Tuesday, April 30th - 2024

Author: Sam Rubinstein

Your weekly guide to Sustainable Investment


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Wealth & Society Summit 2024

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Sept, 26-27 Vienna, Austria
 
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Internal Audit Lens - Corporate Greenwashing

 

In the opening episode of ACCA's monthly Internal Audit Lens podcast series, ACCA UK Internal Audit Sector panel member Fadeke Ayoola talks to Robert Rubinstein of TBLI Group about corporate greenwashing and what internal auditors should be aware of in that arena.

Listen to the podcast here

 


Impact Investment Challenges - The Future Now Show



In a conversation about impact investing, Robert Rubinstein and Mario de Vries delve into the challenges of the field. Robert argues that sustainable investing can be profitable, and criticizes the current trend of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) investing. He compares it to a "fitness club" where everyone pretends to care but doesn't make real changes. Robert worries about a lack of critical thinking and potential fraud in the industry. He emphasizes the need for accurate measurement of sustainability impact and standardized metrics.

Listen to the discussion here

The world agreed to create a climate reparations fund. Now comes the hard part.

people on stage at COP28 applauding
 
By: Naveena Sadasivam - Girst

A 26-member board is finally beginning work on the UN’s new loss and damage fund.

After three decades of work, advocates for developing countries scored a major win at last year’s United Nations climate change conference in Dubai: World leaders unanimously agreed to set up a climate reparations fund. As the planet warms, the poorest nations are being hit hardest by drought, rising sea levels, hurricanes, and a slew of other climate impacts — even though these countries did the least to cause global warming, compared to their early-industrializing peers. Enter the so-called loss and damage fund, which is supposed to compensate them for the unavoidable effects of climate change. So far, the international community has pledged more than $650 million to the venture.

Now the tedious, unsexy — and often boring — work of setting up the fund is just beginning. 

This week, a 26-member board is meeting for the first time to discuss the administrative and institutional policies required to operationalize the fund and dole money out to developing countries in need. The board’s to-do list is long. It ranges from the procedural — selecting co-chairs and agreeing on a host country for the fund — to the more substantive: deciding which countries are eligible to receive funding, how to fundraise and replenish the fund, and whether or not the World Bank will help manage the fund. 

The board was supposed to hold its first meeting at the end of January, but a stalemate among wealthy countries, including the U.S. and those of the European Union, about who to nominate to the board led to delays, putting the meetings three months behind schedule. Much of this work must be completed in just over six months, before the next United Nations climate conference, known as COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan.

“There’s a very large work plan for the year,” said Brandon Wu, director of policy and campaigns and head of international climate justice work at the nonprofit ActionAid USA. “They are still trying to squeeze in three meetings before COP29 to be able to stay on schedule.” Wu is attending the board meeting as an observer.

The stakes are high. The roughly $650 million that has been pledged so far is a sliver of the estimated need — which researchers have pegged at as much as $580 billion per year by 2030 — and is broadly seen as startup money sufficient only to establish the fund.  As the main contributors to the climate crisis, wealthy countries are expected to be the primary donors to the fund. But before the fund can begin allocating money to poorer nations in need, a number of decisions need to be made.

Key among them is whether the World Bank will serve as a trustee and help manage the operations of the fund. Wealthy nations believe that the bank, which houses several other environmental and climate funds, has the experience, reputation, and administrative know-how to best manage a financial endeavor of this size. But developing countries were initially opposed to the idea, citing the failures of the bank’s past programs and its role worsening debt crises in poor countries. Ultimately, developing countries reluctantly agreed to allow the World Bank to host the loss and damage fund on an interim basis. But that decision was contingent on the bank meeting 11 conditions, including allowing recipients to directly access money from the fund instead of requiring that money pass through an intermediary international institution, such as a United Nations agency or multilateral development bank. The World Bank has until June to deliberate, and report on whether or not it can meet those conditions. 

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How Industrial Waste is Enabling Carbon Mineralization


 
By:  Buff Lopez - CleanTech group

There’s a lot of buzz around high-quality carbon capture technologies, but it seems like they’re always 10-20 years away from commercial scale. So, for now, we’ve had no choice but to rely on lower-quality and nature-based carbon capturing solutions. While these solutions are great options, they generally have some kind of impermanence associated with them. For example, planting a tree is a good solution, but when that tree dies or is burned, its stored carbon is released back into the environment. 

The top emerging innovations to sequester carbon permanently include biocharenhanced rock weathering, and carbon mineralization—the latter is the focus of this blog. 

