A true open source story: I met Andrea Frosinini through Hyperledger. He then connected me with Dr. Soheil Saraji at the University of Wyoming. The three of us started talking about the applications for blockchain–from Vinci, Italy, Laramie, Wyoming, and Los Angeles, California. (This was 2021. We couldn’t have gone to Vinci, Italy even if we wanted to.)

Our original idea was a white paper on using blockchain for carbon accounting for carbon capture and storage, but given the amount of material, Soheil suggested that we expand into a full book. So Soheil and I spent the past year working with collaborators from all over the world and talking with people in the oil and gas industry. The result, “Sustainable Oil and Gas with Blockchain,” covers the many initiatves in the oil and gas industry, such as reducing methane leakage, carbon capture, sustainable aviation fuels and hydrogen, plus sustainable plastics and carbon credit markets. It also goes over how the blockchain could help support and scale these efforts, as well as legal and technical issues related to the blockchain. It will be published by Springer in June 2023. Click here for more about the book.

I learned a lot writing this book. I spent a lot of time on applications for blockchain technology, but I also dove deep into the business and financial side of the oil and gas industry. I hadn’t worked much on this industry from my days as a portfolio manager, because it was considered too risky for the blue chip pension fund and endowments, not to mention central banks, that we managed money for. While doing research for this book, it became obvious why they were so risky: Commodity businesses are brutal for all except the lowest cost producers, and oil is the world’s biggest commodity.

The conclusion of our book, though, is that environmental sustainability will change this. The value of energy, be it jet fuel, natural gas, or electricity, won’t just be the commodity itself, but its environmental attributes such as carbon emissions. Putting it all together, my theory is that environmental sustainability will make the oil and gas industry more financially sustainable, by differentiating its products and thus creating moats around their businesses.

And so I’ve come full circle. Climate change and open source have led me back to investing. One of the world’s biggest industries, oil and gas, will undergo fundamental changes in the next decade. This will open up many opportunities for investors.

For more details, see this related blog post.

• Why is carbon accounting hot now?
• Why do we need blockchain/web3 for carbon accounting?
• A demo of the hyperledger-labs/blockchain-carbon-accounting open source project
• How to build a commercial carbon accounting system and related businesses from our open source code
• What’s ahead for carbon accounting

A recording of the presentation is here:

The audience also asked some good questions:

How is Carbon Accounting Related to Carbon Offsets?

They’re not. The carbon accounting we presented is Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions accounting, which could be used to calculate the emissions of an activity, such as a flight, shipment, or utility bill, or total emissions of a company with all its operations. Carbon offsets are based on the emissions reductions or removals for a particular project.

Do Carbon Tokens on the Blockchain Affect Your Work?

The blockchain tokens from carbon offsets are not related to carbon accounting. In the future, we could envision tokens for supply chain emissions reductions, as discussed in a previous post and this white paper.

Is this the Same Thing as Blockchain Supply Chain Tracing?

No, blockchain supply chain tracing is for tracking the movement of goods through a supply chain. We’re tracking the emissions across a supply chain, from suppliers to shipping to customers.

An important difference is that if the emissions footprint could be calculated and tokenized, then emissions reductions could be detached from the physical product and sold to someone else who would pay more for it.  This is really important for fuels and energy, which would require huge infrastructure of pipelines or grids to transport, so being able to trade emissions reductions virtually is key to funding them. See this post for more details.

What Standards are You Following for Carbon Accounting?

The open source blockchain-carbon-accounting application follows the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol and could be used to calculate emissions for an activity, a product, or a company.

Who Enforces the Standards for Carbon Accounting?

If company level emissions accounting is used for climate disclosures, then those disclosures are overseen by the same financial market regulators, such as the SEC in the US, as financial disclosures. A company’s Board of Directors and auditors could be held liable for the disclosures made to investors.

Who Should the Auditors Be?

For simple audits of a flight, shipment, or electricity use, someone just needs to compare the supporting documentation (boarding pass, tracking number, or utility bill) with the user’s information.

For company climate disclosures, an auditor familiar with corporate emissions auditing would be required.

 In either case, we designed it so that auditors would have assigned roles on the network, and the system would randomly assign audits to auditors.

What Data Sets Should We Use?

