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TBLI Radical Truth Podcast
Talking Long, Walking Short? - A brief history of ESG & options for the future
Dr. Raj Thamotheram is a pioneer in responsible investing. He worked for 12 years inside the system in senior management roles at a large pension fund (USS) and a global fund manager (AXA IM), before becoming a freelance consultant in order to start Preventable Surprises.
He is a recognized thought leader on how companies and investors can adapt to put people and the planet on par with profit and so deliver long-term value and has been nominated twice by Global Proxy Watch as “one of the 10 most influential figures in the corporate governance field”. He is one of the co-founders of the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets and a former trustee of Friends Provident Foundation, where he played a key role in the organization’s decision to become an “active and engaged investor”.
‘You basically have free hot water’: how Cyprus became a world leader in solar heating
The country, which has more 300 days of sunshine a year, has embraced rooftop systems that harness the sun’s energy.
The Thriamvos company truck pulls up at noon outside the four-storey building in the heart of Nicosia.
It’s the third rooftop installation of a solar-powered water heating system that Petros Mihali and his assistant, Soteris, have made in the Cypriot capital since their working day began at 7am.
The process is perfectly choreographed and almost always the same: in the searing midday sun, the crane bolted on to the truck hoists the boiler up first, then the black-paned solar panels, then the galvanized steel mount on which the entire system will stand. Within two hours of the thermal technology being set up, the household, say the Thriamvos company employees, will have “gone solar.”
“We do around four installations a day across Cyprus,” says Mihali. “And each takes little more than two hours at most because, like the system itself, it’s all so easy.”
Cyprus has outstripped all other EU member states in embracing hot-water solar systems, with an estimated 93.5 percent of households exploiting the alternative energy form for domestic needs.
EU figures show the eastern Mediterranean island exceeding renewable energy targets set in the heating and cooling of buildings thanks to the widespread use of the solar thermal technology.
“There are many areas where Cyprus has not achieved greenhouse gas emission goals,” says Charalampos Theopemptou, the island’s first environment commissioner. “But in terms of renewable energy resources being used for the sustainable heating and cooling of buildings, we’ve met the target easily, precisely because of such extensive utilization of solar water heaters for so many years.”
Theopemptou, a Green Party MP who heads the Cypriot parliament’s environment committee, can still vividly recall seeing the first solar water heating system installed on the rooftop of his wife’s family home almost 60 years ago.
“It was in the late 1960s that the water heaters were introduced to Cyprus, and I can still remember the very first system here because it happened to be erected on the roof of that building in Nicosia,” he recalls. “The Israelis were the ones to introduce the technology to us and it quickly took off because it’s so simple. All you need are solar panels, a tank and copper pipes. Ever since, it’s been a wonderful solution to the hot water needs of households here.”
The solar thermal systems not only collected solar energy as heat – usually generated through electricity and the burning of fossil fuels – they were extremely cost-effective and had helped spawn an entire industry, he explains.
“It’s been great for low-income families and then there’s the jobs: so many have been generated,” the MP says. “There are the local manufacturers who produce the parts and then all the people who are trained to install them. It’s big business.”
In his role as environment commissioner, Theopemptou pushed hard to make the solar systems obligatory on all newly constructed residential and commercial buildings – a move instituted by Israel back in the 1970s.
Octopus Energy Generation to Invest £2bn in UK Clean Energy Projects by 2030
Octopus Energy Generation has unveiled ambitious plans to inject £2bn into UK-based clean energy initiatives by 2030, signaling a significant boost to the nation's renewable energy landscape.
This announcement follows recent agreements to develop four solar farms in partnership with BayWa r.e., located in Bristol, Essex, the East Riding of Yorkshire, and Wiltshire. These farms will have a combined capacity of 222MW and a 30MW battery storage system at one of the sites. Construction on three of the solar farms is slated to begin later this year, with the fourth starting in 2025. Once operational between 2025 and 2026, these sites are projected to supply enough electricity to power 80,000 homes while offsetting emissions equal to taking 35,000 cars off the road annually.
In addition, Octopus plans to break ground on a new 12MW battery project in Cheshire. This project will have the capacity to store energy for nearly 10,000 homes daily, further enhancing the company's green infrastructure.
These new ventures bring Octopus Energy's UK clean energy portfolio to an impressive total. It now includes 16 onshore wind farms, three offshore wind projects, three battery schemes, 138 solar farms, and thousands of rooftop solar installations.
Across Europe, Octopus manages 3.8GW of green energy projects in more than 15 countries, representing a combined value of £7bn. These projects generate enough renewable electricity to power 2.3 million homes annually—equivalent to removing over a million petrol cars from the roads.
Octopus is preparing to capitalize on the recent lifting of England's 'de facto ban' on new onshore wind developments. The company plans to submit applications for several new wind turbines this year as part of its 'Fan Club' initiative, which offers local residents discounted energy rates during peak wind generation times.
"The UK is on the verge of a green energy revolution," said Zoisa North-Bond, CEO of Octopus Energy Generation. "This £2bn investment in homegrown renewables will help boost our energy security and pave the way for a more affordable energy future.
"Solar and onshore wind are among the cheapest energy sources available," she added. "By building closer to demand, we can maximise green electricity when it's abundant and lower bills for customers nationwide."
