If you’re a mere mortal looking to save the planet from the perils of global warming, you probably feel you’re engaged in an epic struggle. There you are with your carbon-tax petitions, your kayak, and your willingness to be peacefully arrested outside the White House. Pitted against you are the fossil-fuel corporations with their entrenched lobbies, vast treasure, globe-spanning tentacles, and sociopathic tendencies.
But if you’re enrolled in a retirement plan, say, you may be a stakeholder in a large fund that invested in activities you find deeply objectionable. And despite the growing movement in support of divestment, it’s often a long, hard slog to get financial managers to seriously consider, let alone commit to, the clean new world of fossil-free funds.
Enter Corporate Knights, a financial research and reporting company, who together with their friends at the South Pole Group and 350.org launched this week a wondrous new tool: “The Clean Capitalist Decarbonizer.” Corporate Knights used the Decarbonizer to analyze the performance of 14 major funds — among them the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust, the endowments of H... Read more
