The Treasury Department is warning that state laws that restrict banks from considering environmental, social and governance factors could harm efforts to address money laundering and terrorism financing.
Maybe that’s the point.
From what I was able to ascertain it seems like the law still enables denial of service on risk based standards, which should enable banks the deny service to the criminal enterprises the Treasury fears.
“the risk that international drug traffickers, transnational organized criminals, terrorists, and corrupt foreign officials will use the U.S. financial system to launder money, evade sanctions, and threaten our national security.”
Not that climate change doesn’t increase the propensity of events with national security implications. But given the Treasury’s examples I think the environmental policy aspects of the regulation aren’t their major concern. Their ire seems to be at individuals or groups committing acts that violate established law.
Florida is a fucking existential risk
Pretty sure a 5 meter rise isn’t possible. If it is, it won’t be in our lifetime.
3 meters is pretty doable in our lifetime. But it wasn’t the model 10 years ago so who knows where this speedrun will take us.
A complete Greenland slide-off would be an average sea level rise of about 7m, and is possible in our lifetimes as an extreme event (something like a fraction of a percent chance before 2100). If it happened it would be multiple events really, spread out across years or decades. Antarctic ice moving so its weight is no longer supported by the continent was too unlikely to include in models a few years ago, but the West Antarctic has been so active that I’d expect it to start showing up in estimates.
West Antarctic alone is about 3m, I don’t know how fast that goes, but without the buttressing of the shelf it’s inevitable (best case in 13ky, or in some hundred years). Either way, Florida better get smart about this, they should/could/would know what’s coming
I don’t understand this map, I live very close to the coast and am 20+ feet above sea level. 5 meters is 16’ 4.85".
The highest point in Pinellas county is 110’, for those who don’t know, it’s the peninsula on West Coast of Florida.
I’m not under the impression there will be a consistent land mass, but something more resembling new islands, keys and beach fronts makes more sense than showing areas entirely underwater.
I found the source: A 2005 educational image from teachingboxes.org
No explanation on what the shaded region actually means, but it does seem to line up with features on this topographical map.
My guess is that it is either based on a rather imprecise average elevation, excluding land that is technically still above water, or that the shaded area represents an area made uninhabitable by the rise in sea level and not the actual new coastline.
Regardless, this NOAA Sea Level Rise Map seems way more accurate.
Why would Patriotic Pro Life Republicans care about National Security? National Security is WOKE!
Funny how anti-woke is always synonymous with anti-freedom. The government doesn’t approve of your opinions, and therefore must use the force of law to punish you.
The good news is, I wouldn’t expect these laws to survive in the long term. The federal government could easily preempt them since they obviously involve interstate commerce. And I suspect there’s probably some blatant viewpoint discrimination baked into the laws, but that would come down to the specifics of the wording. But even if they are content neutral, I’d argue that they violate the first amendment, which thanks to citizens united would have to be applied to financial institutions too.
And that brings us to the bad news: until congress and/or the courts are no longer held by nutjobs, I wouldn’t expect either to do anything to fix this.
A few years ago, a friend was telling me about how much access to the financial system is a problem for (legal) sex workers. I wonder if this law protects them too.
It looks like it might to me unless there’s a quantitative, impartial, and risk based reason or a “rating, scoring, analysis, tabulation, or action that considers a social credit score” the decision to deny them credit would be illegal for my understanding. Unless there’s some justifiable monetary reason for them to deny service legal sex workers should be covered.
HB 3 Florida 2023 session
