Al Gore back on the TED stage: Optimism on Climate Change

Ten years after his first TED talk (the first one I ever watched back in 2006!) Al Gore is back on the main stage at TED, reinforcing the urgency of the science of climate change, and also doing a great job of explaining how we're crossing positive tipping points in terms of lower costs for renewable energy and broader support for the kind of climate action we need:




Stay going.

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The Intentional Endowments Network -- formal launch & founding members

Yesterday we announced the Founding Member group of the Intentional Endowment Network (IEN), the initiative I've been working on for the past couple of years.

This project grew out of an initial forum held in Boston partnership with Hampshire College in April 2014. It was clear from that event that an ongoing network to serve as a venue for learning and collaboration was necessary to help colleges and universities tackle sustainable and ESG investing in their endowments.

After 18-months of what was essentially a pilot phase, we're thrilled with the nearly 80 institutions that have joined on as the core group to more formally launch this initiative.

Please check out and share the press release (also pasted below).

Higher education and the financial system are two of the most influential sectors of our society. The former shapes and reinforces the mental models and modes of thinking for most of our leaders and professionals. The latter shapes our business models and modes of development. By working at the intersection of the two to integrate the goal of creating a healthy, just, and sustainable society, this network holds the promise of having a profound positive impact on the world, now and for generations to come.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

77 Founding Members Launch the Intentional Endowments Network to Support Growing Interest in ESG Investing 

Boston, MA (March 14, 2016) – The Intentional Endowments Network (IEN) today announced the launch of a peer network designed to support endowment investment practices that address environmental, social, governance (ESG) and sustainability factors in order to enhance financial returns and align with institutional mission and values. The network launched with 77 Founding Members including 27 asset owners. 

Founding Members include: Arizona State University, ASU Foundation, Becker College, California State University, Calvert Investments, Carleton College, Hampshire College, Hanley Foundation, Litterman Family Foundation, Middlebury College, Portland State University, San Francisco State University Foundation, Wallace Global Fund, UBS Asset Management, University of Maine and University of Massachusetts Foundation. Regular membership enrollment is now open to all endowments, foundations and practitioners of ESG and sustainable investing. For more details, visit www.intentionalendowments.org/membership.

“The California State University is committed to staying informed and educated in ways that support a sustainable future,” said Garrett Ashley, Vice Chancellor of University Relations and Advancement at The CSU “each of our 23 campuses has unique needs and requires that we are thoughtful when making investment decisions. The Intentional Endowments Network is an invaluable resource for endowments and other investors designed to make good stewardship the norm.” 

“Colleges and universities have been leaders in advancing sustainability through education, research, campus operations and community engagement. Now, they are leveraging the financial and social capital of their endowments to support those efforts by taking a more comprehensive approach to sustainability risks and opportunities in the investment process,” said Anthony Cortese, Co-Founder of IEN, and former President of Second Nature, Dean at Tufts University, and Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.

To support the development of intentionally designed endowments – that consider institutional mission, values, and sustainability risks and opportunities – the network facilitates peer-to-peer connection and learning, thought leadership, and collaborative action. A Steering Committee composed of leaders from higher education, non-profit organizations and the investment industry guides IEN’s work. Collectively, the network identifies practical options for administrators and trustees to successfully enhance their institutions’ approach to sustainable investment and address stakeholders’ concerns.

“There are many important considerations in managing endowments. Increasingly, investors are coming to see climate change, human rights abuses, and other social and environmental challenges as material investment risks,” said Jonathan Lash, President of Hampshire College. “Regardless of how endowments ultimately decide to address these risks, all should be intentional in considering them and fostering educational dialogues on campus about them.”

“Because of the enthusiastic response from endowments and the investment community during IEN’s eighteen-month pilot phase we are now substantially expanding our activities in 2016,” said Georges Dyer, Co-Founder of IEN. The network will host interactive, action-oriented forums for senior decision makers in Chicago and San Francisco. It will enable endowments to support implementation of the Paris Climate Agreements, and host a webinar series to inform endowments on industry developments. The network will publish articles and reports on sustainable investing topics such as fiduciary duty, shareholder engagement, and financial performance, for trustees and other decision makers.

