Every day, the alphabet soup of climate and ESG-related NGOs seems to thicken. But their respective raisons d’etre can seem like a mystery for all but the closet of insiders. To help unravel the role of each of these organizations in the broader social movement and policy push for urgent climate action, Chad Reed speaks with Ivan Frishberg, the chief sustainability officer of Amalgamated Bank and a pioneer of climate collaboration for big banks and corporates. Given his historically central and successful role in driving industry collaboration on climate action, Ivan provides key insights into the current state of this evolving landscape, delves into the hot topic of divestment versus engagement, and discusses the merits and significance—or lack thereof—of the so-called ESG backlash.
Every day, the alphabet soup of climate and ESG-related NGOs seems to thicken. But their respective raisons d’etre can seem like a mystery for all but the closet of insiders. To help unravel the role of each of these organizations in the broader social movement and policy push for urgent climate action, Chad Reed speaks with Ivan Frishberg, the chief sustainability officer of Amalgamated Bank and a pioneer of climate collaboration for big banks and corporates.
Given his historically central and successful role in driving industry collaboration on climate action, Ivan provides key insights into the current state of this evolving landscape, delves into the hot topic of divestment versus engagement, and discusses the merits and significance—or lack thereof—of the so-called ESG backlash.
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Episode recorded: December 19, 2022
Email your feedback to Chad, Gil, and Hilary at climatepositive@hannonarmstrong.com or tweet them to @ClimatePosiPod.
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Ivan Frishberg: Once you set a science-based target, you’re essentially giving yourself rules for the economy and for your business that allow you to engage in a managed transition. And that in climate change is what we’re all trying to do. A managed transition where we avoid the worst impacts and manage the worst downsides.
Chad: Every day, the alphabet soup of climate and ESG-related NGOs seems to thicken. But their respective raisons d’etre can seem like a mystery for all but the closet of insiders. To help unravel the role of each of these organizations in the broader social movement and policy push for urgent climate action, I spoke with Ivan Frishberg, the chief sustainability officer of Amalgamated Bank and a pioneer of climate collaboration for big banks and corporates.
Given his historically central and successful role in driving industry collaboration on climate action, Ivan provides key insights into the current state of this evolving landscape, delves into the hot topic of divestment versus engagement, and discusses the merits and significance—or lack thereof—of the so-called ESG backlash. Really hope you enjoy this insightful episode.
Chad: Ivan, thank you for joining us today. We're honored to have you. I know many in the climate community think very highly of your long and successful career in climate advocacy. I want to start with your background in organizing.
You are a campaign manager and senior advisor to several multi-year national campaigns to defend existing environmental regulations and advocate for additional public sector climate action, could you tell us a little bit about your experiences here and your key lessons learned on both how to move public opinion and translate that into votes for specific pieces of legislation?
Ivan Frishberg: Thanks Chad. It is an honor to be here. I'm a huge fan of your work of Hannon Armstrong. I feel like you're a company on a mission which is very much like Amalgamated Bank and I really enjoyed the opportunity to work with members of your team at a business level, on a policy level.
It's just great to be here. It's funny. I have a lot of conversations with folks in the finance community and they talk about their long track record of working for different financial institutions. I can introduce myself by saying I have a long record of losing on climate before joining Amalgamated Bank. That's really my background.
My first climate campaign I worked on involved, actually it was a time when President Clinton had a White House summit on climate change and Al Gore is at the White House climbing onto a ladder to unfold the top of the parts per million chart, which was a precursor of the Inconvenient Truth.
I think in that moment, in particularly actually after an Inconvenient Truth, I had decided that really I wanted to focus my career and my time on climate change. I was doing that as a policy advocate and campaigner and had quickly then got caught up in Waxman Markey and the bills and the Senate to move federal Climate Policy and then the Clean Air Act, which produced the Clean Power Plan and its ultimate demise.
