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Presented by America’s Plastic Makers®: | | | | | |  | | By Lorraine Woellert | Presented by America’s Plastic Makers® | | | | | 
Harvard and Yale students took to the field during halftime of a 2019 NCAA college football game to protest investments in fossil fuels. | Nic Antaya/The Boston Globe via AP, File | THE DAM BREAKS — Academic endowments are entering a new normal after Harvard University, the richest school in the world, said it would divest from fossil fuels. The decision wasn’t made lightly. The nearly $42 billion endowment succumbed to years of pressure from students and climate activists, a massive protest at a 2019 football game, and a string of legal efforts. President Lawrence Bacow in the past has said the endowment shouldn’t be used for political ends. Earlier this month he changed his tune. “None of us will be spared the realities of climate change, which means we are all in this together,” he wrote. This isn’t about Harvard. It’s about the beginning of the end. A cascade of similar announcements has followed in Harvard’s wake, with Boston University, the University of Minnesota and the $8 billion MacArthur Foundation pulling the plug on fossil fuels. And there are more to come. “We’re going to see this ripple out in the coming months,” said Richard Brooks , climate finance director at the nonprofit Stand.earth. “The financial arguments have never been stronger, with declining demand for oil, gas and coal. The social acceptability has now shifted as well.” Divestment activists now have turned their focus to Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, Boston College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, none of which have fully abandoned fossil fuels. The nonprofit Climate Defense Project, a group of lawyers that filed complaints on behalf of activists at Wisconsin, Harvard and Boston College, hopes to file more of them this fall. A steady accumulation of schools over the past decade have taken the plunge to divest, starting with Maine’s Unity College in 2012. The list now includes Georgetown University, Cornell University, the University of California, Syracuse University and Brown University. Crystal ball: Expect more divestment announcements in October leading into the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Scotland. POLITICO’s Jordan Wolman has the deets.
| | | Lorraine and Catherine here. Are there any back-door machinations we’re missing on the Hill? Drop us a line at lwoellert@politico.com and cboudreau@politico.com. Check us out on Twitter @ceboudreau and @Woellert. FOMO? Sign up for The Long Game. We couldn’t have done it this week without Jordan, Shayna Greene, Karl Mathiesen, Zia Weise and America Hernandez.
| | | | A message from America’s Plastic Makers®: Congress wants to increase prices on products made with plastic. Stop the #PlasticTax. plasticmakers.org/StopthePlasticTax | | | | | | | BECOME A GLOBAL INSIDER: The world is more connected than ever. It has never been more essential to identify, unpack and analyze important news, trends and decisions shaping our future — and we’ve got you covered! Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Global Insider author Ryan Heath navigates the global news maze and connects you to power players and events changing our world. Don’t miss out on this influential global community. Subscribe now. | | | | | | | | KINDER CAPITALISM — Milton Friedman already has been pronounced dead in this space. Today, we’ll call him buried. A group of Democrats in Washington wants the White House to overhaul American capitalism to give priority to climate change, the racial wealth gap and other issues over short-term corporate profits. Sens. Mark Warner (Va.), Chris Van Hollen (Md.) and Dianne Feinstein (Calif.) have asked the Biden administration to set up an inclusive economic growth initiative to identify ways to shift incentives for investors and companies. Their letter followed a similar plea from 18 House Democrats, Catherine reports. “By changing the incentives for corporations and investors, we can lessen the disregard too often shown towards workers, environmental harms, or racial and gender inequity,” they wrote. These aren’t crunchy-granola senators. They’re middle-of-the-road party leaders with clout who are backing a coalition of social-impact organizations that want businesses to consider not only shareholders, but workers, communities and the environment, too. Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), who wants business to take the lead on climate change, said he’s frustrated. “Often, corporate America is sitting on both sides hedging their bets,” Casten said during a discussion hosted by Leadership Now, a group of academics and business leaders that advocates for voting rights and transparency in politics. Flashback: The Business Roundtable, a lobbying group of top-dog CEOs, endorsed stakeholder capitalism in a famous 2019 letter that, essentially, went nowhere. The group now is fighting a $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill that would enact the most sweeping climate action in U.S. history. “The pandemic and the resulting economic fallout, systemic racial injustice, and the rising threat of climate change call for bold but necessary action: rebuilding our economy so that it works for all Americans,” House lawmakers wrote. “To address these issues, we need to change the underlying structures that have perpetuated them.” | | | | 