“Endowments have a unique opportunity, where doing the right thing for the climate – reducing stranded carbon asset risk and investing in solutions – is also the smart thing for their investment portfolios,” said Bob Litterman, Litterman Family Foundation and Chair of the Risk Committee at Kepos Capital, LP. “The Intentional Endowments Network is the venue for finding the best ways to take advantage of these opportunities.”

  

About the Intentional Endowments Network

The Intentional Endowments Network (IEN) is a collaborative network advancing intentionally designed endowments through a variety of strategies – including ESG integration, impact investing, shareholder engagement – that will make a significant and critical contribution to creating a healthy, just, and sustainable society.  It supports colleges, universities, and other mission-driven organizations in aligning their endowment investment practices with their mission, values, and sustainability goals without sacrificing financial returns. IEN is an initiative of The Crane Institute of Sustainability, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) non-profit. It is coordinated by Georges Dyer and Tony Cortese and based in Boston, MA. 

www.intentionalendowments.org

About the IEN Team: www.intentionalendowments.org/team

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Stay going. 

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We've breached 2 degrees

Heat records are again being obliterated. Anyone in New England yesterday has a visceral sense of this after experiencing summer in March.

And the news is coming in that we've breached the dreaded 2 degree average temperature rise. These climate changes aren't linear, so it will likely (hopefully) take some time before we're consistently over that level -- in fact, hopefully we'll never be consistently over that level, because that will be a chaotic and dangerous world -- but if we needed any more evidence that the urgency of this challenge is extreme, we've got it.

More details from Slate: Our Hemisphere’s Temperature Just Reached a Terrifying Milestone

Op-Ed from Bill McKibben: The mercury doesn’t lie: We’ve hit a troubling climate change milestone

Stay going.

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Environmental Voter Project

Hey, fellow Massholes -- check out this project aiming to get out the environmental vote:

The Environmental Voter Project 

It's being piloted in Massachusetts, so sign-up to be counted as someone who prioritizes sustaining our common and irreplaceable life-support system as an important policy issue.

Apparently most people who understand this don't vote -- and that is a huge problem.

Here's a catchy video explaining why:





Stay going.
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Business calls for carbon pricing and climate action ahead of Paris summit

The big annual climate negotiations start in Paris next week (COP21), and the stakes are high. We're overdue on initiating strong, international climate policy, and now we have to play catch up.

There are many strong statements of support, all of which should give negotiators cover in creating an ambitious deal.  Here are a few recent statements:

• CEOs of 78 major firms call for carbon pricing COP21 deal: organized by the World Economic Forum and has a combined annual turnover of $2.1 trillion
  
• CEOs of 10 food and beverage companies call for a "sound agreement to affect real change": organized by Ceres' "Accelerating Change, food and beverage leaders" initiative.
  
• 6 major banks call for a "strong global climate agreement": organized by Ceres
  
• 81 companies sign the American Business Act on Climate pledge: organized by the White House, representing companies with combined market cap of over $5 trillion.
  
• Over 400 investors have signed the Global Investor Statement on Climate Change (GISCC): organized by the Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), signatories represent over $24 trillion in assets.
  
• Over 50 companies have signed the Building and Real Estate Climate Declaration, calling on global leaders to "realize the opportunity of the low-carbon economy": organized by the US Green Building Council, the Carbon Leadership Forum, and Ceres.
  
• Climate Declaration: organized by Ceres, signed by more than 1,000 companies. 

What's less clear is even with all of these statement of support from companies, how effectively they are supporting the political process to put a price on carbon. There is still a lot of false rhetoric about how a price on carbon will hurt the economy, despite the evidence to contrary; and those making such claims often claim to represent the 'business sector'.  In addition to important statements like these, we need to see more companies advancing their enlightened self-interest in the political arena by actively and aggressively lobbying for a price on carbon.

Stay going.
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Political Will

Today the president announced that the Keystone XL pipeline would not be approved. You probably heard about this, it's getting front page coverage on news outlets across the world. This is a big victory in the fight against climate change, even if it is in many ways symbolic.

