.: Sustainability: the stock market & cities :.

I’ve found a couple of interesting articles on sustainability:  the first regarding how cities are proving to be the leaders where sustainability is considered a forefront issue, pension funds (S&P is even creating indexes related to sustainability these days) and an American Prospect article on sustainable cities which was passed on to me by a Cibolo council member.

Profiles in Municipal Sustainability: An Interview with Dean Kubani

City sustainability initiatives are now the norm, rather than the exception. In the past year alone, some of the nation’s largest cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Washington DC, have launched sustainability initiatives or announced sustainability as a goal, joining noteworthy sustainability leaders such as Chicago, Austin, Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. PBS recently aired a series called Edens Lost and Found, featuring sustainability efforts in four cities. This movement among city governments is gaining broader attention for its ambition, as noted last month by Neil Peirce in the American Prospect.

pension fund managers to shun ‘short-termism’

Generation Investment Management is a joint effort between Gore and David Blood, former chief executive of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. It describes itself as a “sustainable investment” firm and its strategy is based on the premise that sustainable development will be one of the main drivers of economic and industrial change in the future.

[Interestingly enough, Goldman Sachs is behind the buyout of North Texas based TXU which was recently announced in the news.  They also pledged not to build any of the scheduled coal plants.] 

Sustainable Cities
Smart growth is newly fashionable. But what will it take to turn fashion into national policy?  

A “green revolution” is burgeoning in America’s cities and towns.

And it’s a surprise. Six years ago, as we exited an economically exuberant but perilously polluting 20th century, the idea would have seemed chimerical. True, by the 1990s we’d begun to talk about community and global sustainability; President Clinton even appointed a White House council on the topic. But the conversation proved to be a tad ahead of its time. It exhibited little of the intensity with which the green ideal is today being talked up, and in some places, truly implemented.

A set of mix-and-match developments explain the change. Foremost and scariest among them is the mounting scientific evidence of fast-advancing, potentially cataclysmic global climate change. Then there is the growing realization of oil’s short-term future in the dangerous world that September 11 dramatized. Among the results are heightened interest in hybrid cars and renewed focus on wind farms, solar energy, biofuels, and other renewables; a burgeoning “smart-growth” movement in our states and regions; worry on the health front about sedentary lifestyles, obesity, loss of natural connections; green roofs and strong revival of urban parks; and breakthroughs to pinpoint waste and pollution in our great infrastructure systems, enabled by more sophisticated geographic information system (GIS) technology.

tag: Gore, goldman sachs, TXU, sustainability, cities, city, climate change, green, global warming, policy, stock, investments