The blue oval is banking on green. | David Zalubowski, File/AP Photo | Ford Motor Co. wins the sustainability news cycle. The automaker and its partner, South Korean energy conglomerate SK Innovation, said Monday they’ll spend $11.4 billion to expand battery and electric vehicle assembly in the U.S. It’s the largest single manufacturing investment in Ford’s 118-year history. Details: A 3,600-acre campus outside Memphis called Blue Oval City will house battery manufacturing and suppliers on site. In central Kentucky, two additional battery plants will have the combined capacity to power more than a million vehicles. Texas will get $90 million to train people to service the next generation of electric vehicles. In other words, Ford is investing in communities represented by lawmakers hostile to President Joe Biden’s green-energy agenda. Will it change any minds on Capitol Hill? “Certainly the idea is to change the minds of a lot of different folks, whether it's consumers, policymakers and other stakeholders,” Bob Holycross, Ford vice president for sustainability, said. The fun stuff: Blue Oval City is designed to be carbon neutral and zero waste, meaning nothing will be shipped to landfills. Ford hopes to incorporate water reuse on site so it can avoid tapping aquifers for manufacturing. Look for the opening in 2025. Amazon has released three years of workforce demographic data. The company put out a statement of solidarity on diversity and inclusion during 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests and has been hiring women and people of color since. Women now make up nearly 47 percent of the company’s workforce, and the share of white employees has fallen to less than a third. But wait. Men and white people still hold the overwhelming number of corporate and executive jobs. New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer has been pestering companies to back up their diversity rhetoric with data. As of Thursday, 67 S&P 100 companies have disclosed or promised to disclose the information, Stringer’s office said.
| | | | A message from America’s Plastic Makers®:   | | | | | | Publicly owned companies grab the sustainability spotlight with their upbeat announcements and noisy shareholders. But environmental, social and governance concerns now are starting to influence private markets at a rapid clip. Data from the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board shows that 57 private equity firms and hedge funds have signed on to the voluntary standard since the first one joined in 2016. Jeff Cohen, head of private investment initiatives at the Value Reporting Foundation, which maintains the accounting standards, said investors are demanding the shift amid mounting evidence that positive ESG metrics mean higher returns. And private equity firms are sitting on a pile of capital . That means there are multiple would-be buyers for every asset that comes up for sale. More competition means higher prices. Firms are upping their due diligence to make sure they can turn a profit, and sustainability accounting is one way to do that. Why do we care? As public companies go green, coal plants, oil pipelines and fracking operations are falling into the hands of less-scrutinized private firms. Regulators have noticed. Catherine told you about the trend in March.
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| | | | CLIMATE THE KINGMAKER — Climate policy will be key to forming a new German government now that the Angela Merkel era is ending. The only thing is, the two smaller parties that will soon have to form a majority coalition have completely different strategies for reaching the country’s goals. The Social Democratic Party narrowly won on Sunday over the Christian Democrats. The Greens came in third and the liberal Free Democrats fourth, according to preliminary returns. Greens and Free Democrats want to team up to bargain with the two bigger parties. But Greens have more in common with social democrats, and Free Democrats are more aligned with Christian Democrats. As Karl, Zia and America report, this could get messy. “Ahead of the election, the parties liked to talk a lot about the climate,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, chief economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “If they mean it, they have to get serious now no matter what coalition.” Important factoid: Germany has the largest economy in the European Union, which is leading the global way on carbon pricing and corporate disclosure of climate risk. This is interesting. Germany’s catastrophic floods in July weren’t a clear influence on the election. Almost half of voters polled beforehand said it was the most important issue for them, but fewer than a quarter actually based their vote on it. POWER FAILURES — China joined the list of countries suffering power outages as energy prices soar. As many as 100 million people could be affected, the BBC reports. In the U.K., Prime Minister Boris Johnson has the army on standby to help get fuel to gas stations.
| | | | A message from America’s Plastic Makers®: Congress wants to tax all things plastic to fund their spending priorities. This will be devastating for families who are already paying too much. Stop the #PlasticTax at plasticmakers.org/StopthePlasticTax | | | | | | REINSURANCE RISK — Reinsurers could be underestimating their exposure to natural catastrophes by as much as 50 percent, according to research from S&P Global Ratings. A one-in-10-year event could wipe out more than 90 percent of the sector’s topline capital buffer. The upshot: Higher premiums, for starters.
| | | — The LA Clippers, with the help of sustainability software company Aspiration Partners Inc. will build what they’re calling the first carbon-free sports stadium. Intuit Dome will be solar and battery powered, and built with concrete that captures greenhouse gas emissions. — John Stossel is suing Facebook after it fact-checked his global-warming videos. Facebook told our friends at E&E News that — surprise — the claim was without merit.
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