A pump jack at sunset. Under the EU Council's proposal, money invested under a green "transition" label could flow to companies expanding oil and gas, the opposite of what savers think they are funding.
The Council's Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) revision drops the exclusion that kept fossil fuel expansion out of Europe's transition funds. The decision landed in the middle of the continent's most severe heatwave on record.
In the same week that France logged its hottest day since national records began in 1947, the European Union moved to loosen what the word “sustainable” is allowed to mean on a fund label.
The two events were not connected by design. They were connected by date. On June 24, as a heatwave that the World Weather Attribution group of scientists described as the most severe ever recorded in the region gripped Western Europe, the Council of the European Union adopted its negotiating position on a revision of the SFDR, the EU's rulebook for sustainable financial products. The same group of scientists concluded that June heat of this intensity would have been virtually impossible fifty years ago without human-caused warming. By the end of that week, the World Health Organization's director-general said more than 1,300 excess deaths had been recorded across Europe since June 21.
