If a tree falls in a forest when no one’s around, does it make a sound? If a company emits carbon dioxide but saves a forest, has it achieved climate neutrality?

While both companies and outside stakeholders agree that reducing and/or offsetting emissions is a worthy corporate objective, there is no consensus on how to define and achieve this goal.

A new study from Clean Air-Cool Planet and the UK’s Forum for the Future considers climate neutrality and makes detailed recommendations for how to achieve it. Getting to Zero: Defining Corporate Climate Neutrality defines carbon neutrality as a condition in which “a company, or one of its products or services, can have no net impact on climate.”

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Last week’s Ceres conference included a panel on water scarcity and risk. The term “peak water” was mentioned, framing water as a commodity facing a peak in availability (like oil) and a potentially tradable value, similar to carbon.

Panelists identified water scarcity as a human rights and community issue as much as an environmental issue. Chris Williams of the World Wildlife Fund reported that over 1 billion people globally have no access to safe drinking water.

Meanwhile, water demand and consumption has increased in the private sector for manufacturing, energy production, and agriculture. A significant amount of the water consumed is wasted through agricultural runoff, leaks, and weak or nonexistent conservation and efficiency programs.

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Alicia H. Munnell, the Peter F. Drucker Professor of Management Science at Boston College, has asked, “Should Public Plans Engage in Social Investing?” in a briefing paper published by the Center for Retirement Research of which she is Director.¹ Her answer:

But even assuming that divestment is an effective mechanism to stop genocide and reduce terror risk and that state legislatures and pension fund boards are the right place to make foreign policy, the issue remains whether pension funds are an appropriate vehicle for implementing that policy. The answer seems unquestionably “no”.²

Is Prof. Munnell saying something outrageous here? If divestment by public pensions could halt genocide and “reduce terror risk”, they still shouldn’t do it?

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“Antitrust” is a word that has long outlived its usefulness. We need a new word – or set of words – that captures society’s imperative to regulate economic and social relations with its corporate creations.

Who recalls why we’re against trusts? At least beyond a vague, queasy feeling about collusion, hidden power, price fixing and political corruption…

In the US, business trusts arose in the 1880’s and 90’s to hold controlling interests in corporations. At that time, state laws existed that restricted ownership of corporations to in-state residents, limited the corporation’s ability to do business across state lines, and imposed capitalization restrictions. Since the trusts were not incorporated, however, these restrictions did not apply to them.

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‘Precatory proposals’: this phrase from Purgatory has quickly entered the lexicon of those defending access to non-binding shareholder resolutions. Its users should wash their spell checkers out with soap.

‘Precatory proposals’, as I wrote a few weeks ago, is a phrase apparently invented by Leo E. Strine, Jr. Strine is a lecturer at Harvard Law School and a judge in Delaware, and he is no friend of non-binding resolutions. He’d like to see them abolished.

So, those who’ve adopted the phrase – which sounds very legal, very precise – should know what ‘precatory’ means and implies.

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