Friday, January 5, 2018

Top Stories on Sustainability, 2017, Part 3

4. Investors woke up about climate risk and benefits of sustainability.
I know, I know, Wall Street only cares about short-term earnings performance. And yet there’s something brewing among big institutional players, the economy’s risk assessors, and even some Wall Street types. For example, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock (with $6 trillion in assets under its management) asked business leaders to focus on “long-term value creation” in his third annual letter to S&P 500 CEOs. BlackRock also said its “engagement priorities” for talking to CEOs would include climate risk and boardroom diversity.
Shareholder resolutions on climate disclosure and strategies succeeded for the first time at Occidental Petroleum and ExxonMobil as well. Fund giant Vanguard, which led the charge at Exxon, also declared climate risk and gender diversity “defining themes” of its investment strategy. Institutional investors continued to drive climate action also, with hundreds signing a statement of support for the Paris agreement. And Norway’s $1 trillion Wealth Fund is forcing banks to disclose the carbon footprint of loans and will divest from fossil fuels. In late-breaking news, the World Bank will stop financing upstream oil and gas projects after 2019.
Finally, a few big developing stories could create long-term ripples. First, the Financial Stability Board (FSB) Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (or TCFD) — chaired and led by financial giant and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg — issued a critical set of guidelines for investors and insurers to understand climate risks. On the heels of TCFD, a group of 225 global investors with $26 trillion under management launched “Climate Action 100+” to “engage” with large emitters on their management and disclosure of climate risks. And in fascinatings new on the debt financing front, Moody’s told cities to address climate risks or face downgrades on their bonds. Could shifting rates on company debt be far behind?
5. China accelerated its clean tech advantage.
On the fifth day of 2017, China announced it would spend $360 billion on renewable energy by 2020. The rest of the year brought even more leadership: China cancelled 103 coal plants, committed to cut coal by 30%, made big moves in electric vehicles (see #9, below), erected the world’s largest land-based and floating solar farms (becoming the world’s largest solar producer in the process), and – in one of the most fun stories of the year — built a solar farm in the shape of a giant pandajust for the heck of it. Essentially, in 2017, China took over the role of global climate leader and then, to top it off, committed nearly a trillion dollars in infrastructure spending to connect China to the rest of the world.
6. Clean tech continued its relentless march (and coal continued to die).
As a whole, the economics of every major green technology got radically better. (Morgan Stanley predicted an “inflection point” in 2020, when renewables become the cheapest energy source globally.) But to focus on two intertwined areas, look at what happened with electric vehicles (EVs) and battery storage.
On the former, some large economies, including FranceIndia, Britain, Norway, and China, committed to ban diesel and gas vehicles. Automakers moved quickly as well, with GM and Ford announcing major investments in EVs and Volvo phasing out conventional engines starting as soon as 2019. A group of multinationals with big logistics operations launched EV100, an initiative to speed up the switch to EVs. One big city, Shenzhen, China, moved its entire bus fleet to EV. In total, EV sales were up 63% globally.
The economics of batteries (needed for EVs and, critically, the grid so we can store clean energy) continued to get much better—50% cheaper since 2014. Tesla built grid-scale storage for Southern California and quickly erected the world’s largest lithium ion battery storage in Australia. The end result is going to be the end of coal, bolstered by commitments from states like Michigan to go coal-free—and the entire EU, which will build no new coal plants after 2020.

The Role of Business in Society

7. Famous CEOs took moral stands.
One group of business leaders faced a tough decision this year: stay in the president’s CEO advisory councils or protest his policies by pulling out. A few, like Tesla’s Elon Musk and Disney’s Robert Iger, left in the spring after the Paris climate decision. But most stayed on — that is, until the Charlottesville, Virginia white nationalist marches. When the president said there were “some very fine people” among the white supremacists, the CEO Advisory Councils disbanded quickly, with the leaders of Pepsi, IBM, GM, BCG, Merck, 3M, and others walking away (a few wanted to stay, but the momentum was clear).
One CEO in particular, Apple’s Tim Cook (who was not formally on the councils) denounced the “moral equivalence” of white supremacists and human rights protesters, but he also went on to say something more important about business: “We have a moral responsibility to help grow the economy, to help grow jobs, to contribute to this country and to other countries that we do business in.” In essence, Cook made a blended argument for sustainability that isn’t about philanthropy and the polar bears, but about the core business and its role in society. And yet, Apple had its own challenges. Proving that no company’s actions are black and white, the world discovered that Apple has stashed a quarter of a trillion dollars in cash outside the U.S. to avoid taxes. Yes, it’s legal, but is it right? Given Cook’s own argument, it’s an uncomfortable disconnect.

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