The open source application has the UK Government’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Conversion Factors, and US EPA’s eGRID electricity emissions factors, and EU EEA emission intensity of electricity generation databases built in. These provide factors for calculating emissions from electricity generated in the US, UK, and EU and a wide range of activities from burning of fuels to shipment of goods to hotel stays and air travel. If more detailed emissions calculations are needed, commercial emissions factors data sets such as EcoInvent or time of use electricity grid emissions factors should be used.

How Far Along is this Project?

It is in early stages of roll out. You can try it at https://emissions-test.opentaps.org/dashboard

What Blockchain Network is it Compatible with?

Our code runs on any Ethereum compatible public blockchain.  The key is to find a low energy/emissions one.  What you saw is written in Solidity and working on the Binance Smart Chain testnet. We chose the Binance Smart Chain because it seems to have one of the lowest energy and emissions footprints.

So I watched videos, read thousands of pages of white paper upon white paper (a partial list is here), talked to people in the offsets market, and even co-authored a paper on the voluntary carbon offsets market.

Which got me increasingly disillusioned.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find anybody to tell me what made a carbon offset valid. Sure, there are many organizations which publish standards and certified carbon projects, but their rules and methodologies differ significantly. Some require separate auditors for the issuance of the credits versus follow up monitoring, while others were fine using the same auditor for both. Some would issue offsets for renewable energy projects, some would not. Some require biodiversity for forestry projects, while others would issue offsets for commercial timber farms. Thus, offsets blessed by one organization’s criteria might not satisfy another’s, or vice versa.

So who is to really say which offsets are truly valid? Nobody could tell me. Instead I got answers like “Offsets are just bought for marketing, to show that you’re a sustainable brand.” or “In the end, who have you hurt by buying an offset?”

Then there was the absolute lack of transparency. Buyers, sellers, and brokers did not want to disclose the actual prices carbon offsets traded for. Rating services did not want to disclose their methodologies or ratings of the offsets. Finally, companies which claimed carbon neutrality with offsets did not even want to disclose what those offsets actually are.

Everybody justified their actions as some form of “We’re trying to help the market.” “It’s hard enough to get people to buy offsets, let’s not make it tougher for them.” “The prices are slow it would give people the wrong idea.” “We don’t want to get criticized for buying offsets.”

Doubt started to creep into my mind. I went to see for myself by reading through the documents and public comments for a few carbon offset projects. I found perfunctory, copy-and-paste material and summary dismissals when questions of additionality or lack of biodiversity came up.

Then it got a lot worse.

After I started to write The Open Climate Investing Book, people asked me about carbon offsets as an investment. So I decided to write a sequel to the voluntary carbon offsets paper and cover both voluntary and compliance carbon markets. It started out as a “how to” guide for investing in carbon projects. Inspired by Ray Dalio’s tomes, I decided also to indulge my own love of history and study several carbon markets from the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 to COP26.

Guess what I found?

The whole twenty five year history of carbon credits has been a series of markets with oversupply of dubious and nearly worthless credits and offsets. It happened with the Clean Development Mechanism. Then it happened to European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme. It’s also happening in the voluntary carbon offsets market. And, thanks to the agreement at COP26 to carry over old Clean Development Mechanism credits, it’ll probably happen to the Paris Agreement Article 6 carbon markets.

By now I’ve almost turned a full 180 degrees, from believing that carbon offsets were the instrument that could catalyze climate finance to almost agreeing with Project Drawdown and Greenpeace calling them a “shell game” and “a bookkeeping trick.” When I heard about people talking about using carbon offsets to “offset blockchain emissions,” it sounded like greenwashing to me. When I started to work on supply chain decarbonization and studied the heavy transportation and aviation industries, I saw that they could very well be delaying real decarbonization.

I was pretty much done with offsets. Then a graduate student at a seminar I gave about climate change and financial markets for petroleum engineering majors (yes, really) reminded me of something. He asked, “What do you think of developing countries like the one I come from, who feel that the developed countries are holding back our progress with climate change?”

He reminded me of what it was like to grow up in a “developing” country. It means living in a place where you know there’s a world somewhere with cars, air conditioned houses full of beautiful things, and elegantly dressed people. You’ve seen it on TV and through social media, but you’ve never experienced any of it.

People in those countries aspire to a better life. They also see climate change as a problem the wealthy countries caused, but one that will cause them hardships. So why should our mistakes prevent them from getting at least a taste of the good life now? And if their country didn’t become wealthier, how could they possibly cope with climate change?

