💬 Engine No. 1 on pushing for change. Christopher James, founder of the firm whose climate-focused activist campaign led to a strategy shake-up at Exxon, said he hopes the idea of investor engagement, as opposed to divestment, is gaining momentum.
"I think divestment early on was incredibly important," he said. "But I think that what's really going to be sustainable, what truly affects change, is engaging with companies.”
On recent reports about Exxon abandoning certain oil and gas projects, Mr. James said: “We don't know what's going on inside the boardroom. We read in The Wall Street Journal like everybody else.”
💬 Scaling climate tech. Jonah Goldman, managing director at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, said increasingly abundant capital for risky climate-tech ventures is helping the sector mature, even as the risk of a setback for investors remains. Breakthrough Energy, backed by Bill Gates, specializes in renewable-energy and energy-storage investments.
"These are super capital intensive projects, they have super-high technical risk, and they return over a very long time...those are not things that venture capital tends to be particularly good at doing," Mr. Goldman said. "At some point, I think some people might get spooked, but the scale capital is there."
💬 CSOs should stay focused. Some sustainability executives overstep their bounds by proposing too many ideas to their superiors, said Jeffrey Hogue, chief sustainability officer at Levi's. He said executives should be able to demonstrate with data that an initiative will have a business or reputational benefit.
“There's a lot of work to be done in this area across corporate strategies and it's really difficult to bring 20 to 30 different things to the table at one time,” Mr. Hogue said.
💬 Rewiring supply chains. Jason Blake, sustainability chief at PepsiCo Beverages North America, said looking for suppliers that can help deliver Pepsi's sustainability goals has forged new commercial relationships.
"Often supplier relationships can be very transactional in nature. I buy, you sell, we negotiate price one way or another," he said. But Pepsi's efforts to prioritize the resilience of its supply chain is also "an opportunity for us to elevate, you know, some key supplier relationships to be more strategic."
—Dylan Tokar, Kimberly Chin, Mark Maurer, Dieter Holger.
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