Diverging Paths: The EU-US ESG Regulatory Debate And The Implications For EU Competitiveness

The pace of change with regard to attitudes, laws and regulations on climate change matters in the ten years since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015 has been head spinning. In the early years of the past decade, there appeared to be a growing international consensus on the need to finance the transition to net zero. In its ambitious Sustainable Finance Action Plan, published in 2018, the European Union ("EU") sought to position itself as a global leader in the area of sustainable finance, introducing a complex framework of new disclosure rules intended to provide investors with the information they needed to make investments aligned with their sustainability goals. In the US, at a federal level, the SEC proposed rules aiming to standardise how companies report their climate-related risks and impacts, while a large number of states introduced sustainability reporting regulations. The Inflation Reduction Act ("IRA") introduced significant tax incentives to