October, 22 2021, 07:27am EDT
Stop the Money Pipeline coalition members respond to FSOC report on Climate-Related Financial Risk
WASHINGTON
On Thursday, the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), Chaired by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, issued an unprecedented report on climate-related financial risk. The report is the result of President Biden's Executive Order on Climate-Related Financial Risk issued in May. Among other things, the report was to provide recommendations on how to mitigate climate-related financial risk, including through "new or revised regulatory standards."
In May, Stop the Money Pipeline coalition members called for the report to be released ahead of the COP26 climate talks in Glasgow beginning October 31. Notably, the FSOC report is being issued weeks ahead of schedule to meet that deadline. The Stop the Money Pipeline coalition has maintained during its Deadline Glasgow: Defund Climate Chaos campaign that President Biden must ensure that all U.S. financial institutions are firmly on a path to real zero greenhouse gas emissions before COP26. Earlier this year, the International Energy Association affirmed that in order to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 and keep global temperature rise below 1.5degC, "there is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net zero pathway."
Member organizations of the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition released the following statements in reaction to the FSOC report's publication:
"President Biden's May Executive Order was supposed to result in a first step towards eliminating Wall Street's financing of the drivers of the climate crisis and preventing another bank-led financial crisis, but this report falls pitifully short of the mandate presented by the May Executive Order. It leaves Biden with very little to show going into international climate negotiations in Glasgow, as it barely includes any new contributions from the U.S. government. Even worse, this report is a slap in the face to Black, Brown, and Indigenous frontline communities that have been targeted by the fossil fuel industry and demanding that Wall Street stop funding projects like the Line 3 pipeline and Formosa Plastics," said Erika Thi Patterson, Campaign Director for Climate and Environmental Justice at the Action Center on Race and the Economy.
"This report makes it clear that financial regulators understand the need for action to ensure that the climate crisis doesn't cause the next financial crisis. However, by leaving out key risk-reduction tools, it is not treating the problem with the urgency it deserves. Secretary Yellen's report lays out preliminary steps to make the financial industry more transparent and accountable for their growing climate risks, but it's also a missed opportunity to recommend actions that actually reduce climate risk and limit Wall Street's toxic investments in the fossil fuels that are driving the crisis. Financial regulators can and must act to rein in Wall Street's contributions to the climate crisis, which threaten our financial system and the small businesses, pensions, communities and families that depend on it. This report is a step in the right direction, but bolder action from regulators is necessary in order to protect our economy from the climate crisis," said Ben Cushing, Fossil-Free Finance Campaign Manager at the Sierra Club.
"This report might have been welcomed if it had been included as a memo five months ago accompanying President Biden's executive order -- but as the result of several months' work, it is deeply disappointing. FSOC's inability to move beyond basic recognition of climate-related financial risk and refusal to recommend tangible actions to effectively mitigate that risk is woefully insufficient to meet the moment. Fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate change, and financial institutions are funding trillions in fossil fuel projects each year. Arriving at COP26 with a climate risk plan that doesn't adequately address this reality means the Biden Administration risks forfeiting its chance at climate leadership," said Collin Rees, U.S. Campaigns Manager at Oil Change International.
"This report affirms recognition of the dangers of the fossil-fueled climate crisis on our communities, financial system, and economy. But because of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell's historic foot-dragging, the US Treasury failed to live up to the bar of action. If the US actually wants to lead on climate, President Biden must replace Powell with a Fed Chair who will take climate risk seriously. Ahead of COP26, it's time for swift and responsible transformation that steers our economy off fossil fuels, and stops the risky practices of climate destroyers on Wall Street. That's why we're making the Peoples' voices heard, and rising for a Fossil Free Future on October 29," said Brett Fleishman, Head of Finance Campaigns with 350.org.
"This report is an important, unprecedented step, and it sends a strong signal to Wall Street that U.S. financial regulators are getting serious about climate risk. At the same time, it includes only the bare-minimum first steps--ones that should have been taken long ago. One of the report's final recommendations [number 4.7] is that regulators should review existing rules and guidance to consider whether they need to do more. That's what this report should have done. We need much stronger leadership from the White House and Treasury if we're going to avoid a climate-based financial crisis," said David Arkush, director of Public Citizen's climate program.
"Nine months into Biden's presidency and 98 months until the crucial 2030 emissions reduction deadline, a report that mostly consists of recommending more research is completely inadequate. The clock is ticking and FSOC is utterly failing to meet the moment. We need to see regulators move more quickly and work above and beyond the recommendations of this report," said Jeff Hauser, Executive Director of the Revolving Door Project.
The Stop the Money Pipeline coalition is over 160 organizations strong holding the financial backers of climate chaos accountable.
