ESG & Industry Updates

First - a reminder - Tariffs are (as of writing) still set to kick in this weekend on all imports from Mexico and Canada, and thus far they do not exempt oil imports from Canada, which could impact New England over the next several weeks, barring updates. We won't know what, if any, impacts there will be until early next week, most likely. Petitions are pending to exempt oil imports from the tariffs but there has not been any publicly confirmed change on that by the Administration as of Friday afternoon. Additionally, there are looming questions about price impacts on electricity in Northern New England that is Canadian sourced and whether that would be subject to the same 25% tariff.

The UN’s Climate Change Conference, or “COP28” Summit was held from November 30 through December 13^th in Dubai, UAE. The Conference consisted of 150 heads of State and Government and 85,000 participants representing countries, organizations, etc. This year’s summit focused on where the world is in relation to the goals initially outlined in the Paris Agreement (forget what that is? Refresher here: LINK). Spoiler alert – the world is nowhere near achieving the goals outlined, and the focus became how the countries involved can speed up their action on climate change mitigation through multiple avenues.

As we have been discussing, the US National Blueprint for Transportation Decarbonization breaks the Transportation sector into seven categories, each of which has its own targets for emission reduction/elimination, and strategies for how those declines in emissions will be achieved. The second segment by emission % is Medium- and Heavy-Duty Vehicles.

The new Administration is off to a running start, as Wednesday saw a flurry of Executive Orders come out, many of which deal with climate change, and the oil & gas industry. There are a lot of items, and they are all pretty detailed with substantial backstory, but we are going to try and briefly touch on the three major items relevant to the industry and quickly go over the main points (or, try to at least!)