Liam Denning, Columnist

Corporate America Demands Low Taxes, Lower Emissions. And Cake.

Companies take contradictory stances on fighting climate change and the ways to pay for it.

April 16, 2021 at 11:00 AM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

And they’ll eat it too.
Photographer: Hulton Archive/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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Ahead of President Joe Biden’s climate summit beginning on April 22 (Earth Day), more than 300 companies have signed an open letter urging him to set a new, more ambitious target for reducing U.S. emissions. It at once captures the mounting pressure on fossil-fuel producers — and, in light of another corporate campaign now underway, the tensions bedeviling ESG credibility.

Make no mistake, cutting U.S. emissions in 2030 to just half the level of 2005, as the signatories call for, would be huge.