I've been a part of that work in the States for many years. You can't even put full words to how significant a moment this was this year when we passed the Inflation Reduction Act, because as I said, I've been losing on Climate for literally decades. This is the first time we had a significant groundbreaking victory and it's historic in size.
It is still half of what we need, but for me, it's gave me clarity around the two things that move legislation. One is win-win. When you have enough sides together with mutual interest to create a win-win opportunity and I think that was clearly the case here with the Inflation Reduction Act, where you have labor and jobs and climate and economic interests all coming together with a common approach.
The other is Congress acts in particular when there's a crisis. You think about the last financial crisis and what they did around Dodd-Frank or they're always better in a crisis. The problem with climate change is that when we really act in crisis at the level that we're going to see it in terms of climate impacts, it's going to be at the point where our actions are going to be pretty inadequate.
Win-win solutions are great, but they don't necessarily take into account the physics and the needs of a changing climate. As I say, this was a historic victory. It's half of what we need here in the US, but that's where we're caught between is acting in crisis or finding win-win solutions and hoping that it all cobbles together to get, particularly for the United States, the leadership that we need to help move the rest of the world at the pace that we need it.
Chad: Yes, absolutely. Eventually, after your time in climate advocacy, you found your way to Amalgamated Bank which bills itself as America's socially responsible bank. Tell us why you joined Amalgamated and a little bit about the bank's history and mission, which I think is really interesting.
Ivan: First, joining Amalgamated was a crazy idea. I had actually gotten to know some of the leadership of Amalgamated through my work with the Obama team at Organizing for Action. I think before I even really knew about the bank or its existence, even though I had received pay checks courtesy of Amalgamated Bank, I never saw a piece of paper, because it just went straight into my bank account.
I worked for a bunch of places that were banking with Amalgamated and never really knew about it. A friend of mine called up and said, I got a crazy idea. It sounded crazy enough to be interesting, which was come work at a bank, help us figure out sustainability, and do sustainability banking. It seemed like the right move at the right time, and we were coming to the end of the Obama Administration and all the progress that had been made there. It was a time when we were going to be focused on implementation. I had just been spending a bunch of time with the Obama campaign operation thinking about how to take all of that infrastructure and turn it towards climate. Now it was the opportunity to think about a bank and how it interacted with climate change, and as you're saying. Amalgamated really is a unique institution.
We're almost 100 years old. We were started by a labor union, immigrant workers who'd come to this country to fight for a better world for their families and they couldn't get access to banking. They needed access to banking to provide for their families, to support families back overseas, and so they created a bank. They could do that back then and out of that we had this 100-year institution that was warmed on a mission to help people create a better world for their families and their communities and that is still the driving force at the bank.
Even though we're a publicly traded bank, we're a public benefit corporation. That mission is built into our corporate charter, our clients, our staff, our board. Our investors are fully aligned around that mission and also see it as not just doing the right thing, but actually key to our success as a business.
Chad: Like an increasing number of retail investors and financial institutions, Amalgamated believes that your money should be able at least to align with your values. How do you attempt to realize this in practice? Could you talk about a few of your programs?
Ivan: The biggest impact that a bank has is in its balance sheet lending and investment. This is the money, the assets that we have and where we put that out the door. We quantify all of our assets in terms of their impact sectors. We have screens to make sure that we're doing things that we don't think what is our view of harmful or bad. We I think most importantly are focused on how we can have positive impact. Now almost two-thirds of our portfolio is what we consider some high impact. That includes climate solutions, that includes affordable housing, community and economic development, finance for our clients sectors like labor unions or political campaigns.
We've been able to build products and relationship services that really support our clients and that's the other place where we really see our impact. It is through our clients which I would include Hannon Armstrong in that context as well. We work with clean energy companies, with investment firms, with labor unions, with non-profit organizations, with incredible institutions and all sorts of different sectors that are making the world a better place. We work to be the bank that is right for them to help empower them. That's the other general area where we have impact.
