🍃The Sustainability Top 10: What if companies had to pay for externalized emissions costs?

Welcome back 🖐,

I am serving you a maxi cup of The Green Tea this week because there were too many good resources and stories and I don’t want you to miss out 🍵.

This week in sustainability, we have resources to score your sustainability report, check your organization’s extreme-heat readiness, and benchmark your data distribution channels; Google using AI to crack a tough sustainability corporate challenge; what it would mean for companies’ bottom line if they had to pay for externalized emissions costs; Cargill’s modern-retro ship to cut emissions; how HP turned B2B salespeople into sustainability pros; PFAS again on the news with a straw twist; and more…

Here are The Green Tea's Top actionable, innovation, and hot sustainability stories this week! 👇

5. (GreenBiz) Rekindling the flame: how to keep your passion burning with a career in ESG. read here

6. (GreenBiz) Could AI help you crack one of your industries' intractable emission issues? Google study finds that AI can help pilots minimize climate-warming aircraft contrails, which are responsible for ~35% of the global warming impact of the aviation industry. read here

7. (GreenBiz) Turning B2B salespeople into sustainability pros: when the value of contracts from sustainability team efforts' exceeded $1.3 billion, the sustainability team's capacity was maxed out and Hewlett Packard Enterprise had to rethink their sales approach. read here

8. (GreenBiz) 3 ways eBay and Pepsi are addressing Scope 3 transport emissions. read here

9. (Reuters) Modernizing an old concept to reduce emissions: a Cargill chartered dry bulk ship was fitted with special metal sails to study how wind power can cut emissions and energy usage in the shipping sector. This is what it looks like 👀👆. read here

10. (Bloomberg) The space industry has been flying under the radar as it comes to their contribution to carbon emissions, but as the industry grows rapidly and reaches an estimated worth of $1 trillion by 2030, maybe it is time to take another look. In a 2019 speech at Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos envisioned a future in which dirty industrial activity took place off-world and that our home was “zoned for residential and light industry.” We know how that turned out on Earth went wealthy countries were sending their waste to developing countries, so maybe we should not give a pass to the industry visionaries and keep an eye on them.... read here

11. (G&A) Don't get cancelled, you know what to do: over half of M&A dealmakers have cancelled deals as a result of ESG due diligence findings . read here

12. (Nature)(Study) What if companies had to pay for the problems their carbon emissions cause? That would cost them a lot of money! A new study from the University of Chicago estimated the carbon damages that companies are externalizing. Most articles on this study were slopy and confusing so I had to go to the source, the actual study, to get the numbers straight. In a bit of good news for USA companies, they look better than companies from most other countries including the EU (that was unexpected!). Using $190/ton of carbon, in the global sample (excluding US), carbon damage equals roughly 44% of firms’ operating profits and 3.1% of their revenues. For US firms, average damages are 18.5% of profits and 2% of revenues. The values vary widely by industry so you can check out how your industry fares at the link.. read here

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15. (Reuters) Not so simple: news this week of Ecuadorians voting to ban oil drilling in the Amazon (specifically at Yasuni National Park) (read here) mislead a lot of people and oversimplified this issue. First of all, the ban applies only to a specific area of Yasuni so existing oil operations in other areas of Yasuni will keep going. Second of all, the banning of oil drilling does not mean that this part of the Amazon forest is safe as we have seen in Brazil where cattle ranching and other activities have razed significant parts of the Amazon without oil being involved. In a country where governance is in crisis with the drug trade gaining a foothold in recent years (you might have heard about a presidential candidate getting assassinated), the safety of biodiversity-rich Yasuni is still a question mark. Furthermore, Ecuador will be forfeiting billions of dollars of revenue that could help with the country's development and, ironically, with its green transition for which countries like Ecuador have little resources (even though they contributed very little to create the climate change problem).

Ecuador is "protecting" something that is of value to all of humanity, yet they are getting nothing in return. There should be more global mechanisms in place to reward this behavior so that protecting nature does not become a tradeoff for countries that need the income. I visited Yasuni two years ago (see video 👆) and was astounded by the biodiversity and also by the excellence of the eco-tourism experience, which is managed by one of the local indigenous tribes. I was also shocked to see full-blown oil operation on the way to the ecolodge. While I am glad that no additional oil exploitation will be taking place, I do worry about how this will turn out in the long term for this incredible biodiversity hot spot and wish that more support was given to countries like Ecuador to protect biodiversity assets that benefit the whole world.

Enjoy and reflect 💭. Warm regards / saludos,

Julio