Tuesday, May 13th - 2025

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Author: Sam Rubinstein

Your weekly guide to Sustainable Investment

 
 

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TBLI Radical Truth Podcast

 
 
 

More than Carbon or bips - how AI is increasing ESG Impact Investing 10-fold



 

  

Olinga Taeed is Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Enterprise and Governance, the world’s leading not-for-profit think tank on the Movement of Value with over 220,000 members, and is Expert Advisor and Council Member of the Chinese Ministry of Commerce’s ‘Blockchain E-Commerce Committee’.

He was the world’s first blockchain professor at Birmingham City University, and is Chief Editor of Frontiers in Blockchains (Switzerland), a peer review academic journal with 400+ editors. He is Chair of Arbor Verification Tech (ESG – Ho Chi Minh), MiMeta.Life (Metaverse), Bureau of Media Data and Ideology (Media – New York), and AizaWorld (Gaming – Hanoi); most recently he was appointed Chair of AITEA (AI - Beijing) populated by staff from tech giants Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent.

He has spoken at The Vatican which attributed him with the “God Metric – the fastest adopted social impact metric in the world”, and is Advisor to Wildcat Petroleum Plc, a London Stock Market listed company.

What will you learn:

  • Expanding ESG Impact Investing Beyond Carbon Footprint
  • The Role of AI in Identifying Impact Opportunities
  • Quantifying the Impact of ESG Investing with A

 

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TBLI Capital Connect Client Highlight:

 

Promethean Power

 

Meet Promethean Power, a climate-smart technology company transforming cold storage for smallholder farmers in India. Their innovative thermal energy storage systems enable off-grid and grid-challenged dairy and agricultural producers to chill perishables without relying on diesel generators.

By cutting costs and emissions while preserving quality, Promethean Power helps rural communities access better markets—and build resilience in the face of rising temperatures and unreliable power.
 
Contact TBLI Capital Connect for more details on Promethean. robert@tbliadvisorygroup.com



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Global banking regulators agree to prioritise climate risk work

 
Aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Florida
 
By  - Reuters
 

LONDON, May 12 (Reuters) - Global banking regulators on Monday agreed to intensify efforts to better understand the financial risks posed by climate change amid pushback from the United States.
The oversight body of the world's forum for banking regulators met on Monday to take stock of the committee's work on climate-related financial risks and agreed to prioritise efforts to understand financial risk implications of extreme weather events, the Bank for International Settlements said in a statement.
 

The agreement comes as policy makers and banking regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are debating the extent to which climate change should be embedded into central bank policy, a tussle analysts say is likely to shape central bank decision making around the world.

In Europe, rulemakers have doubled down on efforts to address climate-related risks, with the European Central Bank making management of climate risks a key priority; in the United States, efforts have been scaled back or shelved.
The group of central bank governors and heads of supervision, which make up the oversight body of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, also said it will publish a voluntary disclosure framework on climate-related financial risks for jurisdictions to consider.

While the Basel Committee has no international authority or enforcement powers, its work on climate sets international standards which have a strong influence on national rulemaking.

Analysts say its thinking is more closely aligned to European and British regulators which are taking steps to integrate climate risks into supervisory expectations for banks than to those in the United States.

In recent years, the U.S. Federal Reserve has taken some steps to integrate climate change into its work through preliminary analysis and reports, but Chair Jerome Powell has repeatedly insisted the Fed has a limited role to play.

More recently, U.S. President Donald Trump and other climate-sceptic Republicans have led a backlash against policies linked to environmental, social and governance issues across government, from coal mining to electric vehicles and DEI.

In January, the Fed withdrew from, opens new tab the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), a global body of central banks and regulators devoted to exploring ways to police climate risk in the financial system.
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in March withdrew from a jointly agreed set of climate principles for large U.S. banks, calling the framework "overly burdensome and duplicative".

Law firm Mayer Brown said in April it expects the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ("FDIC") and Fed to withdraw from the joint climate principles in the near future.