Chad: You touched a little bit on this in your previous response, but as you know within the ESG community both on the investor side and the corporate side there is increasingly hot debate regarding divestment versus engagement. Very simply divestment side argues that not investing in certain asset classes. Most recently that's fossil fuels, but traditionally alcohol, tobacco, firearms, not investing in these asset classes is the right thing to do. It can raise the cost of capital to such firms thereby making those sectors ultimately less profitable.
Bolstered by some recent academic studies, the engagement side of this argument contends that divestment does little to alter a firm's cost of capital while engagement can then drive meaningful change at the corporate level. My understanding is that Amalgamated engages to an extent in both approaches. You have negative investment screens whereby you do not lend to certain industries at all, but you also have a very active engagement program as you were alluding to earlier whereby you engage not only with shareholders and stakeholders, but also corporates. You've achieved some significant successes in this regard. Tell us a little bit more about your philosophy on this – divestment versus engagement – and the outcomes you've achieved.
Ivan: Sure. You're right. We do both, and I think we've found impact in both. Let me take a step back, because I think the thing that brings all of this together is risk, and that's a pillar of what banking theory and policy and regulation is all founded around is risk management that we have to be good stewards for our depositor's money. We're thinking about risk. We are now a roughly $8 billion bank and the world is dominated by $1, $2, $3 trillion banks. We had to think about how we protect our business and our clients from systemic risks. That I think is where you have to begin these ESG or engagement/divestment conversations, which is really an understanding of systemic risk, because not every risk that you're going to see is about saying, okay, what's the financial revenue flow to a company going to be, and can we manage that over time, and does that make for a good loan? Some of these systemic risks can have a profound impact on the bottom lines of our business over time – climate change, racial economic inequality, even what's happening with our democracy. There is no doubt that capitalism cannot function without some rules of society and democracy being held together. When it comes down to divestment or engagement, there's some nuances to focus on that help take some of the hot air out of the balloon and think about how you respond in each instance.
The first is this position on risk. Are you a long-term investor? Are you thinking about managing a pension investment over time where you're going to be incredibly diversified and you're not looking at one company, but you're looking at how the whole thing works? You have an obligation from a risk perspective to be really focused on your ability to manage systemic risk, to avoid systemic risk, and to be able to deliver for pension holders in 10, 20, 30 years. If you're a lender, as I just described, that's a shorter window of risk, but a lot of investors are individuals. We produce products for them, but think about the customer who's a parent. That's shocking. In this country right now, gun violence is the leading cause of death for children. The number one children in this, the most developed prosperous economy in the world die is from gun violence.
Chad: I saw that the New York Times infographic today, that increasingly it's black and brown children as well that are the victims of that gun violence, and that's just terrible.
Ivan: Yes. If you're a parent and you're an investor who's to tell you that you have to include gun companies in your diversified holdings of stock? No, you absolutely get to divest. You have your own calculation of risk just as a pension asset manager or a lender, a big money center bank does. Everybody has their own view of risk. That's the first thing. You have to understand the entity that's making the investment, what's their view on risk.
Chad: In that case though, the risk associated with investing in gun manufacturers or distributors is that there'll be lawsuits or legislation that would ultimately impede their business model going forward. Is that specifically the risk that you're referring to?
Ivan: No, I think it's a moral hazard if you're that parent. You're just thinking, it's not a a dollars and cents balance sheet thing, it's a statement of position, and you're thinking about your risks and your return and what you want to do with your money. You get to make those decisions that is essentially the free market, those who are attacking ESG right now and forgot a lot of that. The second nuance is, and this is the risk you're getting at, is around, for example, fossil fuels. We know that for most uses in society, fossil fuels are on their way out. It's only a matter of timing. That question, the second question is timing. I can divest everything today, or I can start to move myself out of a position and I can anticipate risk and return in the market.