International carbon credit markets were invented to solve this problem. They’re designed to help those countries develop without making our mistakes, while providing the wealthy countries ways to meet their climate targets at lower costs. They’re also the glue that holds international climate cooperation together. Without them, the developing countries would simply try to develop as quickly as possible using whatever means available, while the wealthy countires would be even less willing to pay the higher costs for emissions reductions.

So as despite repeated failures, we need carbon markets, or we’ll never achieve our climate goals. We just need carbon markets that actually work.

Now comes the good part: Fixing this is not complicated. It doesn’t require new technology. It’s not satellites or digital MRV or blockchain/web3/DeFi/ReFi. Nor is it another rating service or standard–there are plenty of those already.

Instead, it just requires treating carbon credits as a serious asset rather than a marketing nice-to-have. An asset, such as a loan, is something that is either performing or not performing based on objective criteria–i.e., is the borrower paying? When it is not performing, such as when the borrower stops paying, the holder of the asset suffers an economic loss.

This has never happened with carbon credits. Despite evidence that some (many?) CDM credits, EU ETS allowances, and voluntary carbon offsets are not really valid, they have not been invalidated. Instead, while some groups categorically deny their validity, standards organizations continue to stand behind them, and buyers try to secretly buy them for as little as possible. As a result, carbon credits have become a shadowy world of zombies.

So here’s a proposal for something that has never existed with carbon credits but exists with every other asset out there:

1. There must be an objective, neutral standard for determining whether a carbon credit is valid or not.
2. If a carbon credit is determined to be invalid, it must be voided.
3. If you use carbon credits, for example to meet a compliance target or claim carbon neutrality, and your carbon credit is voided, you must write it off and pay to replace it.

In other words, the buck must stop with, well, whoever spent it. The buyers of the carbon credits must be serious enough about their “carbon asset” to stand behind them with real money. Their investors must insist on it. Together, they must then insist that project developers stand behind the credits they create.

And here’s the best part: You could make money doing this, at least if you owned good credits. Because if we could clear the market of all the oversupply of dubious credits, then the value of the remaining credits should rise in value.

Of course, it would be take a long time for the current carbon credit buyers and sellers, standards organizations, not to mention government and international agencies to do this. But it doesn’t require them. It just requires you. And me. Do you buy carbon offsets or do business with any companies that do? If so, just stand behind the offsets you buy. Tell yourself that they must be valid under neutral, objective review, or you’ll pay to replace them. Ask the companies you do business to do the same.

There are a lot of details to be worked out. More on how to do this later. Meanwhile, here’s a link to the full chapter on investing in carbon assets.

Strangely, though, I’ve now worked in two markets where reducing emissions is profitable. Climate action has a positive net present value. It will save you or your company money. Even better, these are huge markets where we could get a lot of climate benefit. Yet still people aren’t doing them.

The first is building energy efficiency. Buildings contribute to almost half of the emissions here in the U.S. by using mostly electricity for lighting, heating, and air conditioning (EPA.) You’re probably sitting in a building right now that could significantly reduce its energy use and save money doing it, because reducing emissions in buildings is not difficult. Upgrading to LED lighting will usually pay for itself in less than a year. Upgrading thermostats or systems for controlling heat and air conditioning has about a two year payback. Even big projects like changing the windows will pay you back in seven to ten years.

So how many buildings do you see getting energy efficiency upgrades? Not many.

The second is methane from oil and gas production. Each year, 260 billion cubic meters of methane, what you and I call “natural gas,” is flared (burnt) at oil wells and natural gas fields or leaking from the ground there. This is 1.7 times the amount of natural gas Europe imports from Russia. (FlareIntel) It has the climate impact of 1.3 billion cars — almost all the cars in the world, or nearly seven times the emissions of all the world’s airlines. It’s also worth over $60 billion. Much of it could be profitably captured and sold.

Yet in many places where it happens, no one is rushing to either make the money or help the climate.

Say it — “That’s crazy!!!” But just saying it won’t solve the problem. First you have to understand why it’s like this. The answer is that you may have a mistaken understanding of what businesses actually do. You’ve been taught that businesses are there to “make money.” But it’s not true. Businesses want to make products and sell to customers. (If you don’t believe me, ask yourself this: When was the last time you sat in a business meeting about improving products or increasing sales? What about a meeting about net present value?) Thus, if a project doesn’t increase sales, it won’t be a priority or top of mind, even if it could make money and benefit the environment.