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Susan Collins Ads Brag About $190 Million for Rural Hospitals. It’s a Band-Aid on the Gaping Wound She Helped Inflict
The Republican senator running for a sixth term has postured as a champion of rural healthcare, but the Medicaid cuts she voted to advance are set to devastate vulnerable communities in Maine and across the US.
Jun 18, 2026
In recent weeks, Mainers have been inundated with ads touting Republican Sen. Susan Collins' role in securing passage of a $50 billion fund aimed at shoring up beleaguered rural healthcare systems across the US—including $190 million earmarked for her state.
But the ads, purchased by Collins' campaign directly and by the dark money group One Nation, neglect to mention a key fact: The Republican budget law that implements the Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) also contains the largest cuts to Medicaid in the program's history, rendering the $50 billion fund a mere Band-Aid on a massive wound.
According to one analysis, the GOP law's estimated cuts to federal Medicaid spending in rural areas over the next decade will amount to nearly triple the RHTP's funding. Maine is expected to lose nearly $3 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next 10 years due to the Republican law—a massive hit that the pro-Collins campaign ads predictably avoid.
Collins, who is running for a sixth term against Democratic nominee Graham Platner, emphasizes that she voted against final passage of the GOP budget legislation, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). But Collins cast a decisive procedural vote that allowed the bill, which also delivered massive tax breaks to the wealthy and large corporations, to advance to the Senate floor, where her Republican colleagues did the rest. President Donald Trump signed the bill into law last summer.
"Susan Collins is only bipartisan when it doesn't matter," declares a 30-second ad unveiled Wednesday by the Platner campaign, which highlighted the incumbent senator's vote to advance the OBBBA and pilloried her reputation as a "moderate."
The Republican law's Medicaid cuts, which total nearly $1 trillion, are expected to cost Maine hospitals $66 million per year in revenue and strip health coverage from tens of thousands of residents—projections that Collins' ads omit.
"Maine will be forced to offset budget holes caused by this bill by terminating coverage for families, eliminating essential health services, and cutting provider rates so drastically that doctors and hospitals are forced to close their doors—particularly in rural communities," the advocacy group Families USA warned in an analysis of the Republican budget measure. "Hospitals like Cary Medical Center and Northern Light AR Gould Hospital in Aroostook County, Northern Light Maine Coast Hospital in Hancock County, and Calais Community Hospital in Washington County will be at greater financial risk of closing due to Medicaid cuts in the bill."
"While more funding for rural healthcare is always welcome, political messaging about new funding cannot obscure the reality for states."
Nationwide, the impacts of the Medicaid cuts—which include new work requirements and other bureaucratic barriers—are expected to be devastating for years to come. A tracker maintained by Protect Our Care shows that more than 1,000 hospitals, clinics, wards, and nursing homes are "facing closure or cuts" following OBBBA's passage.
Maine Family Planning, the state's largest network of reproductive health clinics, was forced to end primary care services late last year due to the Republican budget law.
“Behind each pin is a story,” Anne Shoup, senior adviser to Protect Our Care, said Wednesday, referencing the markers on the group's hospital closure tracker. "Whether it’s an expectant mother losing access to prenatal care after the nearest rural hospital was forced to close its maternity ward, or seniors driving hours each way for care that used to be down the road, or people with disabilities facing gaps in caregiving that allow them to stay in their own homes, these pins represent our neighbors, our parents, and our kids. They deserve better than to have their healthcare gutted to write a check to the ultra-wealthy.”
The health policy organization KFF has said it is "highly unlikely that any state will receive more money from the rural health fund than it will lose" from Medicaid cuts and other federal policy changes, calling into question Collins' characterization of the RHTP money as transformative for Maine's rural healthcare system.
"RHTP is like lending someone a bucket to catch rain from a leaking roof," Mark Shaffer, an analyst at the Maine Center for Economic Policy, wrote last month. "It’s too small to hold what’s falling and is taken away before the roof ever gets fixed. The cruel irony is while hospitals scramble to manage the leak, millions of Americans have simply been pushed out of the system entirely and left to fend for themselves. And this was all done to support tax cuts for the wealthy."
A 30-second pro-Collins ad released earlier this year by One Nation—a GOP-aligned dark money group that has already dropped $20 million on ads supporting the Republican incumbent—described the $190 million in RHTP funds awarded to Maine for the first year of the program as quite literally lifesaving.
The problem, as the Maine Beacon pointed out, is that "no funds had actually been distributed at the time Collins’ ad aired in mid-March 2026."
"In fact, the Maine Department of Health and Human Services did not receive full approval for the program’s budget until the end of March, weeks after the ad began running," the Beacon observed. "State officials said during a Rural Health Fund Seminar on March 31 that they are still working to finalize contracts and hire staff, with funds not expected to be distributed until later in 2026."
