January 19, 2021
No one is better at digging holes than the oil and gas sector. Over the last century, the industry has perfected the art of extracting fossil fuels many miles below the surface.
Its future, however, may be in digging for heat. The prospects for geothermal energy extracted from the nuclear furnace at the Earth’s core are rising after decades in the doldrums. In 2021, oil and gas majors are poised to make the first major geothermal investments in more than 30 years, say industry experts and energy executives, as financial returns on fossil fuels tank.
Investors backed a record 98 companies generating geothermal energy last year, including many new startups, the most since private equity research firm PitchBook began keeping track about two decades ago. Globally, geothermal investments exceeded $675 million last year, six times more than the year prior.
January 12, 2021
Can companies that violate human rights be held accountable? The answer, historically, has often been no. Despite many accusations and even indictments, vanishingly few multi-national companies from mining to manufacturing have been convicted of violating human rights.
But companies operate with an implicit social license alongside their legal corporate charter. Flagrant human rights violations, even when courts aren’t around to enforce the punishment, can threaten their ability to do business by disrupting companies’ access to markets scaring away investors, suppliers, or customers or trashing their reputation.
In a recent working paper, Oxford University economist Nathan Lane and his co-authors at Monash University examined the use of this power in civil society, assessing how the killings of mining activists affected the financial fortunes of companies associated with those murders. They show it’s surprisingly potent.