How Bloomberg is aggressively covering environment news

Ben Smith of The New York Times examines how Bloomberg News is covering the environment.

Smith writes, “The problem, reporters for Bloomberg Green found, was that many of these moves were meaningless. There was no standard accounting for companies’ claims about what the reporters called ‘an ethereal token known as a carbon credit,’ and no accountability. And so the giant financial news organization created a measure, and began checking the claims made by companies, including BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase and Disney.

“Bloomberg is a gazillion-dollar behemoth, not a tiny start-up, and this effort has used the company’s well-developed muscles for parsing data to put pressure on companies to live up to their own claims. A particularly scathing investigation found that the Nature Conservancy, the environmental partner to many top companies, had been selling hundreds of millions of dollars of carbon offsets that did virtually nothing to reduce carbon emissions.

“‘Just as journalists ‘follow the money,’ in the climate era, we will ‘follow the emissions,’’ Bloomberg Green’s editor, Aaron Rutkoff, said in an email. ‘Eventually, reporting on corporate emissions is going to be as standard as reporting on earnings — and missing investor expectations will have the same sort of downside for C.E.O.s.'”

Read more here.