Investment

About 10 years ago, a very thick book written by a French economist became a surprising bestseller. It was called “Capital in the 21st Century.” In it, Thomas Piketty traces the history of income and wealth inequality over the past couple of hundred years. The book’s insights struck a chord with people who felt a growing sense of economic inequality but didn’t have the data to back it up. I was one of them. It made me wonder, how much carbon pollution is being generated to create wealth for a small group of extremely rich households? Two kids, 10 years and a Ph.D. later, I finally have some answers. In a new study, colleagues and I investigated U.S. households’ personal responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2019. We previously studied emissions tied to consumption – the stuff people buy. This time, we looked at emissions used in generating people’s incomes, including investment income. If you’ve ever thought abo...

Assistant Secretary for Insular and International Affairs Carmen G. Cantor concluded a weeklong trip to the Pacific, where she met with regional leaders and U.S. government interagency partners to highlight the Department of the Interior’s commitment to the insular areas and Freely Associated States (FAS).   In Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, Assistant Secretary Cantor and staff from the Department’s Office of Insular Affairs (OIA) hosted interagency partners and U.S. Embassies Chiefs of Mission at the biannual Federal Working Group on the FAS. The meeting facilitated the exchange of best practices, addressed program delivery challenges and discussed pooling federal resources for crucial projects. Over 35 federal program personnel from 20 agencies attended. Traveling to Guam, Assistant Secretary Cantor met with Lieutenant Governor Josh Tenorio, engaged local leaders, and conducted site visits to key projects receiving funding from OIA. These visits i...

For three generations, Fanny Brewer’s family has been ranching the same land in South Dakota’s Ziebach County. Encompassing part of the 1.4-million-acre Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, where she grew up, the county is among the poorest areas in the United States. But for Brewer, her husband, and their four kids, it represents prosperity. The Brewers run cattle and grow some alfalfa across 12,000 acres of grassland that’s a combination of owned land, leased tribal land, and federal trust land. This complicated arrangement isn’t unusual for Indigenous producers, who experience unique hurdles such as financial lending discrimination, limited land ownership opportunities, additional governance requirements, and disproportionately high poverty rates as a result of colonialism. “Some Native families never develop that generational wealth, whereas our non-Native neighbor...

Climate change risk factors can now be calculated as investment risks with a tool launched by Bloomberg and Riskthinking.AI, a data and software company, the two firms announced. The tool assesses the physical risks posed to companies by climate change so that investors and advisors can take these factors into consideration when making investments, the companies said. The risks that are used in the assessment are those named by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Combining Bloomberg’s data on more than one million physical assets with Riskthinking.AI’s highly granular data-set of global climate change projections and proprietary methodology, the indicators provide Bloomberg users with a new and powerful way to assess their exposure to floods, droughts, wildfires, and other climate vulnerabilities,” the firms said in a press release. “The impact from extreme weather events is of growing concern...