Source

Tory shadow energy minister claims 2050 net zero goal ‘not based on science’

 
The IPCC has set out the need for global emissions to reach net zero by 2050 to have a chance of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C.
 

Exclusive: Andrew Bowie calls climate scientists biased and says country should not be ‘hamstrung by arbitrary targets’

India-EU FTA talks turn to carbon tax, QCO issues

 


Piyush Goyal holds trade talks with EU Commissioner, India-EU reaffirm to conclude FTA by end of 2025
 
 

New Delhi: India and the EU are discussing ways to manage non-tariff barriers such as the bloc's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) and New Delhi's Quality Control Orders (QCO) in the ongoing round of their bilateral free trade pact talks.

While there is an understanding to conclude the proposed India‑EU FTA in two phases, the bloc has asked New Delhi if the pact can be concluded in one go since a similar deal with the UK was done in a single phase. The eleventh round of negotiations are taking place in New Delhi from May 12‑16.

“While the two sides are negotiating tariffs, the issue is now how to manage non‑tariff barriers. Both sides have raised concerns,” said a person in the know of the development.

India has already said that it will impose retaliatory duties if the EU imposes a carbon tax on Indian goods. The EU’s CBAM is expected to translate into a 20‑35 % tax on select imports into the bloc from January 1, 2026 and will impact the cement, iron and steel, aluminium, fertiliser, electricity and hydrogen sectors.

This assumes significance as India will have the right to retaliate or seek compensation from the UK for its industry for losses incurred due to CBAM under their recently concluded free‑trade pact.

The EUDR seeks to prevent the import of specified goods contributing to deforestation and forest degradation in the bloc. It covers coffee, leather, oil cake, wood furniture, paper, and paperboard.

The EU CBAM and EUDR are expected to affect $9.5 billion of India's exports to the EU, which amounts to 9% of India's exports to the world or 12.9% of India's exports to the bloc, the Economic Survey for 2024‑25 said, citing studies.

"India is set to become the fourth largest economy but is not the fourth largest recipient of foreign direct investment. There are concerns on this front also," the person said.

Brussels has also ruled out visa issues from the purview of the trade pact pact.

The India‑EU FTA is to be concluded by this year end. Separate negotiations for an Investment Protection Agreement and an Agreement on Geographical Indications in June 2022 are also underway.

Read full article 

Study Uncovers the One Thing That Cuts Through Climate Apathy: Loss

 

NASA's Oceans Melting Greenland mission found that ocean-ending glaciers like Apusiaajik are melting faster than previously thought.
 
 
By; Kate Yoder, Grist
 
In a field of muddy results, it's among the clearest findings that one cognitive scientist has seen in his career.

For much of the 20th century, winter brought an annual ritual to Princeton, New Jersey. Lake Carnegie froze solid, and skaters flocked to its glossy surface. These days, the ice is rarely thick enough to support anybody wearing skates, since Princeton’s winters have warmed about 4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1970. It’s a lost tradition that Grace Liu linked to the warming climate as an undergrad at Princeton University in 2020, interviewing longtime residents and digging through newspaper archives to create a record of the lake’s ice conditions.

“People definitely noticed that they were able to get out onto the lake less,” said Liu, who’s now a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. “However, they didn’t necessarily connect this trend to climate change.”

When the university’s alumni magazine featured her research in the winter of 2021, the comment section was filled with wistful memories of skating under the moonlight, pushing past the crowds to play hockey, and drinking hot chocolate by the frozen lakeside. Liu began to wonder: Could this kind of direct, visceral loss make climate change feel more vivid to people?

That question sparked her study, recently published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, that came to a striking conclusion: Boiling down data into a binary — a stark this or that — can help break through apathy about climate change.

Liu worked with professors at Princeton to test how people responded to two different graphs. One showed winter temperatures of a fictional town gradually rising over time, while the other presented the same warming trend in a black-or-white manner: The lake either froze in any given year, or it didn’t. People who saw the second chart perceived climate change as causing more abrupt changes.

Both charts represent the same amount of winter warming, just presented differently. “We are not hoodwinking people,” said Rachit Dubey, a co-author of the study who’s now a professor of communications at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We are literally showing them the same trend, just in different formats.”

