SBTi CEO Response Asserting Commitment to Transparency is Bullshit

Dear Luiz,

Unfortunately, your faux polite message leaves me no other option than to call it out as a bullshit response, in that it advances a knowable deceit that expresses utter contempt toward me, and more importantly, toward science and toward all SBTi rightsholders (which amounts to all living beings adversely impacted by climate change, hence all of humanity.)

Please note that my identification of your response as bullshit is, in fact, a generous interpretation that grants you the benefit of the doubt, in the sense that it asserts that your response advances “nonsense discourse presented as sense,” instead of asserting that your response is an insidious lie.

In order to believe that your response is anything other than bullshit, an objective observer would need to believe that your assertion, “I am committed to transparency,” is backed up by the evidence.

It is not.

The kind of transparency at issue is the level of transparency necessary to enact the scientific method of replicability, as is made crystal clear by my message (as well as your original assertion of?commitment to transparency?and?replicability?in our March 15 phone conversation).?Thus, such a commitment to transparency is normative, not incrementalist (as your message asserts in seeking to advance the latter: “I want our 2022 report to deliver an even greater degree of transparency, accountability and impact measurement and I'm confident that with each new edition it will only get better” [emphasis added]).

In other words, the level of transparency necessary to replicate results (ie enact the scientific method) is either achieved, or it is not: any and all movement toward the necessary level of transparency is irrelevant, and, in fact, acts as a smokescreen (whether intentionally or not).

This concept of normativity versus incrementalism is firmly ensconced in the very foundations of the Science Based Targets initiative, which explicitly rejects incrementalist greenhouse gas emissions targets, and explicitly requires normative targets that align with the most rigorous scenarios emerging from the climate science for respecting the carbon budget.

I asked you to provide specific evidence necessary to enact the scientific method of replicability: namely, 1) the data and analysis underpinning SBTi’s 2018 decision to recommend only its own methods, and disqualify all methods produced independent of SBTi; and 2) the absolute emissions data, and method employed, for all companies with SBTi-validated targets.

In order for you to be “committed to transparency” of the kind that is necessary for an initiative that claims to be “science based,” you would have to ensure that SBTi provides all information necessary to replicate the results arrived at in its name (which includes the term “science”).

Your response, instead, explicitly refuses to address the substantive requests for specific transparency that I advance. In this sense, your response mocks the pursuit of truth, by placing obstacles in its path.

It is knowable that your response is intended to obfuscate due to your inclusion of the sentence, “On top of new online progress dashboard and data spreadsheets that are made public, the report does include a description of methods.” [sic]

My request made it clear that the data SBTi currently provides is insufficient to enact the scientific method, so your assertion that SBTi’s online progress dashboard and data spreadsheets “are made public” is irrelevant, if that public is deprived of the level of information necessary to enact the scientific method of replicability. Further, a mere “description of methods” is utterly insufficient in the context of the necessary pairing of absolute emissions with the specific method applied to set the target in question.

Finally, if you were indeed “committed to transparency,” you would have shared the 2020 Deloitte review when I first asked for it, seeing as it was already publicly available on the IKEA Foundation website, instead of refusing to share it with me. On this count alone, your purported “commitment to transparency” is bullshit. ??

In sum, your response is in fact a non-response that is intended to appear polite while in fact expressing utter disrespect for me, for science, and for all SBTi rightsholders (again, all living beings adversely impacted by climate change, hence all of humanity.)

Going forward, I would appreciate the courtesy and respect of authentic responses that sufficiently address the substantive issues at hand, though I am now, unfortunately, forced to expect discourteous, disrespectful, inauthentic bullshit responses based on your actions to date. I look forward to being pleasantly surprised by your shift (and the shift of the SBTi institution) into integrity.

Sincerely,

Bill

PS In the spirit of transparency, I am pasting the previous exchange back into this thread, in order to maintain its integrity of documenting our line of communication.