How investors can help avert climate catastrophe
Editor's note: This article is extracted from the bookSustainable Investing(Dō Sustainability, May 2013) by Cary Krosinsky, Executive Director of the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets. GreenBiz readers can use codeGBiz10atwww.do必威体育2018sustainability.com10％的过这本书。
在今天的市场上，投资者有三个潜在的应对方案，当涉及到环境和社会问题需要考虑。第一个“选项”business as usual, is where most investors are presently placed, leading to some form or other of catastrophe whether related to storms, biodiversity loss, sea level rise, etc., or some combination thereof, and very likely economic collapse.
第二个总体方案 -增量变化-- appears to be insufficient. We struggle to find adequate pathways to sustainability through "wedge" theory. The latest estimates across analysis ranging from the International Energy Agency's future studies and similar from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), World Resources Institute (WRI) and UN Environment Programme (UNEP) suggest we are on the brink of big trouble with incremental approaches being anything but close to enough.
如果可能的结果是要么彻底改造或灾难，这对投资者产生巨大的影响。的一点强调的是，它应该清楚的是，如果投资者按兵不动，他们会失败无论哪种方式。因此，唯一明智的选择是第三个选项：基金经理和资产所有者change their priorities and perspectives and seek to become part of the solution而不是随着时间的推移参加一个几乎可以保证经济或环境破坏。
The state of global ownership
全球资产所有者的当前状态需要一些考虑。养老基金，捐赠基金和基金会通常有持续短缺，每年多支付了比他们在赚取利润。资产的这种感觉池需要使用创意期待的组合，以保持尽可能多的自己的现状，因为他们可能可以。
Pension funds often report profit expectations of 5 to 8 percent per year even in an age where growth is fundamentally challenged. Yet these same asset owners insist on being universal owners, not factoring in ESG in any meaningful way, perhaps guaranteeing that they won't achieve their own goals if growth fails to continue.
Fortunately, many large asset owners are reconsidering this, including CalPERS, Norges Bank and many others, especially those in Scandinavia. Such asset owners represent well over $1T in public equity alone, making a pending shift of this capital towards sustainability focused companies another trend to consider.
Investor and flood photoby Peshkova on Shutterstock.
另一个方面来讨论more thoroughly is the deeply rooted nature of current lifestyles and business. The global footprint in effect consists mostly of individuals and their families, businesses, governments and the business processes, transportation and buildings involved. Entrenched deeply within all aspects of this are use of fossil fuels, cement and chemicals, all of which are the vast majority of the overall greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint of human activity.
业务涵盖roughly 40 percent of the global footprint，个人还有40％到50％，和自然的原因是余数。普华永道认为，我们需要按每年5％降低年度总足迹, in order to keep within a 2°C increase by the year 2050. Clearly, business has a huge role here, in promoting and delivering resource efficiency and innovative products and solutions which can further reduce individual footprints.
Using investment to encourage such activity, by rewarding those companies best positioned to drive solutions of the future, is worth a concerted effort, and to some degree, markets are already moving in that direction. In 2011, for example, while the S&P 500 was flat, two leading lists of the most innovative U.S. companies, one performed by MIT Sloan, the other by strategy + business magazine, both were up 6 percent.
另一件事值得考虑的是企业的整体股权结构。个股业主的最大类别是政府，富裕的家庭和个人，企业本身，养老基金，主权财富基金，保险公司和中产阶级家庭合计。
Much smaller in aggregate are endowments and foundations, less than 1 percent of public equity in total, so efforts at getting universities to divest from fossil fuels, while perhaps morally feel good in nature, will not tip the balance in any way shape or form. (More interesting are cases such as Yale University's endowment, who already allocated 6.4 percent of their ownership to "positive sustainable investment." However, does this imply that 93.6 percent of their investing is not sustainable? Perhaps not all of it, but it does beg the question. Certainly universities have the opportunity to set an example, but they cannot do it all by themselves.)
Long-term energy transitions are required
So what sort of larger shifts are required to get us to 2050 without climate catastrophe? One thing we could consider starting with is coal. Can we not consider a preservation and buyout effort to retire those assets in the ground, combined with converting coal plants to use other sources? Some form of effort in this regard would seem mandatory.
虽然奥巴马政府在使燃煤电厂买不起技术政策着手，欧洲正在重新陷入增加煤炭的使用，尤其是福岛之后。中国，俄罗斯和印度在此期间继续有计划地精心打造过千新的煤电厂。煤占绝大多数的问题，如果我们发现了一种完全转化的煤电厂天然气利用的最佳实践，以确保没有甲烷泄漏并限制通过明智地选择位置的过程中淡水的损害，我们可以有一些的追求计划。
Ownership is critical, as assets in the ground have an assumed value. Much like bankruptcy proceedings, owners of equity and fixed income that relate to coal companies could receive some percentage of their investment back, and owners of the land, whether the same companies or not, simply could be bought out, and a regime put in place to ensure that the coal stays where it is, in the ground.
类似的工作部署上老化的核武器和核废料，确保他们不漏，增殖等，这是有成本的，但一个我们必须要承担。投资者应该把钱拿回来的一部分，但不是全部，因为需要对这份最终被证明是经济不明智的选择采取处罚。投资者为什么要得到一个免费的通行证？他们追求之一，但它不是在这种情况下，实至名归。
核有一定道理作为一种可行的选择 - 当然法国展示了如何核可以是大多数对一个国家的能源。法国可以引领的全球联盟部署的最佳实践核？当然，挑战是最好的技术都比较昂贵，并且需要像20年部署核武器，特别是在美国，而福岛脱轨选择其他地方，以及废物挑战仍然存在。
显然，我们还需要找到一种方式来最大限度地提高太阳能，风能，水能，地热能等。这里的好消息是，该技术每天都改善，沿着摩尔定律/ Kurzweilian路径的东西。坏消息是，同样是这些进步已经引起早期投资者失去他们的衬衫，有时放弃对环保投资作为一种可行的选择。这是一个原因，绘制出一个过渡计划，投资者可以放心乘坐，而不仅仅是投资，他们的心是。