The climate binary

Both charts demonstrate the same warming trend, but the gradual temperature data is less striking than the binary lake data.

The strong reaction to the black-or-white presentation held true over a series of experiments, even one where a trend line was placed over the scatter plot of temperatures to make the warming super clear. To ensure the results translated to the wider world, researchers also looked at how people reacted to actual data of lake freezing and temperature increases from towns in the U.S. and Europe and got the same results. “Psychology effects are sometimes fickle,” said Dubey, who’s researched cognitive science for a decade. “This is one of the cleanest effects we’ve ever seen.”

The findings suggest that if scientists want to increase public urgency around climate change, they should highlight clear, concrete shifts instead of slow-moving trends. That could include the loss of white Christmases or outdoor summer activities canceled because of wildfire smoke.

The metaphor of the “boiling frog” is sometimes used to describe how people fail to react to gradual changes in the climate. The idea is that if you put a frog in boiling water, it’ll immediately jump out. But if you put it in room-temperature water and slowly turn up the heat, the frog won’t realize the danger and will be boiled alive. Although real frogs are actually smart enough to hop out when water gets dangerously hot, the metaphor fits humans when it comes to climate change: People mentally adjust to temperature increases “disturbingly fast,” according to the study. Previous research has found that as the climate warms, people adjust their sense of what seems normal based on weather from the past two to eight years, a phenomenon known as “shifting baselines.”

Read full article 

Virgin Media O2’s Recycling Initiative Saves 45,000 Business Devices from Landfill

 

By: Hanaa Siddiqi - Sustainable Times


Virgin Media O2 has revealed a significant milestone in its O2 Recycle for Business programme: nearly 45,000 smartphones and tablets have been reused or recycled since its relaunch in October 2023. This initiative, aimed at UK-based businesses, allows companies to trade in old devices for cash, receive credit toward new tech, or even donate the proceeds to charity. The scheme has raised around £330,000 for the Good Things Foundation.

The recycling service provides a hassle-free experience, offering free courier collection and the convenience of registering multiple devices simultaneously. For remote workers, a prepaid postage system ensures that sending in old devices is easy and cost-free.

Once collected, the devices undergo a thorough data wipe before being refurbished for resale or fully recycled. Virgin Media O2 has emphasised that no device components are sent to landfills, helping to combat the growing global problem of e-waste, a waste stream recognised by the UN as one of the world’s fastest-growing.

This initiative forms a core part of Virgin Media O2’s broader environmental strategy, which includes a bold target of facilitating 10 million reuse and recycling actions by 2025.

Virgin Media O2’s chief sustainability officer, Dana Haidan, said: “We know businesses want simple solutions to help them become more sustainable.

“That’s why Virgin Media O2 is leading the way in helping companies to reduce their waste, recycle their unwanted tech and reuse their unwanted devices.

“Businesses can also play a vital role in supporting digital inclusion by accessing tech donation programmes, where their unused devices can be given a second life and used by someone in need, helping them to get online, access essential websites and build digital skills.”

The problem of electronic and electrical waste (e-waste) is escalating rapidly. According to the UN, e-waste is the world’s fastest-growing domestic waste stream, surging 82% since 2010. Projections suggest it will rise by an additional 32% by 2030. Unfortunately, recycling systems are struggling to keep pace, wasting billions of dollars' worth of valuable resources as used electronics pile up.

The UK is one of the major contributors to this global issue. Data from the UN reveals that the UK produces more e-waste per capita than all but one country—Norway. In response, MPS from the Environmental Audit Committee are calling on the UK government to introduce stricter regulations and legislation to curb this growing problem.

While a significant portion of e-waste comes from individuals, businesses also play a crucial role. Research commissioned by Virgin Media O2 indicates that nearly 12 million business devices across the UK are currently sitting unused. The company highlights that many of these devices could be either resold or recycled, urging businesses to recognise the missed opportunity in recovering value from tech they no longer use.

Read full article 

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