Baseball Analogizing Blackrock
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, continues to behave as if the corporations rapidly destroying the planet are normal players.Photograph by Lucas Jackson / Reuters
Bill McKibben’s weekly newsletter gives us reason to take a closer look beyond the hype about one of the most influential investment firms in the world. He uses baseball to raise concern in a way that is clear, if you know a little about the sport:
Can Wall Street’s Heaviest Hitter Step Up to the Plate on Climate Change?
The year is coming to an end, and all eyes are trained on D.C., as Joe Biden prepares to helm a venerable enterprise with a four-trillion-dollar budget. On the climate front, Biden’s team, which he announced last week, with Gina McCarthy, Deb Haaland, Jennifer Granholm, and John Kerry at the forefront, seems highly credible—a hundred-and-eighty-degree shift from the coterie of coal lobbyists and oil-industry operatives that have decorated the current Administration. Biden’s group has a real shot at getting Washington squarely in the global-warming fight. But, although that federal effort will doubtless occupy much of our attention in the year ahead, let’s close out 2020 by examining the de-facto government based on Wall Street. Its obvious head is BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, which is—just for purposes of scale—an eight-trillion-dollar enterprise, and the largest shareholder in almost every company that matters to the future of the Earth. BlackRock is a monetary heavy hitter.
To continue the baseball analogy, BlackRock finally stepped up to the climate plate this year. Larry Fink, the C.E.O., focussed his annual letter to investors on global warming, promising that henceforth sustainability would be at the heart of investment decisions. For that stand, Fink was recently named the first Institutional Investor of the Year—by Institutional Investor magazine. This encomium seems a little like awarding the season’s M.V.P. during spring training, simply because an intrepid player announces his plan to bat .400. In point of fact, BlackRock mostly whiffed on climate last year: the activist group Majority Action reports that, during proxy season, when BlackRock’s votes would have made a real difference, the firm voted to elect ninety-nine per cent of the directors proposed for boards at energy companies and utilities, even if the companies had made no serious climate commitments. The group also highlights that BlackRock supported just three of thirty-six “climate-critical resolutions” put to shareholders at S. & P. 500 companies—resolutions that might have curbed JPMorgan Chase’s lending to the fossil-fuel industry, or Duke Energy’s lobbying efforts. In half these cases, if BlackRock and its smaller competitor Vanguard had voted with the planet in mind, the resolutions would have passed. Fink didn’t bat .400, in other words—he batted below .100. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Blue Whistling Thrush
Pangot, Uttarakhand
Checking Your Decision-Making On Climate Criteria
Illustration by Ka Young Lee
We missed this useful brief exercise when it was first published a few months ago. Our thanks to Veronica Penney for the quiz and the scientific study it was based upon:
Think You’re Making Good Climate Choices? Take This Mini-Quiz
If you take an airplane trip, can you make up for the planet-warming emissions from that flight by doing things like driving less and turning off the lights in your house? Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Black Vulture
Refugio Pantanos de Villa, Peru
Bubble Wrap & Our Future
It is not light reading. Nor short. But before you order anything else on Amazon you might want to at least skim this report:
Amazon has a plastic problem. Oceana analyzed e-commerce and packaging market data1 as well as a recent scientific report, published in Science about predicted growth in plastic waste, that projects plastic pollution of aquatic ecosystems by country2 and found that Amazon has a large and rapidly growing plastic pollution footprint. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Whimbrel
Cairns, Queensland, Australia
You Can’t Have Your Crabcake And Eat It Too
Pot of red gold … Norway exported nearly $9m worth of king crab in October alone. Photograph: Cultura Travel/Philip Lee Harvey/Getty
Invasive species sometimes lead to creative opportunities, but rarely without some tradeoffs:
Crab-22: how Norway’s fisheries got rich – but on an invasive species
Known locally as ‘Stalin’s Red Army’, an invasion of king crabs from Russia created a lucrative industry, and difficult choices
Fishermen in Bugøynes were struggling before the crabs marched in from Russia. Photograph: Nadia Isakova/Alamy
The Norwegian fishing village of Bugøynes, 310 miles north of the Arctic Circle and a frigid, dark place for much of the year, was on the edge of ruin.
Work was scarce. Years of overfishing and mismanagement had stymied cod quotas. Boats lay idle in cold waters. Those who chose to stay were forced to rely on what meagre wages they could still muster from fishing and processing. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Long-tailed Shrike
Ooty, Tamil Nadu
The Count Is On
Anna’s Hummingbird. Photo: Matthew Olson/Audubon Photography Awards
This time of the year we always save some time for the census, and not surprisingly 2020 necessitates some adaptation to methodology:
Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count Will Look Very Different This Year
While some local counts may be cancelled due to regional COVID-19 rules, many community scientists across the hemisphere will carry on one of the longest-running wildlife censuses in a socially distanced fashion.
