Show Notes
There's a spectre haunting ESG, the new trend towards investment funds seeking to consider things other than their financial bottom line. ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance. But there's a problem. Often firms are not well placed to improve outcomes beyond their own immediate purview. Thus divestment from high-emissions firms might seem like a good idea, but it turns out to have minimal impact on emissions. This is as one might expect because it simply passes the invest onto investors who don't care about the issue.
In fact there's a more powerful reason which is that starving emissions-intensive firms of funds is likely to depress their investment which they need to reduce emissions. And since the 20% of firms with the highest emissions emit 280 times what the least emitting 20% firms emit, reducing the emissions of the high-emissions firms is very likely to be where the biggest climate change action is going to be. These are genuine dilemmas but investment firms who seek to target ESG tend not to level with their retail investors that this is what is going on. They're much more likely to do their best and then 'sell' their members some calming PR on how their investments are making a difference. We talk about a left field way round this dilemma.
If you'd like to see the video of this discussion you can find it here.
More from Uncomfortable Collisions with Reality
Welcome to another edition of Uncomfortable Collisions with Reality, where Gene Tunny and I react to a UN report on AI that invested me as the intellectual godfather of the phrase "digital public goods". I have been mulling on the quWelcome to another edition of Uncomfortable Collisions with Reality, where Gene Tunny and I react to a UN report on AI that invested me as the intellectual godfather of the phrase "digital public goods". I have been mulling on the question of public goods since well before chairing the Government 2.0 task force, realising that many of the public goods of the twenty-first century are digital. Most people haven't noticed yet, but the Ostroms' quadrant in which a public good is both non-rival and non-excluded is no longer good enough as a definition. It denies public goods as a problem solved. But Wikipedia is a public good and it's excludable. It's just that its founders wanted to open it and could raise the funds to do so as a charity. Likewise, just as free-to-air TV figured as a public good in some 1950s and 60s textbooks, so Google, Facebook and Twitter(X) are public goods even though they're funded by advertising. (And of course you're free to think that X or any of the other social networks are public BADs, but that means they're just public goods that generate negative value. We then go on to explore ways in which social media could contribute to social mobility - something I wrote about hereAnd Gene asks me some questions about AI. I think it's obviously intelligence. Chatting with Claude and ChatGPT reveals a mysterious, shape-shifting intelligence that can easily beguile us without being truly conscious. By launching careful pilots and managing the risks, we can ensure this alien technology serves its ultimate purpose of improving our real lives.The UN report mentioned is here.
Are we suffering from an austerity of the imagination? Why does modern political and policy reform feel completely stuck in a rut?In this episode of Uncomfortable Collisions with Reality, I sit down with Luca Tiratelli to diagnose the exhaustion of the modern policy landscape. We explore why radical solutions seem impossible today, distinguishing between the Overton window of vested interests and the Overton window of imagination. We unpack the creeping careerism infecting academia and the public sector, where producing content and appeasing stakeholders has replaced frank, fearless advice.Luca shares his thoughts on the necessity of utopian thinking and having a clear vision to drive reform, whilst I argue that mapping out an unknown future often distracts from making difficult trade-offs in the present. Finally, we discuss why our current electoral democracy encourages risk aversion and competitive misrepresentation, and how alternative governance models like sortition might break the gridlock and breathe new life into our institutions.
Greg Smith has a well thought out, deeply compelling and scary take on the world we suddenly find ourselves in. I thought you should hear from him and so have just recorded this conversation. I strongly recommend you check it out. (Note: this was recorded in March but only hoisted on YouTube until now - early October. But it's still very much current.
What if technology stopped keeping us apart and started bringing us back together?
Why, in an age of constant connection, are so many of us lonelier than ever?