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Big Oil’s climate promises are getting so watered down they’re practically homeopathic.

Shell said Thursday it plans to ever-so-slightly re-jig its climate commitments made in 2021, targeting a slightly less ambitious timeline. It’s the second time in less than a year that Shell has diluted its climate promises, after scrapping plans last June to steadily cut oil production in the run-up to 2030. Given Shell is already the subject of a lawsuit from activist shareholders over its climate policy, this is more fuel for the legal action engine.

Gas It Up

Shell isn’t the only fossil fuel company to soften its climate change targets. With peak oil demand on the horizon by 2030, it’s understandable Big Oil might want to ride peak profits right to the bitter end. However, Shell’s update places a special emphasis on natural gas, which is somewhat “cleaner” in terms of pollution and seems to be gaining popularity as a way for companies to temper their climate policies. The UK government announced this week it’s backing the development of new gas-fueled power stations.

Shell is now slowing down the timeline by which it had said it would reduce “carbon intensity,” i.e. how much CO2 is produced per kilowatt hour of electricity. Shell had previously promised to cut carbon intensity by 20% from 2016 levels by 2030, now it’s aiming for 15%-20%. It also erased a deadline for a 45% reduction by 2035.

It’s not entirely misguided to think natural gas can be part of a green transition in some parts of the world. “In developing countries, we need to transition away from coal as quickly as possible and natural gas could be seen as a transition fuel in some cases,” Professor Mark Maslin, an Earth system scientist at University College London, told The Daily Upside. Professor Priti Parikh, Director of the Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction at UCL, agreed that in some regions, natural gas could be an important part of a green transition:

• Parikh said that roughly 2.3 billion people lack access to clean cooking fuel. “For those communities, LPG [liquefied petroleum gas] will be an integral part of the mix to transition communities away from polluting fuels like wood,” said Parikh.
• But she said companies beefing up their gas output aren’t focused on this use case. “None of the big companies including Shell are developing business models and subsidies at scale to transition households using wood to LPG in the medium term with a view of moving to greener fuels longer term,” she said.

Either the sun is setting really low or shadow banks are growing.

According to a Wall Street Journal feature published Thursday, the private equity industry is keen on credit card debt, mortgages, car loans, and every other nook and cranny of the consumer debt and “asset-based finance” economy.

Bank Heist

When the banking industry descends into crisis, private equity giants are sure to step in. And like the 2008 financial crisis before it, last year’s small and regional banking crisis gave PE groups already dipping their toes into consumer debt the signal to dive in. The motive is simple: Asset-based finance can be repackaged as, in the words of the WSJ, “complex instruments with investment-grade credit ratings” that can then be sold to major institutional investors like pensions and endowments, offering private equity a new channel of growth.

By the end of 2022, private fund managers had already raised around $1.5 trillion from clients to invest in private debt, according to the WSJ’s analysis of PitchBook data. After Silicon Valley Bank’s implosion last year, many similar-sized banks and upstart fintech groups wanted to offload some private debt — and private equity pounced, sparking a wave of deals:

• Last June, KKR bought as much as $44 billion of buy now, pay later loans from PayPal, and in December it bought over $7 billion of recreational vehicle-backed loans owned by BMO. Blackstone, with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, scooped up $17 billion of mortgages from Signature Bank’s liquidation sale; Blackstone also recently bought over $1 billion of credit card debt from Barclays.
• Apollo, meanwhile, acquired the entire asset-based finance division of Credit Suisse, which was the top office for such business on Wall Street. Goldman Sachs’ short-lived consumer lending unit Greensky, and its $8 billion of loans, was purchased by KKR, Pacific Investment Management, and Sixth Street.

Meta said Thursday that it’s shutting down its free CrowdTangle data insights tool, replacing it later this year with a new limited-access service that doesn’t have the same bells and whistles. 

Data Due Diligence

CrowdTangle, which Meta acquired in 2016, tracks what content appears on public platforms and how often it’s shared. The overall goal is to help people understand how information spreads on the internet. While it helps social media managers track account performance, it’s also become a go-to plugin among academics, researchers, and journalists in a heightened era of conspiracy theories and misinformation. 

Despite Crowdtangle’s value in an upcoming election year, Meta had already started to step back from the platform in the wake of studies highlighting Facebook as a hotbed for fake news and misleading images. Meta shut down the team that ran CrowdTangle in 2021, and the next year, it stopped accepting new users. Now, Mark Zuckerberg & Co. are looking to replace it entirely, and the response is mixed:

• A new Meta Content Library will launch in August, but it will be available only to academic and nonprofit research centers, categories that exclude most news outlets.
• University of Maryland researcher Cody Buntain, who was given an early test of the new tool, told The Wall Street Journal that gaining access to public comment data on posts is a valuable new feature, but it doesn’t allow users to track social-media activity in specific geographic locations like CrowdTangle did. Rebekah Tromble of George Washington University said the tool restricts users from downloading data on even public posts from elected officials.