If you think about investment as a time-bound decision, that changes the flavor of that decision. The third thing is to think about technologies and not companies. This is where divestment often comes down and engagement is down at a company level, but really we should be thinking about technologies. If you're an energy company, the question is are you in coal or not or are you in oil and gas? Are you making a transition out of those? Maybe as an investor you want to be in certain types of technologies that maybe different companies start off in one place and they're transitioning out. We have to, I think, have the ability as lenders and investors to think about the use of funds and about technology and not just companies.
Hilary: Climate Positive is produced by Hannon Armstrong, a leading investor in climate solutions for over 30 years. To learn more about our climate positive journey, please visit HannonArmstrong.com.
Chad: Staying on that climate theme in an area where Amalgamated has really shown strong leadership. Last year you published your Net Zero climate targets, which were validated by the Science-Based Targets Initiative, or SBTi and you became the first US bank to do so. Tell us about the target itself. What is it the importance of the SBTi organization and why getting the banking sector in particular behind Net Zero and SBTi is so important?
Ivan: Sure. The first thing about target setting is that it's actually an incredibly important guide to managing all of that risk that we were just talking about. Once you set a science-based target, whether it's through SBTi or not, you're essentially giving yourself rules for the economy and for your business that allow you to engage in a managed transition. Climate change is what we're all trying to do, a managed transition where we avoid the worst impacts and manage the worst downsides.
Having science-based targets allows you to follow up particular path. We have a 2045 Net Zero target, but we didn't start with that number. We started with scenarios for each of our different asset classes. We started with an accounting of where our emissions were within our loan and investment portfolio and we started to look at the IEA targets or scenarios.
Going forward, we started to look at the different jurisdictions we were in and we created targets by asset class that kind of made sense to where we thought the economy needed to go, where it would go, what we could control and put that all together to a 2045 target. The reason that SBTi in a particular is important is that it's that third party validation.
I think one of the things that it's, we know is bad in a market is just sort a chaotic apples to oranges to cherries to blueberries type of information that you can't put together and rationalize. We don't expect every investor to get under the hood of our climate targets, but we do expect people to look for some level of assurance that our targets are real and meaningful, that they're aligned with science and that we're following the right roadmap. That's where SBTi really is that gold standard for doing that.
Chad: Now you've also personally played a role in co-founding and or building other international industrial partnerships or coalitions, including the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials or PCAF, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance or NBZA and the Glasgow Finance Alliance for Net-Zero or GFANZ. Generally, why are these organizations necessary to drive corporate climate action?
Ivan: Beyond just creating a bigger, richer alphabet soup.
Chad: Exactly.
Ivan: The beginning for me goes back to us being an $8 billion bank. Honestly, when we started this journey, we were at a three and a half billion dollar bank. To accomplish our goals with respect to climate, the whole financial community needs to move. To do that, there's a set of basic steps.
You have to be able to measure your carbon footprint or your finance emissions if you're in the finance sector. That comes through the partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials, PCAF, then you need to be able to set targets. That comes through SBTi or the Net-zero Banking Alliance, then you can do the management work, but you need those sort of systems to be able to do that management work.
When we started our journey and we're thinking about how do we measure what's in our portfolio, there really wasn't a commonly agreed to way to do that. We discovered through the Global Alliance for Banking on Values, some Dutch banks that had actually done this, it had been launched as a part of the Paris Climate Agreement.
They had this sort of accounting system and it was basically a way for every asset class to go through and understand what the emissions are that were attributable to the finance that you were doing. That gave you an absolute emissions number. It allowed you then to get it to an emissions intensity number. We said, ''Okay, we want to do this, but we can't just do it on our own. No, everybody else uses a different thing or nobody uses a thing at all.''
We really sought it to both do it, but make sure we were doing it in a collaborative way. We started with North America, built a team of values-based banks to produce the first North American standard and then at the same time launched the global PCAF standard. When we launched the intention, it was about three and a half trillion dollars of assets that were committed to this methodology. Now it's over $80 trillion and it covers credit unions to BlackRock.
Now this is the standard that's incorporated both into regulation and into voluntary standards across the board in the finance sector.