Carbon Mineralization 

Carbon mineralization is a process that mimics the Earth’s primary carbon dioxide (CO2) regulation method. Earth naturally converts CO2 in the atmosphere into rocks or minerals over millions of years. In our oceans, even living beings sequester CO2 in their exoskeletons (e.g., shells, coral reefs, etc.) that is buried under the seafloor when they die, and that will take hundreds of millions of years to be recycled into the atmosphere.  

The natural mineralization cycle is relatively simple; however, natural mineralization cannot keep up with the excess CO2 that humans have generated. Currently, natural mineralization can only sequester 0.7 GT of CO2 per year. Unfortunately, humans emit nearly 36 GT of excess CO2 emissions per year (IEA 2022).  

While the process is relatively straightforward, it took researchers until about 20 years ago to understand the kinetics behind the reaction so that they could mimic it in a lab. Carbon mineralization traps CO2 into the crystal structure of carbonate minerals resulting in its permanent sequestration. This is conducted both in-situ and ex-situ manners.  

For in-situ operations, CO2 and water are injected underground to create a calcium carbonate derivative that stores the CO2 when reacted with calcium-/magnesium-bearing minerals. In-situ operations are subject to environmental conditions, and gases and water can leak out of cracks in underground reservoirs. 

Enter Greenore 

Greenore, recently named an APAC Cleantech 25 company, is spun-out of Columbia University and founded by Xiaozhou (Sean) Zhou who was researching sustainable ironmaking, and carbon sequestration and utilization processes. Greenore converts iron and steel making by-product, slag, into chemical products (calcium/magnesium carbonate, iron oxide, silica, alumina, and rare earth concentrate), while consuming CO2 as a reactant. Greenore has developed a catalyst that mimics the Earth’s natural mineralization process without its time constraint.  

Greenore achieves this via ex-situ mineralization, a process that mimics in-situ mineralization above ground. Due to its high availability, alkaline industrial solid wastes can be utilized for ex-situ mineralization such as steel slag, iron slag, mine tailings, cement waste, and more. These materials are generally rich in calcium-/magnesium-based minerals which can sequester CO2 quicker than other natural weathering processes.  

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U.S. Solar Factories Say Biden Isn't Doing Enough To Protect Them From China


By: Alexander C. Kaufman - HuffPost

The White House launched a $7 billion “solar for all” program earlier this week meant to help build 1 million individual systems across the country.

President Joe Biden netted billions in his landmark climate-spending law to revive solar manufacturing in the United States — prompting the Korean panel giant Qcells last year to invest $2.5 billion into building the country’s largest photovoltaic factory in Georgia.

As the assembly line revs up this month, so does the federal government’s support.

Last Wednesday, Biden signaled plans to fulfill a U.S. solar manufacturers’ request to bring the full force of American trade restrictions down on imported Chinese panels. Last Friday, the administration announced a $255 million loan to a company promising to open in Tennessee one of the first new factories outside China in years to make polysilicon for solar equipment. On Monday, the White House launched a $7 billion “solar for all” program meant to help build 1 million individual systems across the country.

Yet solar manufacturers say it’s not enough to keep American factories open in the face of a massive influx of panels so cheap that some buyers are using the equipment to make garden fences. Blaming illegal subsidies in China for artificially lowering the price of panels, Qcells and at least six other U.S. solar manufacturers filed a petition Wednesday urging the federal government to crack down.

The filing asks the Commerce Department and the U.S. International Trade Commission to investigate whether panel producers in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are violating U.S. trade laws against subsidizing exports and selling solar equipment for below cost.

“China and Chinese-owned companies are manipulating our market,” Tim Brightbill, the trade lawyer representing the American Alliance for Solar Manufacturing, said on a call with reporters Tuesday night. “Chinese companies went from producing less than 2% of global solar production in 2004 to near-total market domination today.”

U.S. trade tariffs already raise the price of Chinese-made solar and ban imports of panels produced with materials traced back to Xinjiang, where researchers at the United Kingdom’s Sheffield Hallam University recently concluded the government in Beijing has forced minority Uighur Muslims to work for free in prison camps.

Following a two-year hiatus, the Biden administration is set to begin enforcing new rules on Chinese companies circumventing tariffs on Chinese-made solar panels by rerouting trade through Southeast Asia.

But the American companies now allege that mostly Chinese-owned exporters in Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam are violating “antidumping” laws against selling products abroad for cheaper than in the home market and requested U.S. trade authorities implement “countervailing duties,” or import fees to level the playing field in the American market.

The U.S. firms include Conval Energy, First Solar, Meyer Burger, Mission Solar, Qcells, REC Silicon, and Swift Solar, though Wiley Rein, the Washington, D.C., law firm handling the case, said it expects more to join in the coming days.