Every day at a building, people work to lease more space at higher rents. Every day at an oil and gas company, people work to produce and sell more fuel. They’ll spend gobs of money to make buildings look nicer for tenants or drill more oil wells, but they’re not thinking about all the side projects that have positive net present values or climate benefits. And they won’t, unless it helps them lease more space, increase rents, or sell more fuel. Conversely, if they could turn emissions reductions into benefits for their customers, so those customers could look good to regulators, investors, and the customers’ customers, then they’ll be more likely to do projects to reduce emissions.

That’s the missing link.

Easy to say, but very hard to do. How do you actually transfer emissions reductions between companies? Each company runs its own siloed accounting systems, so integration between any two companies is always costly. You might think regulators could step in and require companies to report their emissions and transfers between each other. Unfortunately, since supply chains span multiple industries and countries, no regulator could actually do this. Finally, big tech vendors could (and would like to) do it, but most companies wouldn’t want that.

This is a job for blockchain.

Blockchain enables collaboration without a centralized authority. A token on the blockchain is minimalist in design, carrying just enough information for a transaction, yet trusted by all parties because it’s stored immutably on the chain. Data and identities are encrypted and could be kept private and shared as needed. A blockchain could thus connect all the parties in a supply chain, no matter how spread out it is. Each party could use tokens to transfer the embedded emissions of its products and services both downstream to its customers and upstream back to its suppliers. The recipient could then use the tokens in its own emissions audit, then calculate its embedded emissions and pass them along:

For more details on the mechanics and how it fits with existing emissions accounting standards such as the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, see the white paper “Blockchain Mechanism for Tracking GHG Emissions through Supply Chain.”

Building energy efficiency and oil and gas methane emissions are just two markets I’ve become familiar with. I’m sure there are many more places where we could emissions at low costs, yet we’re not doing them enough. Overcoming such inertia is what we’re working on in the Supply Chain Decarbonization Project at the Hyperledger Climate SIG. Please sign up below or at this page to get updates about our progress.

How did this happen?

What are its potential implications?

What are the opportunities for blockchain in climate change going forward?

Since many people have asked me about this, I put together a new chapter on blockchain and defi, looking at it from my backgrounds in web3 and as a fund manager.

Several people have made suggestions and contributions that went into this chapter. This is exactly why I made this book on climate investing an open source project. I’d like to invite everyone reading this to look through it and give me your feedback, so that it’s accurate and fair in its facts and analysis.

The key to this model is identifying the correct high and low climate risk stocks. This doesn’t sound like it should be so hard. If ESG metrics are useful for climate investing at all, then they should at least be able to tell us who the best and worst performers are.

So we tested several different ways to identify the high and low climate risk stocks, using both research and actual Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s) that incorporated ESG metrics. We built multi-factor returns models using these different ESG metrics and compared the climate risk exposures they calculated. The full results are in this research paper, but you probably just want to know “Did it work?” And the short answer is:

Yes and No.

The good news is that we were able to build a very simple and elegant climate risk model from the return difference of just two ETF’s, the SPDR Series Trust – SPDR S&P Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF (XOP) as Brown stocks and the VanEck Vectors Low Carbon Energy ETF (SMOG) as the Green stocks. We orthogonalized this return difference against bond market factors and credit spreads, which is a fancy way of saying we removed the effect of changes in interest rates, the shape of the yield curve, and the relative interest rates paid by higher credit risk borrowers. The resulting model was able to identify the climate risk profile of both oil companies and renewable energy stocks quite successfully:

This screenshot shows the risk exposures of several oil companies and renewable energy stocks. Look in the column labeled “BMG”, short for “Brown Minus Green.” It is the ratio of the stock’s return relative to the return difference between Brown (high climate risk) and Green (low climate risk) stocks. If it is positive, it means that the stock will (on average) outperform when Brown stocks with high climate risk outperform. If it is negative, it means that the stock will (on average) outperform when Green stocks with low climate risk outperform. If the number is greyed out, like for Albemarle, then the ratio is not statistically significant.

As you can see, the oil companies have positive BMG climate exposure, and the renewable stocks have negative BMG climate exposure.

This is good news. It means, first, that adding renewable energy stocks could offset the climate risks in oil companies for your portfolio. (Though that has its own risks — see the analysis in structuring portfolios.) Second, it is possible to create an easily tradeable indicator of climate risk profile– great news for fund managers, risk analysts, and quants in general. Finally, it means that the financials markets really are starting to price in the climate risk exposure.

