8: Delivering Financial Value

“People everywhere are talking about ESG because there is a big swirl around the promise of changing the world,” says Kate Gordon. She knows this well because Kate has extensive policy background from both the private and public sectors. Her interest in climate issues developed as an outgrowth of her early career work in economic equity, influenced by her role as Editor of the Labor and Employment Law Journal while in law school at UC Berkeley. Early in her career she was involved in clean energy to support US domestic energy security and to create jobs. She became interested in climate change through focusing on identifying, analyzing, and communicating the economic risks associated with the climate crisis. She was Founding Executive Director and Lead Author of the Risky Business Project, a bipartisan initiative to engage business leaders on the economic risks associated with climate change, reframing it as an economic issue, not a political one. She worked with co-Chairs Hank Paulson (former US Secretary of the Treasury), Michael Bloomberg (Founder of Bloomberg, former New York City Mayor, former US Presidential candidate), Tom Steyer (Founder of Farallon Capital, former US Presidential candidate) and other key influencers on this effort. Kate's expertise has also included working in US national and state-level positions as Senior Advisor to the US Energy Secretary, and Director of the Governor's Office of Planning and Research for the State of California. She points out that concern for the climate crisis is not a PR stunt for companies or a way for them to get on the global stage to make bold proclamations, nor is limited to the scientific community, nor should it be relegated to the sustainability department in some distant corner of the business. It is an existential threat to the planet and to all economic actors within, from governments to businesses to NGOs. Kate has seen the global conversation about the climate crisis evolve from being fringe, to being driven by the scientific and environmental communities, to becoming important for societal institutions to start tackling (government, business, NGOs, community groups…) to support improved quality of life and well-being needs for people everywhere. The climate crisis, and the other converging crises (Covid-19, social injustice, economic inequality…) are no longer distant abstractions affecting other people elsewhere. They are pocketbook issues: whether those are felt through the impact to your company's bottom line from disrupted supply chains, increased raw materials costs, relocated facilities, remote work, and consequently discussed in the boardroom; or they are felt by each of us individually in our lighter wallets resulting from increased pass-through costs. The aggregate impact of more virulent diseases, rising social tensions, increasing severity and unpredictability of storms, worsening wildfires worldwide, melting polar ice caps, and the rapid acidification of ocean environments from increased carbon in the atmosphere directly affects normal economic and business channels, making supply, delivery, and support less reliable and ultimately raising the costs that all of us pay.