In reading the president's announcement (below) I was just struck by how far we've come in the past 10 years in terms of finally starting to wake up on this issue. We could barely dream of a president making this kind of speech 10 years ago.

And while talk is cheap, and we still haven't started implementing nearly the kind of action we need to (and should have been for the past 25 years) -- this is real progress. Once the political will is there, we can start implementing changes much faster than we typically think, as the president mentions below.  Worth the read:

THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody. Several years ago, the State Department began a review process for the proposed construction of a pipeline that would carry Canadian crude oil through our heartland to ports in the Gulf of Mexico and out into the world market.

This morning, Secretary Kerry informed me that, after extensive public outreach and consultation with other Cabinet agencies, the State Department has decided that the Keystone XL Pipeline would not serve the national interest of the United States. I agree with that decision.

This morning, I also had the opportunity to speak with Prime Minister Trudeau of Canada. And while he expressed his disappointment, given Canada’s position on this issue, we both agreed that our close friendship on a whole range of issues, including energy and climate change, should provide the basis for even closer coordination between our countries going forward. And in the coming weeks, senior members of my team will be engaging with theirs in order to help deepen that cooperation.

Now, for years, the Keystone Pipeline has occupied what I, frankly, consider an overinflated role in our political discourse. It became a symbol too often used as a campaign cudgel by both parties rather than a serious policy matter. And all of this obscured the fact that this pipeline would neither be a silver bullet for the economy, as was promised by some, nor the express lane to climate disaster proclaimed by others.

To illustrate this, let me briefly comment on some of the reasons why the State Department rejected this pipeline.

First: The pipeline would not make a meaningful long-term contribution to our economy. So if Congress is serious about wanting to create jobs, this was not the way to do it. If they want to do it, what we should be doing is passing a bipartisan infrastructure plan that, in the short term, could create more than 30 times as many jobs per year as the pipeline would, and in the long run would benefit our economy and our workers for decades to come.

Our businesses created 268,000 new jobs last month. They’ve created 13.5 million new jobs over the past 68 straight months -- the longest streak on record. The unemployment rate fell to 5 percent. This Congress should pass a serious infrastructure plan, and keep those jobs coming. That would make a difference. The pipeline would not have made a serious impact on those numbers and on the American people’s prospects for the future.

Second: The pipeline would not lower gas prices for American consumers. In fact, gas prices have already been falling -- steadily. The national average gas price is down about 77 cents over a year ago. It’s down a dollar over two years ago. It’s down $1.27 over three years ago. Today, in 41 states, drivers can find at least one gas station selling gas for less than two bucks a gallon. So while our politics have been consumed by a debate over whether or not this pipeline would create jobs and lower gas prices, we’ve gone ahead and created jobs and lowered gas prices.

Third: Shipping dirtier crude oil into our country would not increase America’s energy security. What has increased America’s energy security is our strategy over the past several years to reduce our reliance on dirty fossil fuels from unstable parts of the world. Three years ago, I set a goal to cut our oil imports in half by 2020. Between producing more oil here at home, and using less oil throughout our economy, we met that goal last year -- five years early. In fact, for the first time in two decades, the United States of America now produces more oil than we buy from other countries.

Now, the truth is, the United States will continue to rely on oil and gas as we transition -- as we must transition -- to a clean energy economy. That transition will take some time. But it’s also going more quickly than many anticipated. Think about it. Since I took office, we’ve doubled the distance our cars will go on a gallon of gas by 2025; tripled the power we generate from the wind; multiplied the power we generate from the sun 20 times over. Our biggest and most successful businesses are going all-in on clean energy. And thanks in part to the investments we’ve made, there are already parts of America where clean power from the wind or the sun is finally cheaper than dirtier, conventional power.

The point is the old rules said we couldn’t promote economic growth and protect our environment at the same time. The old rules said we couldn’t transition to clean energy without squeezing businesses and consumers. But this is America, and we have come up with new ways and new technologies to break down the old rules, so that today, homegrown American energy is booming, energy prices are falling, and over the past decade, even as our economy has continued to grow, America has cut our total carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth.