Chad: Definitely great successes with these organizations and setting standards and building industry coalitions. Are there any other actions either these specific organizations or governments can take to add more teeth? These are all voluntary standards and commitments really. Is there anything else that can be done either at the institutional level or the governmental policy level that would help add some teeth to these ambitious and generally well-intentioned commitments that member institutions are making as part of these pledges of organizations.
Ivan: All of these things, so PCAF or the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which I actually think is one of the most transformative things that is happening in the banking space right now. Everybody hates it. The banks, I think, hate it, the activists hate it, everybody just grumbles about it, but the reality is, setting aside China, you have most of the world's banking assets focused on a common goal with common rule sets. They can figure out how to implement it their own way, but we're all singing off the same song sheet, and we all play our different parts or different harmonies and melodies, whatever, but we're working out the same thing. That, I think, is incredibly powerful, especially because GFANZ is connected to the work that's happening in the asset ownership, asset management, insurance spaces.
For government to act, whether it's the SEC or other regulatory bodies, to take on things like TCFD and turning them into regulation, you need widespread industry adoption. You couldn't ever go walk in as a policymaker and say, "We're going to pass laws to do stress testing, scenario planning, measurement, target setting. We're going to by force bring order to this." You need, ultimately, a lot of that regulatory authority and structure around it, but you need these voluntary initiatives to really develop the space, show what's possible and can be implemented to get to that point. I think our work building these voluntary mechanisms is what's making regulatory action possible.
Chad: I definitely agree with that. Kudos to all of you for all your good work there. Turning to diversity, equity, and inclusion, obviously, a really big, important space that's developed over the last few years, and I know Amalgamated has made some recent big strides as it relates to DEI. Tell us about some of your recent successes and how, specifically, you've achieved these results.
Ivan: I think, first, it's an intentionality. You have to dedicate yourself to do it and, like everything else in business, you have to have a thoughtful, data-based approach to developing a plan, setting targets, and implementing and managing that. I would say, over the last several years, that's what we've been doing. Year over year, our results, in terms of diversity of our teams, it gets stronger and stronger. We are now a majority-minority organization across the board.
Our board is incredibly diverse. Our challenge, if you go back a couple of years ago, was really our senior management or middle management. That has changed dramatically. When we put our CSR report next year, you're going to see some really incredible improvement in that space. I think I'm very proud of what we've done. Where it comes from is, as I say, it's that process, but it's also from our leadership. Our board is very intentional in this. I think it's no surprise.
We have an amazing CEO and president, Priscilla Sims Brown. She is a black woman with Ethiopian roots and heritage, and she brings with her an insight and commitment to this that has helped shape the company. I think incredible credit to her, to our board, which is chaired by a woman. We're, I think, the only bank to have both a woman CEO and a woman chair of the board. That allows us to do a lot of things and make a lot of progress. We're excited to show that progress that we've made.
Chad: Excellent. Looking forward to your upcoming impact CSR report. I want to turn now to some recent attacks on ESG, or environmental, social, governance, more broadly. As ESG has become more popular among both investors, for instance, a Morningstar survey recently found that 85% of the 500 largest global asset owners consider ESG factors to be material to their investment policy decisions, and important to companies – we have a third of the world's largest companies by revenue that have committed to Net Zero by 2050.
As ESG has become more popular across the free market, attacks against it have been lobbed from all sides. From the center and the left, many argue that companies and investors are making claims about their climate and other ESG performance that are either not accurate, and/or they're setting Net Zero or other targets that just aren't achievable. From the right, particularly, here in the US, conservative climate denialist groups have driven successful efforts at the state level to limit the ability of some financial institutions to consider ESG, especially climate factors, in their decision-making processes. Then, seemingly in response, Vanguard, the second largest asset manager in the world, withdrew from the Net Zero Asset Manager's Initiative very recently which aims to encourage companies to reach Net Zero targets. In your view how substantive are these attacks on ESG and how impactful have they been so far? and how would you expect the impact to be going forward?
