ESG Often Led by Renewable Energy
Businesses often ask about including green power in ESG efforts. We suggest rephrasing the query such that it is about using renewable energy to reduce the environmental harms associated with fossil...
View ArticleFTC Regulates What You can Say about Your Solar Panels
A business that generates renewable energy, say, with solar panels, but sells the Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) for that renewable energy may not then claim it “uses” renewable energy. The...
View ArticleESG may be Fashionable in New York
Clothing is worn by almost everyone, almost all of the time. Across the globe, the $1.3 Trillion clothing industry employs more than 300 million people. Over the last 15 years, clothing production...
View ArticleESG Poll Results Drive Strategies for Business
The use of ESG to evaluate companies is the cause celebre in early 2022 and while still in an early phase, primitively and ill defined, it is reaching nearly all corners of the economy at a fever...
View ArticleESG is an Opportunity for Commercial Landlords
At first blush the California Climate Corporate Accountability Act requires only a small number of the nation’s biggest corporations generating more than $1 Billion in annual revenue to report their...
View ArticleThe UK Sets the Scene for Mandatory ESG Laws in the Western World
As we in the U.S. await action by the federal government on mandatory ESG laws, the United Kingdom has become the first European Union country to enact mandatory ESG disclosure laws. These new...
View ArticleThe ESG Benefit of Paying Employees to Work at the Polls
The “S” in ESG is among the most impactful sustainability factors despite being among the least measured. There are a myriad of Social factors in sustainability, but what they have in common is they...
View ArticleZero Waste in an Era of Net Zero Everything
Despite that the Zero Waste movement peaked in about 1998, in the modern context of Net Zero from Net Zero Energy to Net Zero Carbon, we are today with surprising frequency asked about a business being...
View ArticleUkraine is Now a Real ESG Issue
While there has been near universal condemnation of the war against Ukraine by Russia, and our empathy is unequivocally with the people of Ukraine, this invasion of a sovereign nation, something that...
View ArticleSEC Chair Tweets about Upcoming ESG Regulation
ESG law is emergent and fast evolving such that today, the best sources are blogs and Twitter, not bound statutes and printed law reviews. Last week U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary...
View ArticleModern Slavery a Key ESG Factor
Slavery exists today. The British government recently reported there are more enslaved people today than there have been at any time in history! And if you doubt that modern slavery is here and now, 20...
View ArticleSEC Climate Risk Rule is Transformative At a Cost
Last Monday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3 to 1 to issue a long awaited proposed new rule to mandate climate risk disclosures by public companies and other businesses in their...
View ArticleRooney Rule Revised Provides ESG Opportunity
Last Monday the NFL announced at the owners meeting that it had approved adjustments to the Rooney Rule, first adopted in 2003, “to enhance opportunities for people of color and women for nearly all...
View ArticleCalifornia Racial, Ethnic and LGBT Quotas for Company Boards Ruled...
Last Friday a California court ruled unconstitutional the state’s racial, ethnic, and LGBT quotas for corporate boards of directors. This now voided law had been an ideological lodestone for the “G”...
View ArticleMaryland Resets it Trajectory with Greenhouse Gas Reduction Law
With legislation that became law last week, without the Governor’s signature, Maryland has enacted the most rigorous state law in the country reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and otherwise...
View ArticleYou Should Comment on the SEC’s Transformative Proposed ESG Rule
We posted some weeks ago when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission issued a long awaited proposed new ESG rule to mandate climate risk disclosures by public companies and other businesses in...
View ArticleA Quick Science Refresher on Greenhouse Gas
With the federal government and state of Maryland each having announced within days of each other, the mandated disclosure of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, we have received, maybe not surprising,...
View ArticleSEC Extends Comment Period for Proposed Rules on ESG Related Disclosures
The Securities and Exchange Commission has extended the public comment period on the proposed rulemaking to enhance and standardize climate related disclosures until June 17, 2022. As a regulation that...
View ArticleSEC Charges Mining Company with Misleading Investors in its ESG Disclosures
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last month charged Vale S.A., a publicly traded Brazilian mining company and one of the world’s largest iron ore producers, with making false and misleading...
View ArticleGlossary of Greenhouse Gas Terms
With proposed federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions by the Securities and Exchange Commission requiring GHG disclosure and new state statutes, including a new Maryland law that requires not...
View Article