NEW YORK — For the 121st year, the National Audubon Society is organizing the annual Audubon CBC. Between December 14 and January 5, tens of thousands of bird-loving volunteers will participate in counts across the Western Hemisphere all while abiding by Audubon’s COVID-19 guidelines. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Black-and-white Owl
Costa Rica
There Once Was A Puffin
Our thanks to a reader who brought this book to our attention after seeing this photo. If you a puffin aficionado, you might also find these earlier posts worth a visit (there are plenty of others, which you can find by searching our site with the word puffin). The book’s publisher describes it this way:
A seaside story to read with baby! Oh, there once was a Puffin, Just the shape of a muffin, And he lived on an island In the bright blue sea! The dear little Puffin is lonely on his island for he has no one to play with. In this beloved nonsense poem, children will rejoice when the muffin-shaped Puffin, who has a hat for almost every occasion, comes up with a simple—and simply delicious—solution to his problem.
Bird of the Day: Western Yellow Wagtail
Frauenkirchen, Austria
The Weight Of Humanity
© Peter Menzel http://www.menzelphoto.com
Bill McKibben‘s Climate Crisis newsletter this week has an interesting segment on the total weight of things humans have made, mentioning the book to the right for visual reference. Turns out our stuff now weighs more than all living things on the planet. That is impressive, but not necessarily in a good way:
We are necessarily occupied here each week with strategies for getting ourselves out of the climate crisis—it is the world’s true Klaxon-sounding emergency. But it is worth occasionally remembering that global warming is just one measure of the human domination of our planet. We got another reminder of that unwise hegemony this week, from a study so remarkable that we should just pause and absorb it. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Black-throated Sparrow
Baja California Sur, Mexico
Ancestral Plants Worth Saving
These sunflowers in San Diego National Wildlife Refuge are wild relatives of sunflowers that farmers around the world grow to produce oil. Lisa Cox/USFWS
Thanks to National Public Radio (USA) for this summary of a recent scientific study:
Distant Cousins Of Food Crops Deserve Respect And Protection
Hundreds of native North American plants, often dismissed as weeds, deserve a lot more respect, according to a new study. These plants, distant cousins of foods like cranberries and pumpkins, actually represent a botanical treasure now facing increased threat from climate change, habitat loss and invasive species.
The crops that the human race now depends on, including grains like wheat and tree fruit like peaches, originally were selected or bred from plants that grew wild hundreds or thousands of years ago. And those ancestral plants, like the small wild sunflowers that can be found across the United States, still exist. “If you see them growing along roadsides, those are the ancestors,” says Colin Khoury, a research scientist at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Black-billed Gull
Outside of Auckland, New Zealand
Phenomenal Fungi Discovery
Spores of the parasitic fungus Strongwellsea acerosa. Infected hosts continue to function for days. Photograph: Faculty of Science/University of Copenhagen
The image above, on its own, would be a mystery calling to be explained. Phoebe Weston has our attention again, this time with a story from the fungi universe:
Scientists find two new species of fungi that turn flies into ‘zombies‘
Insect-destroying fungi ‘may represent the next frontier for drug discovery’
A fly infected with the fungus Strongwellsea tigrinae. Spores are discharged through a hole in the abdomen. Photograph: Faculty of Science/University of Copenhagen
Two new fungi species that infect flies and eject spores out of a large hole in the insect’s abdomen “like small rockets” have been discovered in Denmark.
The new species, Strongwellsea tigrinae and Strongwellsea acerosa, are host-specific and rely on two species of Danish fly – Coenosia tigrina and Coenosia testacea, according to researchers at the University of Copenhagen. Continue reading
Bird of the Day: Red-lored Parrot, nesting
Costa Rica
Rewilding Britain With Natural Regeneration
Rewilding Britatin has published a report on the value of allowing trees to naturally disperse seeds as a mechanism for rewilding:
13%OF BRITAIN HAS TREE COVER
compared to 40% of the EU area and 46% of Europe as a whole
When we talk about expanding woodland and tree cover, sometimes we jump on tree planting as the solution. It certainly has a role to play, but nature is an old hand at planting trees and usually does it better.
Letting nature expand woodlands naturally: Continue reading
Organikos 