the focus of a new Bloomberg report. Berkey let loose on a recent conference call with regulators about how unrealistic climate goals were for banks trying to integrate them into their respective economies.
The report covering Berkey’s outburst simply concluded that the “world’s biggest banks can’t live up to the green regulatory ideal unless they start dumping huge numbers of clients worldwide at a reckless pace and also roil economies in large swathes of the globe that primarily rely on dirty fuels.”
Berkey was on a “check-in” call where regulators query market participants about regulations, the report says, when he expressed his frustration, interjecting: “Banks are living and lending on planet earth, not planet NGFS [Network for Greening the Financial System]”.
The outburst is a microcosm of “cracks” emerging in the banking sector after being draped with regulations about sustainability, the report says. Bridgewater Associates founder Ray Dalio famously said last year about ESG: “You have to make it profitable.”
Its indicative of new-world climate regulation going head to head with old world capitalism, the report says.