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Is the idea of “green investment” really dead?

henry tapper

I find the juxtaposition of these two headlines  (one from today’s FT.com, one from BBC.com – striking.

I am left asking myself two questions

  1. Are we giving up on climate change?
  2. Are we giving up on green investment?

I don’t think the questions are quite the same.

If you consider that all good investments are underpinned by ESG, then an explicit commitment to green investments is unnecessary. We all divide our waste and recycle by default.

We cannot give up on climate change but we may have to accept that we are in a naughty world where it will happen. We may have missed the boat on 1.5C and will have to accept the unpleasant consequences , so what is the plan B?

I am not expert, I am – to my shame – not losing sleep over either questions. I have made my peace with the argument by adapting my lifestyle as best I can to be helpful, but I do not campaign of these issues.

I am glad that others do and am grateful for those who execute TCFD to ensure that what gets measured gets managed but my day job considers other things,

I imagine that I am like the vast majority of people in this country, keen to do my bit but not obsessed.

Is the idea of green investment dead?

We underestimate the impact of ESG at our peril. I do not think it is complacent to see ESG as having already made a difference in making our money matter. But once it has been absorbed into the financial DNA, it should be considered as business as usual.

Although 100% of my DC pot is invested in a “FutureWorld” and “Fossil Fuel” free way, that is more because I see the economic advantage of being invested in tech rather than oil companies, And I blog as someone who sees investment as something that people do for me, I apply only the tiniest interest in what is happening to my money.

It should be noted that avoiding investment in bad things is proving good news for the size of my pot. The old arguments about the advantages of “sin stocks” don’t seem to be proving good ones and virtue currently seems to be more than its own reward. it seems to be rewarding on more than a moral basis.

And yet I worry

There is a recidivism in global society which is most evident in America. The extremes of populism that want to drain the swamp of wokery – or whatever today’s vilification of liberal do-goodism is, could yet drag us back into another deeper swamp – of climate misery.

I don’t mean by that , hotter days in summer, wetter days in winter. I mean the creation of large parts of the globe which are uninhabitable because they are under water or under sand. I mean the loss of the habitats for nature to control changes in our climate to the point where we find we have no natural mitigation for climate change.

It is, as the party most likely to lead our next Government, abandons its flagship green plan, as our current Government retreats from explicit policies to protect the planet and as the planet tells us that it is warming at the very rate we were warned against, that I write and finish this blog,

It is 7 am, I am back to the day job and yet I worry. I can find intellectual justifications for Labour’s change of policies, I can walk the City streets comfortably, and yet I worry. That worry is the consciousness of ESG. Does conscience make cowards of us all or am I right to worry about what I read?

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