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Upcoming TBLI Events
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TBLI Capital Connect expansion
We've expanded our Capital Connect service so start-ups and companies without significant budget for fundraising efforts can tap into our extensive network of investors, and get connected to curated investor matches that are actively investing in your sector.
Are you currently looking to meet impact investors? This service might be just for you!
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TBLI Radical Truth Podcast
The Rise of the Emerging Manager
Despite the increased demand for private alternatives, investing in top venture capital funds still remains often exclusive to large institutions and a small group of hyper-connected wealthy individuals. Because of this, most investors continue to be locked out of the best opportunities.
A new segment of managers is however, becoming increasingly appealing to family offices and fund of funds - that of the emerging manager.
Listen to this podcast with Emerging Manager, R3i Capital GP Leesa Soulodre and learn:
- How Emerging Managers are outperforming benchmarks
- How ESG in Venture is delivering returns
- How Microfunds are delivering outperformance
Matereality: Redefine Corporate Purpose Workshop Series
Courage meets technique in this three-part workshop series. Participants become skilled in asking the right questions and following the money using public corporate sustainability and ESG disclosures. Build the blocks for your own role in system change. Lorraine will guide provocative plenary discussion that is necessary as we move towards an economy that serves life. Additional groupwork will allow for frank yet practical discussion among global peers.
Develop the capacity to examine corporate purpose in relation to Industrial Healing with this open-source leading edge approach.
More infoHow a monk and a Hippo joined forces to tackle Bangkok’s plastic pollution
Desperate to restore the Chao Praya River to a pristine state, an abbot in the Thai capital began recycling in his temple. Now he has a floating ally in his efforts to clean up the river
“Once upon a time this river was filled with fish; now, nothing swims in it any more,” says Wat Chak Daeng temple’s abbot, Phra Mahapranom Dhammalangkaro, as he looks out over Bangkok’s Chao Praya River.
As a novice monk in the 1980s, he remembers seeing children playing in the river and people scooping up handfuls of water to drink. But when he became abbot of Wat Chak Daeng more than 25 years later, those bucolic images were a thing of the past. Instead, when he arrived at the 240-year-old temple, he was saddened by the sight of the dirty river and the rubbish-strewn grounds surrounding it.
Dhammalangkaro knew that if nothing was done, the situation would only get worse. He built a recycling centre in the temple grounds, which evolved from collecting a handful of bottles to upcycling 300 tonnes of plastic a year. His biggest problem was that he was unable clean the river itself.
But then he met Tom Peacock-Nazil, chief executive of Seven Clean Seas, an organisation that finds solutions for plastic pollution. Last week the two men launched the Hippo, a solar-powered boat, which aims to remove 1.4m kilos of plastic a year from Bangkok’s busiest waterway.
“I want to take the waste from the river before it goes to the sea,” says Dhammalangkaro.
The Chao Phraya River is the largest waterway flowing through central Thailand. It stretches more than 230 miles from the northern Nakhon Sawan province to the Gulf of Thailand and is home to critically endangered species such as the Siamese tigerfish, giant barb and Chao Phraya giant catfish.
In Bangkok, it is an artery for a network of water buses, ferries and wooden long-tail boats. But it’s not just carrying people. According to research by the Rotterdam-based non-profit organisation Ocean Cleanup, the Chao Praya River carries 4,000 tonnes of plastic waste to the sea every year.
Plastic can be washed from the land into the rivers with the rain and floods, but even with penalties of up to 10,000 baht (£220), there are still people illegally dumping rubbish.
The Hippo’s design is simple and effective. A boom on the vessel funnels the floating plastic from the river on to a solar-powered conveyor belt. This then hauls the rubbish out of the water and drops it into a dumpster hidden under its roof.
The tangled mass of water hyacinths, food containers, plastic bottles and bags is then sorted by hand and recycled at the plant in the temple.
As well as removing rubbish from the river, Chalatip Junchompoo, a director of the Marine and Coastal Resources Research Centre, believes the Hippo’s presence will have an important impact by raising awareness of plastic waste. She views it as a welcome addition to its network of river booms and rubbish-collection boats.
“When people see the Hippo, it will make them curious,” she says. “They will want to know what it is and why it’s there.”
Thailand is aiming to have all plastic recycled by 2027, up from 37% now, according to the Pollution Control Department. Plastic that cannot be recycled is, where possible, used for refuse-derived fuel.
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The lost history of what Americans knew about climate change in the 1960s
It wasn't just scientists who were worried, but Congress, the White House, and even Sports Illustrated.
To judge by recent Supreme Court decisions, the world didn’t know much about climate change a half century ago.
In 2007, when the court ruled that the Clean Air Act of 1970 gave the Environmental Protection Agency the flexibility to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, former Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “When Congress enacted these provisions, the study of climate change was in its infancy.” Writing a dissent in a 2022 case looking at similar questions, Justice Elena Kagan argued that back in 1970 when Congress created the act, legislators gave the EPA the flexibility to keep up with the times, tackling problems (i.e., climate change) that couldn’t be anticipated.
Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University, saw those opinions as a sign of how little people understood about the past. “I remember just being mortified by that,” she said. To be sure, at the time of the first Earth Day in 1970, people were more worried about the immediate effects of smog than the long-term, climate-altering consequences of burning coal and oil. But Oreskes knew that scientists had been working to understand how carbon dioxide affected the global climate since the late 19th century. So she set about writing what she thought would be a short paper to correct the record.
In the process, Oreskes, along with other researchers at Harvard and Duke University, uncovered a lost history. As they searched troves of historical documents, they found plenty of other people were concerned about a warming planet, not just scientists, in the years before 1970. “We discovered a universe of discussions by scientists, by members of Congress, by members of the executive branch,” Oreskes said, “and the more we looked, the more we found.”
Her paper ballooned into an 124-page analysis, soon to be published in the journal Ecology Law Quarterly. And it’s only part one of the findings. Oreskes has found more than 100 examples of congressional hearings that examined CO2 and the greenhouse effect prior to the adoption of the Clean Air Act, evidence she plans to spell out in part two.
The research adds weight to arguments that Congress intended to give the EPA a broad authority to regulate pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions — a matter that has become more important, the authors say, in the aftermath of the West Virginia v. EPA decision in 2022 that limited the agency’s ability to regulate power plant emissions. The court’s conservative majority invoked a new argument called the “major questions doctrine,” requiring a very clear statement from Congress to authorize regulations that have “vast economic and political significance.”
Oreskes’ paper demonstrates that members of Congress, when discussing the Clean Air Act in 1970, were aware that addressing climate change could have significant economic consequences, for energy production and the automotive industry, for example. Oreskes hopes the paper will “put the lie to the myth that has been propagated that the Clean Air Act had nothing to do with carbon dioxide” and spur conversation among lawyers, judges, and legal scholars.
By the mid-1960s, climate change was already becoming a matter of concern to the federal government, the new analysis shows. A 1965 report from the National Science Foundation found that the ways humans were inadvertently changing the world — through urban development, agriculture, and fossil fuels — were “becoming of sufficient consequence to affect the weather and climate of large areas and ultimately the entire planet.”
And the science was well-understood by many members of Congress, Oreskes and her colleagues discovered when they looked through the papers of Edmund Muskie, a Democratic senator from Maine who helped write the Clean Air Act, located at Bates College. The documents show that Muskie was deeply involved in conversations about climate change with scientists, and his staff tracked coverage of the topic closely in the press. In 1970, Muskie warned his fellow senators that if air pollution went unchecked, it would “threaten irreversible atmospheric and climatic changes.” (The Clean Air Act allows the EPA to regulate air pollutants that endanger public health, specifically including effects on weather and climate.)
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US pays $2bn to Black and minority farmers after years of discrimination
Payouts are ‘an acknowledgement’ of US’s long history of refusing to process loans from Black farmers, USDA says
California is planning to streamline solar, wind approvals
By: Sean Wolfe - Renewable Energy world
Deploying low-carbon technologies remains a challenge in the EU. Here’s how they are funded and what needs fixing
California legislators are working behind-the-scenes to create a series of laws that aim to overhaul and streamline the way the state approves solar and offshore wind projects, CalMatters reports.
The legislators are aiming to complete the package of laws before the end of the month, when the California legislative session ends. Lawmakers have been in discussions with Gov. Gavin Newsom, CalMatters reports, and the proposals have not yet been publicly announced by officials.
CalMatters has obtained five draft copies of energy measures that Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire reportedly was involved in drafting. The measures would overhaul how clean energy projects are approved and supported in the state, CalMatters reports.
The proposals would offer incentives for projects and components built in California, create tax credit-based incentives, overhaul local and state permitting, and update environmental reviews for some projects, CalMatters reports.
When reached by CalMatters, McGuire declined to comment on the proposed legislation, but in a statement to the news organization said “the Senate will be embarking on a two-year effort to modernize our grid, expand the number of large-scale green energy plants and storage facilities in California, and kick a modernized permitting process into high gear.”
Earlier this year, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) adopted a plan that mandates the construction of more than 56 GW of renewable generation by 2035, including 4.5 GW of offshore wind, as part of an to reduce statewide annual GHG emissions from the electric sector to 25 million metric tons (MMT) in the same timeframe.
The GHG reduction plan, which CPUC says represents the “most aggressive end” of the range identified by the California Air Resources Board, aims to achieve a nearly 60% reduction compared to 2020 levels.
By 2045, CPUC says the portfolio would reduce emissions by 85%, with a level of 113% clean energy – exceeding 100% because it is based on retail sales and includes exported energy.