Ivan: The first thing is to acknowledge this is a really big topic and it's really complicated and easy to conflate different things. ESG is really the world of risk and it's about risk management and risk factors in investment making. That is different than impact and corporate social responsibility and those things intersect, but they're also very different. There's ESG that companies wanted rules and data that they want to work with to mitigate risk. There's also ESG that has turned into kind of a product set even though this has been only it's been around for just pretty recently in terms of the overall investing world, but it has become central for a lot of different complicated reasons. What happens in this current environment is you have kind of a natural body of people who are saying this ESG data is sort of, it's nice it's great for risk, but it's actually not changing the world.
That was part of what we wanted to do and that's actually part of the amalgamated heritage right? One of the first founders of sort of impact funds was somebody who worked at Amalgamated Bank and he had been chased out of the Treasury department by the McCarthy witch hunts and came to the bank and said okay, we're going to create some investment products that are aligned to the values that we want and those were impact funds. Now then they get called ESG funds, but there's a critique of all that saying we're not delivering. This would be to simplify the European critique which it leads to greenwashing and it's just about protecting investors. It's not really about impact and that creates some tension that is a healthy tension that we could all work to solve.
The problem that's really going on in the US political context is policy makers on behalf of a set of very narrow special interests who perceive themselves maybe accurately as losers in the world of impact and ESG are saying wait a second we're going to try to stop the rules of the market. We're going to try to stop information being used and you're going to force you to do the things that you don't want to do. That is principally about fossil fuels and if you use that Vanguard, their departure from the Net Zero Asset Managers Alliance is probably one of the clearest examples where they had voted to support pretty modest ESG initiatives on shareholder resolutions around managing climate risk. A complaint was filed with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to say Vanguard should lose its ability to invest in utility companies, because it's trying to manage their climate risk.
They operate under that license as an investor to be able to do that. It was a threat to their business and can you imagine if they'd been successful if all of a sudden State Street, BlackRock, Vanguard, Fidelity, all had to pull out of the utility sector as asset managers would've been devastating. That this was all done to protect fossil fuel interests and as we saw there was a hearing in Texas this week it's all pretty transparently become another form of climate denial which it's taking climate denial and moved it into a denial of capitalism.
Chad: Yes, and one thing I also want to clarify, a lot of these fossil fuel interests to speak are very wealthy – the owners and the managers of these companies. And actually a lot of the workers – some of whom may be unionized or are just working class folks – are actually hurt by these companies with lack of retirement benefits and without a transition process and for jobs going forward. I just want to add that as well.
Staying on this topic the International Sustainability Standards Board (or ISSB)which was established over the last year or two with the mandate of creating global standardized sustainability related financial reporting metrics. I wanted your thoughts on it.
Ivan : It's really important. This is the kind of harmonization of standards. Finance is global at this point and work investments are global. Working to a kind of comparable set of rules and expectations for investors is really important to the formation of capital and the management of risk. That is where their efforts to create a common baseline for sustainability disclosures is really, really important and I think it is the thing, if you think about the SEC rules, which are in-- I think what I would argue contribute, although not directly connected to ISSB, all it is basically putting carbon accounting, the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and TCFD together, two broadly accepted phenomenon in the corporate sector for disclosures and creating a set of rules there that are beneficial to investors.
ISSB just does the same without the same regulatory mechanisms, but it's just saying, yes, we're going to create a commonality of standards so that when everybody is doing this, if they're working again to the same set of rules, you have more comparable and useful outcomes.
Chad: Thank you, Ivan. We're almost done, but first we have the hot seat and we ask for your immediate quick thoughts to the following statements. The hardest decision I've ever made is--
Ivan: Maybe it was to join Amalgamated Bank. I confess coming in here, I didn't balance my checkbook. I didn't know that you could make a deposit through your phone or anything like this. Joining AM bank was a bold, bold, leap into this space and now I don't often believe it, but many of my colleagues who spent their whole career in banks say, oh, yes, you're a banker
Chad: Definitely a great decision and you've done a great job. One thing I've changed my mind on is--
Ivan: I feel almost like everything, everything is an evolution. I think there's a lot of policies that we advocate for and put into place that stand the test of time only for so long. I feel there's almost everything. If you don't treat it as living and breathing and as an evolution and the ability to change your mind, then you're going to end up on the rocks.
