Trillium seeks out leaders in carbon constrained economy
Matt Patsky runs Trillium and its biggest fund with an eye on delivering for investors, while also fostering a belief in his responsiblity to make the world a better place.
April 12, 2021 9 MINS
An interest in ESG emerged early for Matt Patsky, CEO of Trillium Asset Management, who at age 11 poured his first $500 from mowing lawns and shoveling driveways in New England into the Dreyfus Third Century Fund.
Patsky was intrigued by the fund’s holistic approach to what was considered a good investment. He learned about the fund through the
Wall Street Journal, which his father used to bring home after leaving his factory job, swinging by the lobby of his building to pick up a copy when he could, Patsky said.
More than 50 investment groups â representing $105 billion â are calling on Congress and the EPA to prohibit large-scale mining in the Bristol Bay area, which would impact the future of Pebble Mine, an open-pit gold and copper project proposed by Northern Dynasty Minerals.
The letter asks Congress to permanently protect the Bristol Bay watershed by deeming it a federal National Fisheries Area and noting its significance as the worldâs largest fishery of wild sockeye salmon.
The letter states that âAlaskaâs Bristol Bay supports the largest and most productive wild salmon fishery on Earth, supplying half of the worldâs commercial supply of wild sockeye salmon,â estimated at â$2.2 billion in annual revenue, 15,000 jobs, and sustaining Alaska Native communities that have relied on the salmon for millennia.â
DeSmog
May 14, 2020 @ 14:44
America’s largest bank is shunning calls from shareholders to disclose its full emissions, despite warnings from its own economists that “catastrophic” climate change could end up threatening human life “as we know it.”
JPMorgan Chase, which a coalition of U.S. environmental groups recently claimed is the world’s largest financer of fossil fuels, has instructed its shareholders to vote down a proposal for the bank to report the emissions of its lending activities at its upcoming annual general meeting (AGM) on May 19.
Now treasurers from eight U.S. states are joining a call for JPMorgan to elect an independent board chair who will guide the company’s financing to align with the Paris Agreement.
The signatories are concerned about the long-term social and environmental impacts of the Pebble mine, a massive open-pit gold and copper project in the Bristol Bay headwaters proposed by Canadian junior Northern Dynasty Minerals (NYSE: NAK).
On Tuesday, Northern Dynasty announced it had written to the recently confirmed Administrator of the EPA Michael Regan with a status update on the Pebble project and had urged the new Administrator to support a full and fair process for the project.
The investors said that while recognizing the importance of natural resource development to support economic growth, they are concerned waste from the proposed mine would threaten the world’s largest wild salmon fishery, located in the Bristol Bay area.
In a farewell statement to his colleagues, Bengio reportedly said it was a difficult decision.
“I learned so much with all of you, in terms of machine learning research of course, but also on how difficult yet important it is to organize a large team of researchers so as to promote long term ambitious research, exploration, rigor, diversity, and inclusion,” he wrote, according to
Bloomberg.
Gebru was fired in December following a dust-up with the company over a paper she co-authored that examined the risks of large language models, which range from environmental to discriminatory.
Her former co-lead on the ethical AI team, Mitchell, was fired in February after she used “a script to search her emails for evidence of discrimination against Gebru,” the Verge reports.