In December 2025, Nature retracted the key study underpinning the NGFS Phase V climate scenarios. The retraction revealed that global banking capital requirements — the cost of borrowing — were partially calibrated on a spreadsheet error regarding Uzbekistan’s GDP —
Missing yet key detail regarding the lack of transparency: transparency would not help one bit even if complete when it comes to the EU Taxonomy. No one either promoting or criticizing it appears to have even deigned to read the damn thing. For it they did, they may have noticed there is something very, very wrong with it. Not because of agendas (although those definitely exist) but simply because of lack of elementary correlation with anything resembling reality. The EU Taxonomy is completely unworkable in real life: a veritable Kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucratic complication and sheer ineptitude. Psychiatry-grade stuff. Super specific yet utterly unstandardized and therefore statistically useless. It underwent complete conceptual pre-enshittification already while being written. Have a nagging feeling that the "Uzbekistan detail" is the rule, not the exception when it comes to the EU Taxonomy: there are literally thousands of such examples. Those in control have no idea what they are even doing there, which somehow seems scarier than everything being controlled logically, if nastily and criminally. Green emperor has no clothes!
The ultimate greening of the financial system: Shut down the data centers and go back to sovereign precious metal backed cash and hard copy telex transfers. Meow.
Thanks for responding. Now I understand strategic vs acceptable(not) lack of opacity.
And yes, agree diagnostic is essential first step.
Re: NGFS single sentence- I am not likely to track that down on my own, being a broad but not always deep reader with multiple strong interests pulling at me.
Exhaustive and for me exhausting. Stopped close reading around 1979 and then did my best to track along. Here are my problems with this:
It criticizes the lack(s) of transparency, but in reality, if there had been total broadcast of all pertinent agreements and documents, how many ordinary people would bother to read, much less study the impacts?
It is very critical of what did happen, but fails to suggest a meaningful alternative- including for the present. Do you have any recommendations?
wrt transparency - that's the point. the architecture works because most people won't read the documents. that doesn't make the opacity acceptable - it makes it strategic.
wrt alternatives - the essay is diagnostic. you map the architecture before you can propose how to govern it differently. if you don't understand what they do, how can you effectively fight it?
wrt what's actually missing from scrutiny - the NGFS Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC), announced in a single sentence in December 2025, sits between risk identification and the scenario production that calibrates your borrowing costs. that's probably the least investigated position in the entire global finance/environment synthesis - and that's almost certainly not by accident.
were i a 'navigator of spaceship earth', that's where i would hide.
Missing yet key detail regarding the lack of transparency: transparency would not help one bit even if complete when it comes to the EU Taxonomy. No one either promoting or criticizing it appears to have even deigned to read the damn thing. For it they did, they may have noticed there is something very, very wrong with it. Not because of agendas (although those definitely exist) but simply because of lack of elementary correlation with anything resembling reality. The EU Taxonomy is completely unworkable in real life: a veritable Kafkaesque nightmare of bureaucratic complication and sheer ineptitude. Psychiatry-grade stuff. Super specific yet utterly unstandardized and therefore statistically useless. It underwent complete conceptual pre-enshittification already while being written. Have a nagging feeling that the "Uzbekistan detail" is the rule, not the exception when it comes to the EU Taxonomy: there are literally thousands of such examples. Those in control have no idea what they are even doing there, which somehow seems scarier than everything being controlled logically, if nastily and criminally. Green emperor has no clothes!
The ultimate greening of the financial system: Shut down the data centers and go back to sovereign precious metal backed cash and hard copy telex transfers. Meow.
Thanks for responding. Now I understand strategic vs acceptable(not) lack of opacity.
And yes, agree diagnostic is essential first step.
Re: NGFS single sentence- I am not likely to track that down on my own, being a broad but not always deep reader with multiple strong interests pulling at me.
Could you, will you, be saying more?
Loved the link- thank you!
Exhaustive and for me exhausting. Stopped close reading around 1979 and then did my best to track along. Here are my problems with this:
It criticizes the lack(s) of transparency, but in reality, if there had been total broadcast of all pertinent agreements and documents, how many ordinary people would bother to read, much less study the impacts?
It is very critical of what did happen, but fails to suggest a meaningful alternative- including for the present. Do you have any recommendations?
wrt transparency - that's the point. the architecture works because most people won't read the documents. that doesn't make the opacity acceptable - it makes it strategic.
wrt alternatives - the essay is diagnostic. you map the architecture before you can propose how to govern it differently. if you don't understand what they do, how can you effectively fight it?
wrt what's actually missing from scrutiny - the NGFS Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC), announced in a single sentence in December 2025, sits between risk identification and the scenario production that calibrates your borrowing costs. that's probably the least investigated position in the entire global finance/environment synthesis - and that's almost certainly not by accident.
were i a 'navigator of spaceship earth', that's where i would hide.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/10/08/world/david-de-rothschild-modern-explorers