Most soft plastic collected for recycling is burned, campaigners say
Everyday Plastic calls supermarket takeback schemes a diversion and says there is too much plastic packaging
Seventy per cent of soft plastic collected in supermarket recycling schemes and tracked after collection ended up being burned, an investigation by campaigners has found.
By placing trackers inside packages of soft plastic that were collected by Sainsbury’s and Tesco in July 2023 and February 2024, campaigners found that most of them ended up being incinerated rather than recycled.
Everyday Plastic, which carried out the investigation alongside the Environmental Investigation Agency, tracked parcels of soft plastic that the supermarkets collected from customers with the promise they would be recycled. Of 40 packages of plastic, the trackers reached end destinations in 17 cases. Of these, 12 packages were used as fuel pellets or burned for energy, the investigation found.
When Sainsbury’s launched its in-store soft plastic collection in 2021, it said: “The innovative recycling system allows customers to recycle polypropylene film found in several household products.”
Tesco said its customers would be able to bring back any soft plastic packaging for recycling. Soft plastic is hard to recycle and very few facilities in the UK have the ability to process it.
Alison Colclough, of Everyday Plastic, said: “Our trackers reveal the hard truth about soft plastic recycling schemes at supermarkets – soft plastic packaging is not going to get recycled.
“The majority of the bundles of soft plastic we tracked ended up being burned for energy recovery – a solution that is being deployed more and more in order to deal with the unmanageable amount of plastic waste.
“The takeback schemes are being presented as a solution, which is diverting attention from the main issue that can’t be overlooked: far too much unnecessary plastic packaging is being produced.”
Katie-Scarlett Wetherall, of the environmental NGO Client Earth, said the investigation into what was really happening to soft plastic collected by supermarkets revealed a huge gap between what consumers were being told and the reality. She said soft packaging recycling claims made on packages were misleading.
Next month countries will attempt to hammer out a global plastics waste treaty after a pushback from developed countries over the proposed remit. In the last talks on the UN plastics treaty there were accusations that developed nations had bowed to the fossil fuel and plastics lobby over whether cuts in plastic production should be a key part of the treaty.
The UK sends most of its plastic waste abroad, exporting nearly 600,000 tonnes of plastic waste for recycling in 2023, a 10% increase on the previous year. In August 2023 alone, nearly 53,000 tonnes of plastic waste was exported.
Turkey was the largest destination for UK plastic waste exports in 2023, taking more than 140,000 metric tons. The Netherlands received the second most, at 116,500 metric tons.
Plastic waste exports are counted in UK government recycling data.
Philanthropy Needs More Disconfirmation Bias
By Kecia Bertermann & Andy Martin
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”—Mark Twain*
When philanthropists are passionate about the causes they support, it’s no surprise that they are more likely to partner with organizations that share their values and goals. But while this alignment can result in strong partnerships and collaborations, it can also open up the risk of confirmation bias: wanting things to be true even when evidence suggests otherwise. Especially as philanthropy has been shifting its focus from individual grants and programs to investing in broader systemic change, addressing confirmation bias becomes all the more urgent: The tools, practices, and cultures for evaluating evidence and learning have not kept pace with this shifting scale. Compared to other sectors, philanthropy lacks robust mechanisms to tackle these cognitive biases, and attending to evidence suggesting the program or intervention may not be achieving the intended impact or generating desired outcomes.
To put it simply “Disconfirming evidence” is any information, data, or findings that challenge or contradict the initial assumptions or theories that were used to design a program or make an investment. It exists on a spectrum; it can be obvious how a piece of evidence fundamentally challenges core assumptions, but sometimes it is difficult to interpret in the moment (while important not to dismiss). It can also be a subtle, weak signal that things are not progressing in the way you thought they might, and therefore easy to ignore.
If such evidence is acknowledged and acted upon, it helps us to guard against confirmation bias, and to design and fund better programs. But philanthropy has few established practices for attending to, much less reacting to, disconfirming evidence. Indeed, there are often incentives to ignore disconfirming evidence, anything from risk aversion and an over-investment in a particular hypothesis to a desire to maintain established relationships or even just a passion for an outcome.
Lessons From Other Sectors
The issue is not unique to philanthropy, but the cost of being wrong is often much higher in other sectors. Harms tend to be specific, identifiable, and consequential, as when ignoring disconfirming evidence leads to a wrongful conviction, a misdiagnosed patient, an inaccurate newspaper story, or software failure. By contrast, in philanthropy, causes and effects can be hard to establish, and so the costs of disregarding disconfirming evidence are often less clear. But if the harms are ambiguous, they are no less consequential.
In other sectors—from medicine to the law, from business to scientific research—practices, structures, and cultures have been established to confront the challenge of disconfirming evidence explicitly:
Practices: In scientific research, well-established practices like peer review and external assessment mechanisms like replication studies provide a critical foundation for ensuring the accuracy and reliability of findings. Training in statistical and research methods helps to establish a baseline for what counts as robust scientific evidence. Journalists have professional norms to manage confirmation bias, with clear established best practice in fact-checking, sourcing, transparency, and fairness captured in codes of practice and editorial guidelines. And in medicine, the practice of differential diagnosis helps medical professionals systematically identify the correct condition by considering and ruling out multiple potential diagnoses based on gathered evidence. This avoids confirmation bias by ensuring that all possible causes are evaluated objectively rather than relying on initial impressions or assumptions.
A climate scientist criticized his own study. Is he a hero or a villain?