Chad: The first one I've learned the most from is--
Ivan: I don't know if this is the most, but I'll give it as a great example. Before I was focused on climate, I was a lobbyist in the higher education space. I worked on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. I was advocating of behalf of students and it's an incredibly complex space and students had a very, because we organized it, a pretty outsized role in deciding what the interest rate was on student loans or what the subsidy structure for the lending industry was going to be.
This is before we had direct lending and there was somebody who I consider a dear friend, Barmak Nassirian, who was an executive at one of the school associations lobbying for college presidents, but he was brilliant and committed to what made sense in policy and to not sugarcoating things or just doing what an association would want to do.
He was, I think, as a junior lobbyist, one of the true mentors of helping me understand like how to approach policymaking and how to do the right thing. We spent many, many evenings sitting around with a group of folks over bottles of wine and bowls of French fries learning how to do this better.
Chad: Wow, that's a great example. If I had to do it all over again, I would--
Ivan: I would've studied harder in school,
Chad: Yet you turned out all right I think.
Ivan: Don't tell my kids.
Chad: When I need to recharge, I--
Ivan: I go to the mountains. I love being outside. I particularly love being around mountains and--
Chad: Which ones?
Ivan: All of them. I've spent much time in the Rockies, I feel like, in the Southwest, but I also now spend a lot of time out in West Virginia and I just feel myself physically transforming somewhere between I66 and I81 and over the hills in the West Virginia. Everything starts to change.
Chad: The key ingredient to my productivity is--
Ivan: I'll let you know when I find it.
Chad: You're in all these organizations, you're a board member, you do a lot.
Ivan: I am productive. I'm not organized although I should be, but maybe the key ingredient is just taking on more than I can manage. Even if I'm dropping a few balls here and there, there's enough in the air that something's happening.
Chad: You can keep juggling. I want my kids to know--
Ivan: I think the most important thing with kids always is that they know you love them. Parenting is hard. You have to be a parent. You have to teach them. They know to things, they confront conflict, you have to create opportunities, all of that. It doesn't come without real tests, but at the core of it, if they know you love them, it's great.
Chad: The most insightful book or article I've read recently is--
Ivan: Not so recently, but The Uninhabitable Earth was, I think, in the climate space. For me, again, one of those moments where it's incredibly depressing book, but really thought provoking and it produces a certain amount of grief, which I think a lot of folks who spend their time on Climate are familiar with.
I think it helps you to the other side to find a way beyond grief, because I think we should be mortified by what's happening and what's going to happen, but it helps you in some way to get beyond that, to really focus on what we can do and just making the difference we can make every day.
Chad: In that vein, to me, Climate Positive means--
Ivan: Climate Positive means first of all, my brain is taken off into too many meetings of climate accounting. Think about that from an arcane perspective. First off, Climate Positive is an incredible podcast and encourage everybody to subscribe.
Chad: Good answer.
Ivan: Climate Positive has just got to be it's just doing the thing that you can do different.
Chad: Excellent. Well, this has been really great, Ivan. Thank you so much for joining us. We got into a lot of great topics and learned a lot myself. Appreciate your time and look forward to chatting again soon.
Ivan: Thank you. It was an absolute pleasure. Thank you for everything that Hannon Armstrong is doing. I think we need more of this. You are what climate positive is.
Chad: If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, please leave us a leave a rating and review on Apple and Spotify. This really helps us reach more listeners.
You can also let us know what you thought via Twitter @ClimatePosiPod or email us at climatepositive@hannonarmstrong.com.
I'm Chad Reed.
And this is Climate Positive.