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...Or We Are Screwed


Though I was six years old when Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, the founder of Earth Day, received a standing ovation at Denver’s Currigan Hall on April 22, 1970; his words must have penetrated deeply: “Earth Day can – and it must – lend a new urgency and a new support to solving the problems that still threaten to tear the fabric of this society… the problems of race, of war, of poverty, of modern-day institutions.”

I was living in Wisconsin then, and live in Denver now. I remember the Packers beating the Raiders in the 1968 Super Bowl, the moon landing in 1969, and I remember the first Earth Day in 1970. Senator Nelson was certainly quite prescient. Despite the raised awareness through the Earth Day campaigns, things have gotten much worse. In a 48-hour span this month, the Denver area experienced 80º weather with sunshine, followed closely by a “bomb cyclone” blizzard – the second this year. Climate change is wreaking havoc on our world and it requires dramatic alteration to our current business practices.

Unfortunately, none of this is new information. Fortunately, impact-driven investment is a growing industry, providing competitive returns, and actively working to fund businesses solving climate change challenges. According to the April 2019 Global Impact Investing Network, the size of the impact investing market has grown to $502 billion. And, Michael Holder of GreenBiz notes that the total sustainable/impact related investing has grown 34% globally since 2016 to over $30 trillion in 2018....Or We Are Screwed

At CoPeace, we have started introducing some of our holding company and portfolio ideas to friends and family. We like the CoPeace idea of putting complementary solutions under one umbrella, using the organizing principle provided by the holding company approach (we will be announcing some of our early investments soon).

While I was in Wisconsin, my nephew, a senior in high school, returned from school as we were discussing CoPeace. He came through the door and proclaimed they had just talked about impact-grounded investments in his economics class. In the words of his economics teacher, “It is critical to demand more long-term responsibility from business or we are screwed.”

 

Sources:

https://history.denverlibrary.org/news/earth-day-turns-45and-dpl-conservation-collection-turns-55

http://www.nelsonearthday.net/docs/nelson_26-18_ED_denver_speech_notes.pdf

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/09/711424891/a-second-bomb-cyclone-colorado-predicted-to-go-from-80-degrees-to-a-blizzard

https://thegiin.org/assets/GIIN%20Market%20Sizing%20Report%20Press%20Release.pdf

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/global-sustainable-investing-assets-surged-30-trillion-2018

Craig Jonas is the CEO and founder of CoPeace. As a forward-thinking holding company, CoPeace is building a portfolio of carefully selected for-profit companies with measurable social and environmental impact. To learn more about impact investing, check out CoPeace’s Intro to Impact Investing.