Today: SBTi updates its net zero standard, backing environmental credits; Billions of dollars in micro loans were meant to help alleviate poverty, it barely made a dent; Oatly switches up the way it markets its oat milk.

Welcome back: The world’s leading corporate climate standard-setting group will allow companies to count purchased environmental credits in their carbon footprint calculations, as part of new rules it says are aimed at acknowledging the difficulty in eliminating certain emissions, Sustainable Business reports.

The Science Based Targets initiative said it has made “an explicit choice to recognize that companies do not control everything, and that pretending otherwise does not serve anyone,” in its long-awaited update to its corporate net-zero rulebook.

The new rules are “built on a best-efforts framework,” the U.K.-based nonprofit said. “The expectation is clear: Set targets based on science accompanied by reasonable implementation plans, deploy every lever within your control, be transparent about where barriers have limited what was possible, and demonstrate what you are doing to address those barriers over time.”

The group is also backing high quality carbon credits, in a shift from its previous outlook. Carbon credits, especially carbon removals, will be part of what the SBTi refers to as “ongoing emissions responsibility.” That means, they will be able to be used to help companies achieve carbon neutrality when faced with emissions that are impossible or nearly impossible to eliminate. This rule will only come into effect from 2035 to cover the last remaining emissions after all other steps have been taken.

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Giving tiny loans to shoestring entrepreneurs was meant to be capitalism’s cure for global poverty.

Microfinance, loans issued in communities not served by traditional banks, would help poor people in developing countries start businesses and work their way toward prosperity. That was the goal of Muhammad Yunus, a U.S.-trained economist, who pioneered the practice in Bangladesh during the 1970s.

“In a poverty-free world, the only place you would be able to see poverty is in the poverty museums,” Yunus told his audience in Oslo in 2006 when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

Yet two decades after Yunus’s Nobel win, few of those aspirations have come to pass, Gabriele Steinhauser reports for the Journal from Cambodia.

Academic studies, including randomized controlled trials, have found that microfinance doesn’t improve the economic conditions of most borrowers. Economists found excessive microfinance lending has set off repayment crises for borrowers in half a dozen countries, including Bosnia, India and Cambodia.

• A sharp fall in China’s crude oil imports during the Iran war has been key in holding down oil prices and keeping the global economy afloat. (WSJ)

• Cypress Creek Energy closed on a $3.5 billion financing for one of the biggest solar and battery projects in the U.S. (Bloomberg)
   
• Democrats are shifting their approach to climate change, as the fallout from the Middle East crisis reshuffles the politics of energy. (NYT)
   
• El Niño, the climate phenomenon that supercharges global weather, has arrived and could intensify to historic levels in the fall. (Guardian)
   
• Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla have produced executives and founders across the clean energy world. (Heatmap)
   
• Teachers in a Louisiana school district will receive bonuses up to $50,935 this year, due in part to a Meta data center project. (WSJ)

WSJ Pro Sustainable Business gives you an inside look at how companies are tackling sustainability. Send comments to bureau chief Perry Cleveland-Peck at perry.cleveland-peck@wsj.com and reporters Clara Hudson at clara.hudson@wsj.com and Yusuf Khan at yusuf.khan@wsj.com. Follow us on LinkedIn at wsjperry, clara-hudson and yusuf_khan.