In a March 27 statement, Collins took credit for preserving the $190 million in federal rural health funding for Maine, claiming it was "at risk" of being rescinded and reallocated by the Trump administration. (In early April, the office of Maine Gov. Janet Mills denied the funding was ever in jeopardy.)
Earlier this week, KFF Health News reported that Maine is one of several states that have been forced to make changes to their plans to spend the rural health funds as the Trump administration exerts "tight control" over the money. One restriction imposed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—headed by Mehmet Oz—bars states from spending more than 15% of allotted RHTP funds on payments to rural hospitals and other providers for patient care.
Collins' ads celebrating the program as an unequivocal victory for rural healthcare include no mention of the spending limitation—which is not in the language of the GOP budget law—or the Trump administration's vice-like grip on the funds.
"It has frankly been surprising to me as a longtime observer of legislative officials, that the GOP members of Congress who were the cheerleaders of the RHTP as a rural hospital fund have not raised any substantial complaints as the Trump administration created this severe funding limit that impacts struggling rural hospitals in their own districts," Adam Searing, an associate professor at Georgetown University's Center for Children and Families, wrote in March.
"While more funding for rural healthcare is always welcome," wrote Searing, "political messaging about new funding cannot obscure the reality for states."
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Bonn Conference Confirms Climate Action Impossible Unless Corporate Capture of UN Process Ends
"A climate process that remains vulnerable to obstruction and corporate influence cannot deliver the action this crisis demands," said one group.
Jun 18, 2026
As international climate talks backed by the United Nations wrapped up Thursday in Bonn, Germany, campaigners stressed that policymakers must do more to curb the influence of polluting industries if such negotiations are going to have any hope of helping the world bring the fossil fuel era to an end.
The Bonn climate talks—officially the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Mid-Year Subsidiary Bodies meetings, or SB64—serve as a technical and diplomatic staging ground for the next UN Climate Change Conference, or COP31, which is scheduled to take place in Antalya, Türkiye this November.
With current national climate pledges remaining far from what's needed to limit planetary warming to 1.5°C—the increasingly moribund target at the heart of the Paris Climate Agreement—experts and campaigners are taking aim at the UNFCCC’s reliance on consensus-based decision-making, which allows a handful of fossil fuel-producing nations and the oil, gas, and coal industries to block ambitious climate action and weaken international agreements.
“At the climate talks in Bonn, States failed to make meaningful progress and pushed back on already established agreements, exposing a critical truth: Climate justice should not be vetoed, and reform of the UNFCCC is needed to enable climate action at the speed and scale the crisis demands," Lien Vandamme, senior campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), said in a statement Thursday.
The #JuneClimateMeetings further exposed the structural barriers slowing climate action: 🤝#ConsensusKillsAmbition, 🕴️Corporate influence,🪑Barriers to participation. It's high time for States to #FixTheUNFCCC.Read more in our statement: www.ciel.org/news/june-cl...
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— Center for International Environmental Law (@ciel.org) June 18, 2026 at 6:27 AM
Vandamme added that "effective multilateralism is the only way out of the climate crisis, and this process does not live up to that expectation."
Rallying under a "Friends of Science" banner, dozens of nations are calling out coordinated attacks by fossil fuel producers and the oil, gas, and coal industries on science that threatens their economic prospects.
“We see coordinated efforts to cast doubt on the best available science driven by a narrow set of interests, not by the needs of our people,” lead Panamanian negotiator Ana Aguilar said during a Wednesday press conference.
“We have seen this playbook before," she added. "Manufacture doubt, delay the response, and let the vulnerable people pay this bill.”
Lead Fijian negotiator Sivendra Michael put it more bluntly, telling reporters, "Anyone that is blocking references to science—they are not our friends."
There has been some progress. As CIEL noted:
It is encouraging that, after more than three decades, the UNFCCC has begun to acknowledge concerns around the corporate capture of the process. The open dialogue on transparency and integrity that happened in Bonn represents an important—but long overdue—step towards addressing the influence of polluting industries in the climate negotiations. This dialogue must be the start toward a meaningful, comprehensive policy to address corporate capture of climate negotiations. A climate process that remains vulnerable to obstruction and corporate influence cannot deliver the action this crisis demands.
Erika Lennon, CIEL's senior attorney, pointed to April's First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia, as a hopeful sign. The Santa Marta conference, which was free of major polluters like the United States, China, Russia, and India, took aim at what climate defenders called the “shamefully weak” draft text—called the Multirão Decision—produced at last November’s COP30 in Brazil. The final document removed all mentions of fossil fuels amid pressure from oil and gas-producing nations like the United States, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, and the presence of a record number of industry lobbyists.
