Month: January 2017

RIS was in the news again, this time on January 17th in FundFire, part of the Financial Times mediascape. The article is under Danielle Verbrigghe’s byline. Of note:

With his consulting venture, which will offer strategic and investment consulting, Sloss hopes to use his experience on the wealth management and asset management sides of the business to connect the dots between financial advisors, clients and asset managers, he says.

“I think I can be a good intermediary and translator between the different stakeholders and constituents, to bring people together in the ESG space,” Sloss says.

Thank you to Danielle for her insightful piece. The full article can be read on FundFire’s subscription-based site here.

I was extremely fortunate to be able to interview the esteemed Steve Lydenberg and his colleague and co-founder of The Investment Integration Project (TIIP), Bill Burckart, for my latest article in CityWire USA magazine. TIIP recently released a new industry analysis report entitled “Tipping Points 2016” which, as Steve and Bill describe it, gets down to systems-level thinking in sustainable investing. My article (link) focused on Section 2 of the report, which is an incredibly thoughtful and useful piece on how to deconstruct the processes of intentionality. I highly recommend reading the entire TIIP report (link).

Special thanks to TIIP, and particularly Steve and Bill, for taking the time to be interviewed, but also for permission to utilize their graphical framework for intentionality in the article. You can see that graphic in its full glory and context in the Tipping Points 2016 report.

“…businesses are coming to the conclusion that reducing emissions is not just good for the environment—it can also boost bottom lines, cut costs for consumers, and deliver returns for shareholders.”

I could not have said that any better. So who did say it?

Barack Obama. Yesterday, 44 published a policy forum article in Science entitled “The irreversible momentum of clean energy“. There is a certain amount of the expected global top-down policy argument, but what caught my eye was the attention drawn to the fundamental bottom-up case — unlocking value for business stakeholders.

Where are the exhaustive peer-reviewed scientific journal articles that evaluate the data and present different conclusions, or event present different independently verifiable data?

After a dust-up over a NOAA analysis of sea surface temperatures that bolsters the case that climate change is a measurable, material and increasing phenomenon, a multi-institution team led by Zeke Hausfather at Berkeley evaluated data from three largely independent sources —  National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Extended Reconstruction Sea Surface Temperature (ERSST), the Hadley Centre SST data set (HadSST3), and the Japanese Meteorological Agency’s Centennial Observation-Based Estimates of SSTs (COBE-SST) from 2003 to the present. I include the link to the study below for those of you who do not have enough charts and Greek letters in your daily diet. As I understand it, they consulted different data sets from different gathering mechanisms – buoys, ships and floats – to account for biases that could emerge in the devices or methodologies.

The science continues to hold up. There are too many conscientious scientists of all political stripes from too many governments and institutions for there to be a credible conspiracy to manipulate either the data or the conclusions or both for very long. Continue reading “If climate change is a hoax…”