Today, the United States of America is leading on climate change with our investments in clean energy and energy efficiency. America is leading on climate change with new rules on power plants that will protect our air so that our kids can breathe. America is leading on climate change by working with other big emitters like China to encourage and announce new commitments to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions. In part because of that American leadership, more than 150 nations representing nearly 90 percent of global emissions have put forward plans to cut pollution.

America is now a global leader when it comes to taking serious action to fight climate change. And frankly, approving this project would have undercut that global leadership. And that’s the biggest risk we face -- not acting.

Today, we’re continuing to lead by example. Because ultimately, if we’re going to prevent large parts of this Earth from becoming not only inhospitable but uninhabitable in our lifetimes, we’re going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground rather than burn them and release more dangerous pollution into the sky.

As long as I’m President of the United States, America is going to hold ourselves to the same high standards to which we hold the rest of the world. And three weeks from now, I look forward to joining my fellow world leaders in Paris, where we’ve got to come together around an ambitious framework to protect the one planet that we’ve got while we still can.

If we want to prevent the worst effects of climate change before it’s too late, the time to act is now. Not later. Not someday. Right here, right now. And I’m optimistic about what we can accomplish together. I’m optimistic because our own country proves, every day -- one step at a time -- that not only do we have the power to combat this threat, we can do it while creating new jobs, while growing our economy, while saving money, while helping consumers, and most of all, leaving our kids a cleaner, safer planet at the same time.

That’s what our own ingenuity and action can do. That's what we can accomplish. And America is prepared to show the rest of the world the way forward.

Thank you very much.

-- President Barack Obama

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Stay going. 

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How To Meet The Challenges Of Rapid Urbanization

The following is a guest post by Ray McNeal, Real Estate and Environment Blogger:

The number of people living in cities worldwide is expected to nearly double by the year 2050, increasing from 3.6 billion in 2011 to more than 6 billion. This rapid growth will surely present challenges, but it will also provide huge opportunities for the public and private sectors to work together to develop more connected and efficient cities. In addition to environmental sustainability, well-planned urban areas could mean improved public health, job growth, a reduction in excess spending, and an increased economic appeal for investors.

The issue is that resources – limited land, water, electricity, and transportation – must increase dramatically in order to support population growth, putting serious additional strain on the environment. To ensure success, public sector urban planners and private sector developers are already working to get ahead of some of the challenges that come with supporting a mass migration to cities, finding ways to stretch resources and make more efficient use of limited space.

Plan Bay Area 2040 is a prime example of a forward-thinking initiative created to prepare for expected growth in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bay Area as a whole is expected to see significant growth in jobs and housing over the next 25 years, with the majority concentrated within its three central cities – San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland. As part of the initiative, officials from each central city meet regularly with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) to discuss progress in developing a transportation and housing plan that reduces dependence on cars and makes efficient use of land. MTC Commissioner Mark Luce considers it an historic step forward in serving future generations. Advocates of Plan Bay Area acknowledge that decisions regarding land use are ultimately local, but that the creation of a joint initiative will lead to smarter, more eco-friendly cities able to reach the common goals of each region.

The private sector is also making efforts to be more environmentally responsible in urban development. At the Urban Land Institute’s 2014 fall conference, real estate developer and Tishman Speyer President and co-CEO Rob Speyer addressed the need to look beyond the obvious solution of LEED Certification, focusing instead on how individuals make use of structures within cities. “Buildings don't exist in a vacuum, and the behavior, and the lifestyles of the people that live and work in our buildings? That's what's really going to determine the future of the environment,” said Speyer.

Tishman Speyer is the owner of Rockefeller Center in New York City, and Speyer often cites the structure as an example of a “happy building” – one that makes the best possible use of space in a crowded city. Aside from a green rooftop, it also provides the opportunity for shopping, entertainment, and office space in one central location and cuts down on the need for transportation that can drain the environment.

Multi-city transit systems and buildings designed to serve more than one purpose are two pieces to the solution in supporting rapid urbanization. Developers and urban planners are headed in the right direction, but must continue their focus on developing well-connected and efficient cities.