“The Santa Marta Conference demonstrated that a fossil fuel phaseout is not out of reach," Lennon said Thursday. "But Bonn showed that the institutions meant to deliver that accountability remain constrained by outdated rules and undue influence from polluting interests."
"We need effective multilateralism and an effective climate regime, not one that is incapable of delivering accountability or tackling the root cause of the climate crisis, fossil fuels, at the speed and scale the crisis demands," she added. "As attention turns to COP31, governments must confront the structural barriers that continue to delay meaningful action, from consensus rules that allow a small number of states to block progress, to the absence of robust safeguards against conflicts of interest, or violations of the rights of meaningful participation of representatives from climate-vulnerable communities."
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Thanks to Trump's Iran War Disaster, Fossil Fuel Industry to Enjoy $700 Billion Windfall in 2026
"We witness not only a massive fossil fuel crisis but a vast upward transfer of wealth built on instability of fossil fuel markets and pain," said an expert at 350.org.
Jun 18, 2026
US President Donald Trump’s war with Iran may finally be reaching a close. But consumers and businesses around the world will continue to pay the price in the months ahead as still-elevated energy costs funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to fossil fuel giants.
That’s according to a report from the environmental group 350.org released Thursday, following Trump’s signing of a memorandum of understanding with Iran this week to begin the process of formally ending a war that has sent global oil prices skyrocketing and saddled ordinary people with record fuel prices.
The group estimated that just 110 days of war resulted in the transfer of an additional $374 billion from consumers and businesses into the coffers of oil and gas companies beyond what would have been expected had the war never been launched.
And while Trump claims his agreement to end the war this week will avert an “economic catastrophe,” there will likely still be tremendous pain even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens promptly.
Using oil and gas pricing scenarios from the International Monetary Fund’s April 2026 World Economic Outlook and data on global consumption, 350.org predicted that by the end of the year, consumers and businesses will spend an additional $199.8 billion on oil and $128.1 billion on gas above a non-war scenario, making for a grand total of more than $700 billion as a result of the war.
This, the group said, is a conservative estimate, as it does not even take into account knock-on effects. The war will ultimately end up costing much more when factoring in inflation across the rest of the economy, resulting from higher fuel costs or fertilizer shortages caused by the strait's closure, which has affected food prices.
It also does not take into account the resulting effects on economic output or employment as rising costs and lower consumer spending force companies to tighten their belts.
"The oil and gas industry is draining billions from people and businesses on the back of a war that has killed thousands and pushed millions toward poverty and hunger," said Andreas Sieber, head of political Strategy at 350.org.
"Even if the Strait of Hormuz reopens tomorrow, we should expect prices to remain above pre-crisis levels," he said. "We witness not only a massive fossil fuel crisis but a vast upward transfer of wealth built on instability of fossil fuel markets and pain."
While the war has brought it into starker relief, previous reports from 350.org have shown that even if the US had never attacked Iran, the continued global dependence on fossil fuels was resulting in trillions of dollars of avoidable costs each year, including $9.3 trillion to mitigate climate-related damages and air pollution-related deaths each year, costs that disproportionately fall on the world's poorest.
In order to alleviate economic strain from the war, Sieber said, "governments should tax these excess profits now and use the revenues to protect people, cut bills, and rapidly deploy renewables that make households and small businesses less vulnerable to the next fossil fuel shock.”
Estimates of inflation also do not account for how the war has heightened global instability and poverty, which will require additional resources for humanitarian relief efforts. In late April, the United Nations Development Program estimated that even if the conflict had ended then, more than 32 million people worldwide would be pushed into economic precarity.
This is not to mention the resources that will need to be expended to address the harms caused by the war itself.
In exchange for negotiations on Iran's nuclear program, a portion of the memorandum of understanding requires the US to work with "regional partners," presumably other Persian Gulf allies, to scrounge up at least $300 billion to help Iran pay for reconstruction and economic development after the country was devastated by American and Israeli attacks on civilian infrastructure and millions were displaced.
As a report from the International Rescue Committee detailed last week, the Iran war has also had cascading effects on other conflicts and catastrophes.
"Six months ago, the IRC warned that a New World Disorder was emerging," said David Miliband, the humanitarian group's president and CEO. "Since then, disorder has not only grown but accelerated. A war with Iran. A million people have been forced to flee their homes in Lebanon. A brewing global food security catastrophe that risks plunging millions more people into acute hunger. An expanding Ebola outbreak. Defanged diplomacy and collapsing aid budgets."
"The Iran war couldn’t have happened at a worse time," Miliband said in a New Yorker article published Thursday. "It set off a chain of events that’s very damaging.”
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