Category: ESG

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/02/09/the-truth-about-big-oil-and-climate-change

In America, the world’s largest economy and its second biggest polluter, climate change is becoming hard to ignore. Extreme weather has grown more frequent. In November wildfires scorched California; last week Chicago was colder than parts of Mars. Scientists are sounding the alarm more urgently and people have noticed—73% of Americans polled by Yale University late last year said that climate change is real. The left of the Democratic Party wants to put a “Green New Deal” at the heart of the election in 2020. As expectations shift, the private sector is showing signs of adapting. Last year around 20 coal mines shut. Fund managers are prodding firms to become greener. Warren Buffett, no sucker for fads, is staking $30bn on clean energy and Elon Musk plans to fill America’s highways with electric cars.

Yet amid the clamour is a single, jarring truth. Demand for oil is rising and the energy industry, in America and globally, is planning multi-trillion-dollar investments to satisfy it. No firm embodies this strategy better than ExxonMobil, the giant that rivals admire and green activists love to hate. As our briefing explains, it plans to pump 25% more oil and gas in 2025 than in 2017. If the rest of the industry pursues even modest growth, the consequence for the climate could be disastrous.

http://PG&E: The First Climate-Change Bankruptcy, Probably Not the Last

PG&E Corp.’s PCG 13.68% bankruptcy could mark a business milestone: the first major corporate casualty of climate change. Few people expect it will be the last.

California’s largest utility was overwhelmed by rapid climatic changes as a prolonged drought dried out much of the state and decimated forests, dramatically increasing the risk of fire. On Monday, PG&E said it planned to file for Chapter 11 protection by month’s end, citing an estimated $30 billion in liabilities and 750 lawsuits from wildfires potentially caused by its power lines.

The PG&E bankruptcy could be a wake-up call for corporations, forcing them to expand how they think about climate-related risks, management consultants and other experts said.

Previously, companies mainly worried over risks from new governmental regulations related to climate change, said Christophe Brognaux, a managing director at Boston Consulting Group. The PG&E case makes clear that companies also have to worry about sudden, and potentially unexpected, impacts to their core assets and liabilities, he added. 

“Physical risks have only recently manifested themselves. This is a fairly new development,” said Bruce Usher, a professor at Columbia University’s business school who teaches a course on climate and finance. “If you are not already considering extreme weather and other climatic events as one of many risk factors affecting business today, you are not doing your job.”

https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/impact-investing-a-trillion-dollar-market-in-the-making

This, Cohen believes, will ultimately lead to an impact ecosystem that has the potential to cover all major assets classes and create the emergence of a multitrillion-dollar market within the next 10 to 12 years.So, if you add it all up, we are talking about tens of trillions, perhaps $30 trillion by 2030.”

Impact investing has been gaining traction over the last decade, as investors, consumers, and—to an extent—policymakers come to recognise that new ideas are needed in order to address some of the largest societal and environmental challenges facing humankind.

However, as is often the case with new ideas, impact investing continues to face big challenges and misconceptions. How to actually define this type of investing is one of those challenges, while the biggest obstacle perhaps remains the general belief that doing good with investments will almost always result in lower-than-market-rate returns.

But according to Cohen, at least, the scepticism is due to a somewhat dogmatic approach by traditional practitioners. “Many people have the notion that optimising risk and return is sacrosanct, and therefore refuse to even contemplate any alteration to the system which might affect their two dimensions of the decision-making process.

“The reason I am putting weight behind this is that if we can apply the usual tools of financial analysis—such as price-earning ratios and return on equity—on an impact-weighted basis, then we will have the most versatile set of tools to be able to make comparisons between companies. This is a huge, but totally achievable goal.”

According to Cohen, the impact revolution will be driven to a large extent by consumers, contributors to pension funds and asset owners. Living in times of systemic challenges such as extreme poverty, geopolitical tensions and environmental disruption on a global scale appears to be leading a growing part of the western population to question, if not outright challenge, the status quo.

This, Cohen believes, will ultimately lead to an impact ecosystem that has the potential to cover all major assets classes and create the emergence of a multitrillion-dollar market within the next 10 to 12 years.

“This is not a dream. If you look at the potential application of agreed impact principles across all asset classes, the numbers are absolutely huge. It is not a stretch to imagine that in a few years’ time a small percentage of the public markets, government and corporate debt, private equity and venture capital will all be investing under the agreed impact principals. So, if you add it all up, we are talking about tens of trillions, perhaps $30 trillion by 2030.”