Vice President Al Gore wasn’t able to trigger a massive global effort to slow climate change in the 2000s, despite his Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But he has certainly been vindicated again and again in recent years, and his message of catastrophic climate change is more widely accepted than it has ever been.
Alongside his appeals to the world in the early noughties, Mr Gore was a co-founder of Generation Investment Management (GIM). This green-focused asset management firm was an early player in what is now a massive space, spanning private equity and exchange-traded funds. But as the investment style has expanded, cracks have started to show.
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) judgments are hard to make, even for experts looking at companies for a living. Rio Tinto (RIO), for example, is often given points for selling out of coal, but is supporting a new coal power plant being built in Mongolia for its Oyu Tolgoi copper mine and recently broke the social and governance side of the equation too by blowing up a sacred site in Australia during mine expansion works. Boohoo (BOO) has been regularly spotted in ethical funds despite numerous reports of workers at suppliers being paid well below minimum wage.