Nature and Ethics by F. David Peat.Paper given  to Centromarca; Italy association of leading brand names."When, in the late 17th Century, bankers, merchants and shippers met in Edward Lloyd's Coffee House they carried out their transactions based on the principle of "my word is my bond". Indeed in English law a verbal agreement, sealed by a handshake, was legally binding, the written contract being only a memorandum of what had been agreed upon by both parties. This was the world analyzed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo in their theory of the market place. It was a market, as Ernesto Illy has often pointed out, based on three invisible pillars of Trust, Honesty and Respect, ethical principles that were taken for granted in that period".

Dialogue between Anthony Alexander, writer, consultant and Director for Research for Alan Baxter & Associates engineering and planning consultancy; and David Vigar, report author.   AA: My work in the built environment sector is focussed on the practical delivery of carbon reductions. This is affected by a number of factors including: the extremely long development cycles in planning, urban design, architecture and construction, the need to transform the working practices and business models of the commercial property sector, and the institutional inertia and steep learning curve related to any change in policy.    Hence, I thought your analogy in the introduction to the Beyond Peak Carbon report that the government was like an architect and business was like a builder was rather an interesting one. 

Can Copenhagen deliver a new industrial revolution?  – David Vigar, Climate Change Adviser, Tomorrow’s Company, david@davidvigar.co.uk As December’s Copenhagen climate summit approaches, new evidence is emerging of the massive scale of the action needed to avert the risk of runaway global warming. At the same time, contradictory signals emerging from the pre-summit discussions don’t inspire confidence that it’s likely to be taken.  The scale of the task is underlined in a new report, Climate Solutions 2, produced for WWF by Climate Risk, a company that advises insurers and others on climate-related issues. Their modelling takes into account targets for stabilising greenhouse gases, available low-carbon technologies and the speed at which industries can grow in a market economy, given physical and financial constraints. The report’s bottom line is that world’s governments, businesses and investors have five years to shift low-carbon industries into a high growth phase to avoid...

GLOBE-Net (October 16, 2009) What is the role of investors in creating a more sustainable economy? A survey of fund managers just published by the UK’s Fair Pensions campaign provides challenging reading for anyone who believes that a green future will emerge simply through market forces operating in the investment community. The market purist argument is that the system should regulate itself; because if climate change really is a material risk for businesses, it should be built into the way companies are valued. Companies whose factories or plantations could be destroyed by climate change-induced floods or droughts should be less attractive investments than ones making wind turbines or hybrid car engines. 

Marking the 20th Anniversary of SRI in the Rockies offers more than an opportunity to review the hard-won progress of investors to prove that socially responsible investing is viable and now clearly out-performs traditional mainstream investing.  Since the credit crises of 2008-2009, we can now assert with confidence that investing for long-term sustainability and taking ESG factors as material to asset valuation could have actually helped avert these crises.   We investors are now winning the paradigm battle and cite the evidence to show that the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is bunk and by the same token show that the Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and, yes, even the sacred tenets of the "rational investor" and the Black-Scholes Merton Options Pricing Model all are part of history.