Newsletters
In 2014, I was asked by the United Nations to spend a year helping the UN think through the Paris Climate Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). That was a fantastic year, working with world leaders, working with the biggest CEOs of the world, and the largest asset owners, helping them to figure out how to solve this climate crisis from a sustainability perspective.
During the talks that led to the Paris Agreement, every major CEO of every major sector was there, or their firm was represented. And it wasn't just about risk. We needed to think about what happens if public policy changes, and we're no longer allowed to invest in coal or fossil fuels. The mindset was about opportunity. There are multi-trillion dollar prizes on the flip side if you can figure out the electric vehicle transition. If you can figure out the renewable energy transition, that's a multi-trillion dollar prize.
This is the big question for today. At a macro level, our sustainability and profits—can they actually coexist, or does one come at the expense of the other? The greatest story about sustainability over the last 20 years is the massive reduction in cost for low cost energy, for carbon offsets, and so on. So the question of whether you want to be sustainable or not is no longer a profit versus expense one—at least to the same level as it was before.
At the same time, one has to look at the risks involved. If you're a business that has a large potential carbon footprint, and if the world is actually going to be serious about a 2°C standard, as called for in the Paris Accords, that means that a lot of that carbon footprint is actually a huge liability.
So the Paris conference was extraordinary for a few reasons. One was the belief that we would actually do this. Secondly, and very importantly, was that the business and investor community was there They weren't there as a thorn in anyone's side, but they were there hand-in-hand with policymakers saying, okay, we're with you now, and we're going work together to make this happen. The feeling in the room was that we can get there, and that business and finance are with us to get there.
This change is going to be driven, as all transformations are, by the entrepreneurial spirit of individuals in the private sector. It's going to be created by a great technology or a great new financing vehicle or a great new financial institution that becomes the breakthrough.
It's a good sign. It shows the power of progress and the power of capitalism, the power of technologies—so all of that is positive, but then the question is, how do you actually implement that in a large way across a global economy?
I’ve advised governments and financial institutions on how they should think about the allocation of capital to the best businesses, and I boil it down to five points:
This is a major transformation, a multi-decade transformation.
It’s now becoming a global phenomenon. Most of the large financial institutions, many of the large wealth managers, have built products, have built capabilities, and are talking about this, because clients are talking about it.
This revolution isn’t just a mandate or a dictate from governments or from the United Nations. This is coming from clients. We want our investments to keep these issues in mind because we know that this change is real, and we know that this is going to be one of those big transformations that our investments need to be mindful of.
Excerpted from the World Financial Podcast, a production of OppenheimerFunds.
Image credit: COP Paris/Flickr
TriplePundit has published articles from over 1000 contributors. If you'd like to be a guest author, please get in touch!
We're compiling all data!