ESG, Reincarnated
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 April 2025
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can we invest our way out of the climate crisis? That’s the question we started this series with, and in this episode, we try to answer that question.
Host Amy Scott pops the hood of her own retirement investments to look at how to reduce their carbon impact, and she shows you how you can too. We visit a battery storage farm in the Bronx to see how New York City is leveraging its shareholder power to accelerate the energy transition. Finally, we look at a phenomenon that has emerged in the wake of backlash against environmental, social and governance investing — something called “greenhushing.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If I'm an investor, you know, worried about the climate crisis, what kind of impact do my retirement savings have? |
| 0:07.8 | It turns out that moving your investments to a climate-friendly investment option is the single most impactful thing that the average American can do for climate change. |
| 0:23.9 | We've been talking so far this season about other people's money, |
| 0:28.8 | the trillions of dollars of investor capital that can fund climate solutions |
| 0:33.7 | or keep fueling the crisis. |
| 0:36.6 | But what about you and me? What can we as individuals do to |
| 0:41.0 | protect our savings from climate risk and not contribute to the problem? To find out, I called up |
| 0:48.1 | Alex Wright Gladstein. She's the founder and CEO of Sphere, a company focused on climate-friendly investing. |
| 0:56.8 | And Alex says there's a lot of invisible power in our retirement portfolios. |
| 1:04.1 | Turns out it's more impactful than the combination of going vegan, never flying again, driving an electric car, putting solar on your house. |
| 1:13.8 | Sphere has a tool online where you can look up the carbon impact of your workplace retirement plan. |
| 1:20.5 | I type in Marketplace's parent company. |
| 1:24.6 | Ooh, $19 million. |
| 1:27.8 | This is how much American Public Media Group employees have invested in fossil fuel companies |
| 1:32.3 | through their retirement savings plan. |
| 1:34.9 | And scroll through the report, which is based on tax filings from 2021, on average, about $15,700 |
| 1:44.1 | per employee. |
| 1:46.1 | And then it compares us to some other companies. |
| 1:48.9 | So Walmart is similar. |
| 1:51.5 | Apple's actually lower, 8.1%. |
| 1:54.4 | But of course, as that's a percentage, |
| 1:57.2 | the actual money would be significantly more. |
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