Daily Archives: April 27, 2022

ESG Scores

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I had never heard of an ESG score in my life. An ESG score stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance score. These are ratings that measure a company’s exposure to environmental, social, and governance risks. These risks include worker safety, energy efficiency, and board independence and all of these have financial implications. ESG scores/ratings can influence investors and may sway them for or against a specific company. What is interesting is that recent studies are showing that a 10 percent increase in corporate disclosure is associated with a 1.3 to 2 percent increase in ESG score variation among major ratings providers, which all interpret and process disclosures differently. More importantly, they are showing that the more information a company discloses about its ESG practices, the more rating agencies disagree on how well that company is performing along these dimensions. By being transparent about their ESG scores, companies are actually disadvantaging themselves! This seems contradictory but that is why the latest research is shocking. These companies have a lot to lose with more than $30 trillion in sustainable investment capital on the line…Investors are dumping massive savings into companies they believe will help provide sustainable futures, so if their transparency is allowing the rating agencies to hurt the company, then the investors will hurt financially as well. If these investors pull out on their investments, many promising companies looking to change the world by preaching sustainability may go out of existence. This newest research raises questions on the effectiveness of the rating system and if the rating agencies need further regulation. I think most people would agree that all companies and corporations in the United States need some oversight to make sure they are not harming the environment, but maybe the rating agencies need additional oversight as well.

Electric Vehicles; a deeper look!

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The man that we all know, who just recently bought Twitter, Elon Musk, has paved a positive progression of sustainable growth with the success Tesla has found and its push for others to drive sustainable with electric vehicles. There is a lot more to electric vehicles than what many may assume. Yes, of course you are not using gas which we all know comes at a great expense and produces negative exhaust into our atmosphere but there are tons of trickle down effects too that EV cars are preventing. The carbon footprint of EV cars is much smaller than gas powered and this also applies to buses and other forms of transportation that are going electric. As we see in many charts and graphs, the largest carbon footprints come from transportation. With EV trucks, as well as cars, it is not just individual human transportation that can create a smaller carbon footprint. The transportation of goods in larger trucks is a huge beneficiary of promoting shrinkage of our carbon footprint. There are currently 14 states that have adapted California’s zero emission vehicle standards which is to make the pledge of gaining a certain percentage of residents to be driving EV in the following years. Today, less than 1% of cars on the road today are electric but with the following of these standards the goal is to reach 13% by 2035. By 2050, roughly 60% of new care sales are projected to be electric which is an unreal trend for shrinking our carbon footprint!

 

https://earthjustice.org/features/electric-vehicles-explainer?gclid=Cj0KCQjw06OTBhC_ARIsAAU1yOXrUfiOw95G56jAX46vwnxy1EZH959AqxzRxyVtKFjtaTtx0TlxPJYaAsllEALw_wcB

 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/10/climate/electric-vehicle-fleet-turnover.html

U.S. Health Care Affordability in 2020

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This article looks at health insurance coverage for adults in America during the first half of 2020. This article presents results from the Commonwealth Fund’s latest Biennial Health Insurance Survey, which assesses the extent and quality of coverage for U.S. working-age adults. The survey began in 2001 and has three measures to gauge the adequacy of insurance coverage. The first is whether or not people have insurance. The second is if they have insurance and whether they experienced a gap in coverage in the prior year. The third is whether high out-of-pocket costs and deductibles are causing them to be underinsured, despite having continuous coverage throughout the year.

The survey for this article began in January of 2020. A nationally representative sample of 4,272 adults ages 19 to 64 was interviewed about their health insurance coverage through June 5.

The article gives important highlights of the survey, explains who is underinsured, and gives a graph that shows the percentage change of people that are underinsured over ten years.

The article goes on to present many graphs that present the percentage of ethnic groups who are uninsured, the change over time of adults in employer plans that are underinsured, change over time of the percentage of adults with a share of private insurance with deductibles of $1,000 or more, the percentage of people with inadequate insurance coverage that have more problems paying medical bills, the percentage of medical debt that leaves people with lingering financial problems, the percentage of uninsured or underinsured adults who often avoid or delay getting needed health care and medications, the percentage of people with higher deductibles who report financial problems more frequently because of medical bills or delaying care because of cost, then finally the percentage of adults who look for but do not buy plans in the individual market or marketplaces cite because of affordability.

The article concludes by explaining how the study was conducted.

This article and information relate to Social Injustice by showing the high uninsured rates of ethnic groups. The uninsured rates of black and Latino people are much higher than the uninsured rate of white people.

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2020/aug/looming-crisis-health-coverage-2020-biennial

 

 

Giant Iceberg Floats by Newfoundland

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In 2017, a massive iceberg drifted past a town in Newfoundland at a whopping 15 stories above the water. This number is especially large when taking into consideration that the tip of the iceberg is only 10% of the entire mass of the iceberg. It’s not uncommon for icebergs to float by Canadian shores, but lately more and bigger icebergs have made their way south, calving off of Greenland. This is concerning, as a rise in temperatures (in part due to rising green house gas emissions) means that glaciers are shrinking. With glaciers melting and calving off more and more icebergs, the sea level is set to rise as well, meaning that icebergs won’t be floating past Canadian shores, they’ll be floating over them. Also concerning is the inconsistencies in how many icebergs calve annually, with 1,546 icebergs clogging shipping lanes in 2014 (one of the top 6 most severe cases in over 100 years), and only 687 icebergs 2 years later in 2016. GHG have real effects, and more needs to be done to reduce them.

 

https://www.livescience.com/58783-huge-icebergs-drift-by-canadian-village.html