U.S. government scientists invented solar panels more than half a century ago, and the country monopolized manufacturing for decades. But production shifted to Europe and Asia in the 1980s. By the early 2010s, China vaulted forward to become the dominant supplier. Backed by low-interest state-backed loans, Chinese manufacturers drove down the price of panels below the point at which any U.S. company could make money.

Solar factories in the U.S. and Europe started closing at such a rapid clip, regulators on both continents accused China of violating international trade rules and slapped tariffs on imports. The restrictions helped U.S. manufacturers reclaim part of the higher-end rooftop solar market. While former President Donald Trump ratcheted up trade levies, he initially gave an exemption for the lower-quality “bifacial” panels on which utility-scale solar farms rely. The Republican revoked that exemption in 2020. Biden restored the waiver a year later. But in the face of record-low panel prices and government support so generous that Chinese dairy producers are getting into the solar-manufacturing business, the Democrat now looks poised to follow his predecessor’s strategy.

“In the past, we’ve been dependent on foreign oil from our adversaries. We should not make the same mistake with solar power,” Brightbill said. “Solar was invented here. It was perfected here. There’s no reason the U.S. should be dependent on Chinese companies.”

Complicating the solar manufacturers’ fight against China is the fact that the leading solar industry group in the U.S. fiercely opposes new trade restrictions. Solar is booming, with the vast majority of the nearly 264,000 Americans with jobs in the industry working in sales or installation, sectors that benefit from a steady supply of low-cost imports.

Read full article 

How do we define climate responsibility? Woodside has no answer


 
By: Adam Morton - The Guardian

So long as oil and gas companies remain wedded to self-interest, the push against them isn’t going away.

Australia’s south-west is suffering through a historic dry stretch. Perth had the lowest rainfall on record in the six months to March, and trees in eucalyptus forests and scrubland across a 1,000 kilometre stretch are dying in shocking and spectacular fashion, with spillover effects through the ecosystems that rely on them.

The climate signal – the impact of rising atmospheric greenhouse gases, largely due to the burning of fossil fuels – in this part of the world has been clear for a while. Winter rainfall has fallen up to 20% since the 1970s in what scientists have for years described as one of the earliest examples of the climate crisis having a measurable influence.

This was one of the backdrops as Woodside Energy – Australia’s biggest oil and gas company, with multi-billion dollar developments in the works at home and in Africa and the Gulf of Mexico – held its annual general meeting in the Western Australian capital last week.

Across four hours, Woodside’s chairman, Richard Goyder, and chief executive, Meg O’Neill, made the company’s case and took questions from shareholders and their proxies. Many related to climate change.

A handful of the shareholders couldn’t understand what the fuss was about, argued CO2 from burning fossil fuels was airborne plant food and called the climate-concerned idiots.

But the overwhelming sentiment from investors was that the company was failing to address their concerns, and not living up to its rhetoric that it aimed to have net zero emissions by 2050. They lodged a 58% protest vote against Woodside’s climate report, the strongest against a listed company anywhere across the globe.

It was a remarkable result, reached after a concerted campaign by shareholder activist groups, and public rebukes by global pension and Australian super funds. Goyder, who has had a torrid recent time as the chair of both Woodside and Qantas, ended the meeting by saying the company took the non-binding feedback seriously, and would consider it as it reviewed its approach to climate change.

They were the words he had to say after an embarrassing slap down, but there was little else at the meeting to back them up. The message was internally contradictory. On the one hand: we’re listening, we hear you and we’re open to change. But also: we reject what you say. And we have some giant fossil fuel developments to be getting on with so we can reward your financial investment.

Standard 21st century operating procedure for a fossil fuel company, in other words.

The disconnect between Woodside’s rhetoric and climate reality echoed throughout the AGM, but crystallised in a few moments. Some were throwaway – Goyder saying it was good to have a question “on the business” when discussion veered away from the ecological impact of its operations – but others were more telling.

One shareholder, referring to the state’s drought, asked whether 2.7m seedlings the company planted in the state last year to offset some of its emissions had survived. Another asked if Woodside believed it had moral and financial culpability for the impact of the climate crisis on local farmers.

Goyder acknowledged the underlying issue – “It’d be nice to get some rain in the agricultural regions of Western Australia sooner rather than later” – but said it was “a pretty long bow” to consider Woodside “responsible for the climate conditions in the agricultural parts of Western Australia”, and “nonsense” to even suggest it might be given the scale of global emissions.

On one level, this is just a truism. Woodside is not uniquely or solely responsible for the growing force of climate change being felt in the state. No one suggests it is.

On another level, it is an argument about responsibility that would not pass muster in most other walks of life. You’re only part of the cause of the problem? Ah well, keep doing more of that then.