Once we have this measure of climate risk for stocks, we could do a lot of fun things like compare investments with each other. For example, we found that generally, the renewable stocks with negative climate exposures had much higher Price/Book ratios than the oil stocks with positive climate exposures:

This means that the stock market is already rewarding the renewable companies with higher valuations, probably the best argument for a company’s Board to reduce climate risk exposures. In of itself, it’s probably not a new observation. But the potential new observation is that we now also have a way to see if the market is correctly rewarding the oil companies which are really doing some about climate change.

The bad news is that our model only works for Energy stocks. For other industries, the results are decidedly mixed. The return series we created, affectionally known as “XOP-SMOG ORTHO 1 BMG”, identified relatively few stocks in the other industries with statistically significant climate exposures. Other series we tried actually gave opposite answers. Depending on the ESG metrics, companies could have either positive or negative climate exposure. For example, take a look at Rio Tinto, a mining company with high climate risk exposure. Using two different ESG metrics, it could have either positive or negative climate risk exposure:

There are other examples like this. The important question is – Why does this happen? There are a few possibilities:

• The market isn’t pricing in climate risk in other industries, because it doesn’t know how climate change will affect those industries.
• The market doesn’t have a consistent climate risk gauge across industries, because each industry has a different mix of transition and physical risk.
• We haven’t found the right way to capture the market’s climate risk exposure in other industries.

The only way to find out which is the case is to try a lot more ways to identify Brown and Green stocks and then checking if they lead to results that make sense. Fortunately, our testing helped us find a process for doing exactly that:

• Check if the difference of the Brown and Green stocks’ returns, or BMG series, is correlated with other return factors from both the stock and bond markets
• If so, orthogonalize the BMG series by removing the effects of the other factors
• Calculate the factor loadings for each industry
• Calculate the factor loadings for all the stocks of a broad market index, such as the MSCI World index
• Compare the industries and stocks identified with significant climate exposure with fundamental resesarch about climate investment risks

Our next step is to scale this up: Streamline the steps. Test a lot more combinations of Brown and Green stocks. Create a model that will make climate investing actionable.

Stay tuned…

Recently, though, I’ve had some doubts. Yes, we’re all embracing the idea that we should do something about climate. But are we doing enough and doing it quickly enough?

For example, you might think that we’re winning the fight against climate change because renewable energy is taking off:

Source: IRENA World Energy Transition Outlook

But did you know that the global investment in energy last year was $1.9 trillion, of which only about one-sixth ($320 billion) went to renewable energy?

Source: IRENA Global Landscape of Renewable Energy Finance, IEA World Energy Investment 2021

So even when all the stars are aligned–The technology is mature, there is manufacturing capacity, and there is a cost advantage–there’s still a lot of “business as usual.” What will happen to the other high emissions sectors where that’s not the case, like steel, cement, transportation, and agriculture? Even if the billions pledged by Bill Gates make the technology available, when will the trillions for deploying those technologies show up?

I’m not here to point blame at anyone. Rather, I’d like all of us to go back and ask “What more could I do?“

Having been a fund manager, I realized that I couldn’t just say “So long and thanks for all the fish,” and move on when I saw that sustainable investing is viewed as a preference rather than a necessity.

I also believe, fundamentally, investors could play a central role in stopping climate change. They are the group acting on the longest time horizons.  Whereas elections happen every few years, pension funds, life insurers, and endowments invest for ten, twenty, thirty years, or even longer. They also must do something about climate change, because it is that will hurt their investments.

So where could I have the maximum impact?

It’s true that ESG investing has already been on the rise. It’s also true that major investors with trillions of assets have pledged to reduce emissions in their investments through initiatives like Net Zero Asset Managers and Climate Action 100+.

When you get to the ground level, though, you’ll find that translating those pledges into action has been slow and difficult. Like every other industry, investment management has a lot of existing institutions that are slow to change from “busines as usual.” See, for example, “The Secret Diary of a Sustainable Investor,” where the former head of ESG at BlackRock describes his experiences.

The problems he encountered all sound true. Yet I believe there is a way forward. The key is to streamline climate investing and turn into action: trades that could be done, benchmark indices that could be written into guidelines, and funds that investors could invest in.

