Sustainability

Al Gore: why sustainable investing makes financial sense

Name: Al Gore: why sustainable investing makes financial sense
Uploaded: 2018-05-21T11:32:51.412Z
Duration: 2 min 42 s
Channel: Financial Times
Description: The former US vice-president is on a mission to prove the business case

The former US vice-president is on a mission to prove the business case. He tells FT US managing editor Gillian Tett which market forces he believes are driving a sustainability revolution, even as significant obstacles could slow progress.

May 21, 2018

Produced by Alpha Grid

Transcript

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Thank you very much.

Thank you, Gillian.

Thank you very much indeed, vice-president, for joining us today. What is your message, really, to the investment industry, in terms of what they can do?

Our mission has been to prove the business case that the full integration of sustainability into the investment process can actually add to performance. We have the happy coincidence that investing in a fully integrated sustainability model does produce higher returns.

There was a famous economist in the last century who said: "Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen much faster than you thought they could." This sustainability revolution that I have mentioned is rooted in the market place, and it's profoundly affected by the costs down curves in areas like renewable energy.

Now, we need political changes. We need policy changes. We need to stop forcing taxpayers to subsidise the destruction of our civiliSation. That's really crazy. But that just affects the pace of this change. The direction of the change, I think, is undeniable. It is accelerating.

So if a company decides, we need to have a rethink, and it's going to require a significant capital investment that will diminish earnings for a little while - if they're measured on a short term basis, then they're discouraged from doing that. We now have $28 trillion of carbon assets mark to market on the books of sovereigns and multinationals. No more than one third of those assets can ever be put to their intended use and burned. That means that we almost certainly have $22 trillion of subprime carbon assets which, at some point, will be recognised as having a value of not what's marked on the books, but a value of roughly zero.

Will there be some radical breakthrough in dramatically reducing the cost of carbon capture and sequestration? I sure hope so, but I don't want to bet the future of humanity on it. This is the time for the investor community to really step up and lead in a way that happily can benefit your clients as well. Thank you for having me.