This is, of course, the climate conundrum. The problem can be solved only if everyone, or nearly everyone, does their bit. China is often singled out as a climate villain, and not without cause. But even if it stopped polluting tomorrow that would leave about two-thirds of carbon pollution unaddressed.

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How divestment became a ‘clarion call’ in anti-fossil fuel and pro-ceasefire protests

Dozens of tents and young protesters wearing keffiyeh, with a rainbow Pride flag in the foreground.
 
 
By: Dharna Noor - The Guardian

The divestment movement has a long history among US student activists, including in the overlapping movements of today

Cameron Jones first learned about fossil fuel divestment as a 15-year-old climate organizer. When he enrolled at Columbia University in 2022, he joined the campus’s chapter of the youth-led climate justice group the Sunrise Movement and began pushing the school in New York to sever financial ties with coal, oil and gas companies.

“The time for institutions like Columbia to be in the pocket of fossil fuel corporations has passed,” Jones wrote in an October 2023 op-ed in the student newspaper directed toward the Columbia president, Minouche Shafik.
 

Today, 19-year-old Jones, like many other student protesters and campus organizers, is just as focused on pushing the school to divest from another group of businesses: those profiting from Israel’s war in Gaza. He and others see the issues as firmly connected, with activists learning from tactics used in both of the often overlapping movements.

“Once we see large institutions like universities taking the steps to sever ties with harmful institutions, we will then hopefully see corporations and countries and cities follow suit,” Jones said on Monday, speaking from the student encampment of demonstrators on Columbia’s campus who are protesting against the war and the university’s ties to Israel.

In particular, students are demanding the university drop its direct investments in companies doing business in or with Israel, including Amazon and Google, which are part of a $1.2bn cloud-computing contract with the state’s government; Microsoft, whose services are used by Israel’s ministry of defense and Israeli civil administration; and defense contractors profiting from the war such as Lockheed Martin, which on Tuesday reported its earnings were up 14%.

Columbia did not respond to a request for comment on the call for divestment. Last week in a campus-wide email, Shafik said that the encampment “severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students”.

She faced criticism for directing the NYPD to clear the encampment over the weekend. The student protesters have created a new encampment and say they will not clear the lawn until their divestment demands are met. Early on Wednesday Columbia University said it had extended a midnight Tuesday deadline by 48 hours for the encampment to disband after it reportedly said protesters had agreed to dismantle some of the tents; student negotiators said university leaders had threatened to call in the national guard and NYPD.

Divestment movements have a long history among US student activists.

In 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Students for a Democratic Society, and the Congress of Racial Equality held a New York City sit-in calling for Chase Bank to stop financing apartheid in South Africa. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, many campus organizers also successfully pressured their schools to cut financial ties with companies that supported the apartheid regime, including Columbia, which became the first Ivy League university to make such a change.

“The work we’ve done on fossil fuel divestment for years definitely took a lot of cues from those organizers,” said Matt Leonard, director of the Oil and Gas Action Network and an early advocate for fossil fuel divestment in the US.

The anti-apartheid campaign inspired another movement, too: the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). Co-founded by a Palestinian Columbia University alum, BDS is a strategy that aims to end international support for Israel due to its treatment of Palestinians – a relationship many scholars and officials describe as another apartheid.

BDS includes fossil fuel divestment in some cases: today, Leonard is pressuring institutions to cut ties with the oil giant Chevron because it is extracting gas claimed by Israel in the eastern Mediterranean.

Fossil fuel divestment campaigners have in recent years seen major wins on US campuses, with about 250 US educational institutions committing to pull investments in polluting companies, according to data from Stand.earth and 350.org.

Calls to divest from Israel, meanwhile, have seen more muted success. While numerous campus groups have called for their institutions to take up the BDS framework, no US universities have made such a commitment.

Some institutions such as Hampshire College re-examined their investments with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in mind. And other colleges have come close to divesting. In 2019, for instance, a Brown committee recommended the university do so, said Olivia Katbi, organizer with the BDS movement.

But supporters are optimistic, as they say BDS is currently seeing unprecedented support from students, faculty and alumni. “The Gaza solidarity encampments … are finally able to loudly uplift the demand to divest from Israel in a way that cannot be ignored,” said Katbi. “Business as usual should no longer be possible during a genocide.”

Protesters calling for divestment from the war in Gaza have chosen divergent targets. Some groups, such as Yale University’s Endowment Justice Coalition, are pushing administrators to drop investments in weapons manufacturers specifically.

Other campus activists’ demands are broader. Students with Columbia University Apartheid Divest – a coalition of dozens of campus groups including the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter – for instance, are calling for a divestment from holdings with companies doing business with Israel, as have groups at other colleges.

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