This is not as difficult as it sounds. It’s true that ESG is hard to quantify, with a lot of different and conflicting metrics. As a result, some complain that it’s not clear how invest with ESG. But as portfolio managers and traders, we’re used to this. Our job is to sort out conflicting signals and judge the unknown. In fact, we never know what the “true value” of any asset is, and nor do we ever need to. We just need to be able to value assets relative to each other correctly, and then trade on these relative value judgements.

So drawing upon my experience, I’ve put together an open source project for climate investing. You can access both the code and the data at github.com/opentaps/open-climate-investing. Based on recent academic research, this project extends the popular Fama and French and Carhart factor models with an additional “Brown Minus Green,” or BMG, carbon risk factor. This factor allows us to judge the climate risk of any investment based on its market prices relative to a set of investments with known carbon risks. So instead of pouring through ESG reports for every company, you can make investment decisions based on how the market is judging climate risk.

This small change in perspective yields a wealth of new insights. You can use it to identify mispricings in the market, judge the effectiveness of ESG funds, even decipher the market’s views on the carbon transition. It also helps make climate investment decisions on companies for which no ESG disclosures are available.

For example, take a look at this analysis I performed on 7 Best Oil Stocks to Buy and 7 Renewable Energy Stocks and ETFs to Consider. Pay attention the highlighted column, which shows what the carbon risk factor is for these stocks and ETF’s, and the t-statistic below which shows how statistically significant those risk factors are:

In brief, what this shows is that the market believes that Chevron (CVX) and ConocoPhillips (COP) have higher climate risk exposures than ExxonMobil (XOM), with BMG carbon risk factor of 0.85 and 0.74 vresus 0.44. Furthermore, the oil exploration companies Shlumberger (SLB) and Pioneer Resources (PXD) have higher risks than any of the integrated oil companies, with BMG carbon risk factors of 1.28 and 1.32. All these companies have statistically significant t-statistics.

Conversely, the market believes that only Vesta Wind (VWDRY) has a significant negative carbon risk factor (-1.33), so that it can be expected to go up (down) when the oil companies go down (up.) The other renewable companies and ETF’s do not actually have either negative carbon risk factors, or their carbon risk factors are not statistically significant.

Is the market right? Are the ETF’s portfolios not “green enough”? Or is the market mispricing their securities and not giving them enough credit? This is a bigger topic than a blog post. If you’re interested, please read the book that I’m writing as part of the open source project.

This model is just the starting point.  To make climate investing a reality, change must happen not just with the portfolio managers of the funds, but with the guidelines or benchmarks of the funds they manage.   Every fund, from mutual funds sold to individual investors to the biggest pensions in the world, has a specific index to compare its investment results against.  Woe be to the manager who underperforms it.  So while portfolio managers think they are in charge (easy to do when salespeople tell you how smart you are every day), they could not invest differently until their guidelines change.

And what will it take to change those benchmarks so they address climate change? First, having alternative benchmarks which incorporate climate exposures while meeting the investment strategies of the plan sponsors.  It’s not good enough to have ESG indices or Paris Agreement aligned indices when the plan sponsors want to invest in biotech, growth, or floating rate bonds.  There must climate aligned biotech indices, climate aligned growth indices, and climate aligned floating rate bond indices for them to benchmark those investments against. 

Then the plan sponsors must act.  They need to change their benchmarks to those climate aligned indices.  What will that take?  More education and awareness?  A change in how we view the legal concept of fiduciary responsibility?  Grass roots mobilization of the plan beneficiaries?   

The truth is I don’t know.  I was just a humble portfolio manager who managed against the benchmarks I was given.

As you can see, this challenge is obviously much bigger than any one person, one company, or even a whole industry.  So that’s why I’m coming back to open source: The only way we can do this is by working together and collaborating.   

You can help: If you’re an investor–whether you’re a fund manager, plan consultant, plan sponsor, individual investor of a mutual fund, or even beneficiary of a pension plan–Use our open source project to evaluate the climate exposure of your funds. It would not only help the climate but help your investments! Ask for more climate aligned benchmarks for your fund and more climate aligned funds in your 401K plan. (Make sure they really have lower climate exposure–again, use our our project.)

If you’re an open source developer, join our project! It’ll be a way to do something about climate while learning about a very interesting field. I’ll be happy to help you along the way.

And if you have financial modeling experience, please contact us–we have openings for quants!