Burning Oil in the Gulf

The financial crisis that was precipitated in 2007 by structured finance (credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations et al.) parallels the Deepwater Horizon spill in important ways. And indeed, the very first credit default swap was engineered to offset Exxon’s exposure to remediation, fines and legal costs resulting from the Valdez spill.

Experts and regulators from both industries acknowledge the lack of proven methodologies both for assessing the risks of derivatives and the risks of deepwater and ultra-deep water drilling platforms.

Both are examples of advanced engineering methods applied in advance of thorough testing and risk assessment.  The practitioners, policymakers, and stakeholders involved with deploying these systems either ignored or failed to understand the risk and potential economic impacts of these technologies on the world in which we live. As a consequence, their customers, constituents and the natural world have suffered greatly.

Both disasters are examples of the lax enforcement of existing regulations and the failure or unwillingness of regulators to keep up with the astonishing systemic complexity that emerges from 21^st century technology, whether software or hardware. For example, Warren Buffet famously called CDO and CDS’s, or derivatives, “financial weapons of mass destruction” and sought recently to protect Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings of certain tranches of derivatives, from new regulations on how to value them, since they are indeed so hard to value. As we can see, like deep-water drilling, the practitioners  and owners of these sophisticated technical financial instruments find them incomprehensible as well.

Interestingly, the SEC’s indictment of Goldman Sachs over its derivatives strategy and the havoc it caused dominated headlines in the weeks preceding the tragedy at Deepwater Horizon.

Economy Cube - Can This Puzzle Be Solved?

Until the government enacts legislation without multiple loopholes, euphemistically referred to as compromises, the public will continue to suffer and subsidize the failures of  untested and unproven technologies when they fail. One hears frequently about how top tier investment banks and petrochemical conglomerates attract the best and brightest. At Fund Balance, we want to see this amazing pool of human capital utilized to developing a sustainable economic future.

Blue Fin Tuna

In addition the U.N. recently released new findings and recommendations for how humanity can decelerate the rapid depletion of the ocean’s biological capital.  Some key points:

• Blue Fin Tuna populations have dropped by 83% in the past 30 years.
• The annual 27 billion dollars in government subsidies to fishing, mostly in rich countries, is misguided since the entire value of fish caught is only 85 billion dollars.
• As a result, fishing fleet capacity is 50 to 60 percent higher than it should be.
• About 20 million workers will be displaced by ending these subsidies and thus retraining will be required.
• Fish populations can rebound quickly if no-fishing zones are expanded and their limits enforced; for example, by allowing tuna to live twice as long as they currently do, they are able on average to produce twice as many eggs.

We hope that the ongoing Gulf Coast disaster heralds a new time – one where:

• The false dichotomy between ecology and economy in the public mind is finally eliminated.
• Government and industry realize that an environment where pollution and unchecked exploitation are controlled and tightly regulated is an environment that supports healthy economic growth.
• People and governments vigorously address the fact that Climate Change is not the only impact of fossil fuel extraction and combustion, and that “market-based” strategies like cap and trade must be combined with other, precautionary and complementary policies.
• The public consciousness is imprinted permanently with the understanding that drawing down capital at a rate that exceeds one’s ability to replace it is economic and biological folly at best and suicide at worst, whether of banks or fisheries.

Watercress Darter

One of our focal points at Fund Balance is extraordinary local efforts to sustain the environment. Recently a story appeared in the Birmingham News covering a Pastor’s efforts in Powderly, Alabama to save the endangered Water Cress Darter (Etheostoma nuchale).  It chronicles a story of how faith and efforts to sustain ecosystems converge.

The Pastor, 90 year-old Bishop Heron Johnson of the Faith Apostolic Church, is quoted as saying “But he has reveled in the idea of saving God’s creatures. ..It has brought excitement to the church,” Johnson said. “You are a keeper of the animals, like Noah,” a Mr. Jackson told the Pastor on Sunday at the dedication for the Seven Springs Ecoscape Garden.

Another interesting element of the story is how the process of saving the fish also revived its habitat and has generated an eco-tourism and meditation park: a beautiful example of faith and sustainability converging at the micro-economic scale.

We encourage the Rainforests Project and the World Bank to work closely with the London Accord to move UK and International Treasuries and Central Banks, to adopt, issue and purchase climate, environment and socially responsible index-linked bonds.

The London Accord idea, as sketched out admirably in the Environmental Finance February Issue, is to issue sovereign bonds whose coupon rate is linked to climate and ESG policies. It’s pretty simple in practice: fail to meet your climate targets and your interest rate goes up. This type of market signal would allow investors in clean technologies, carbon offset projects and other climate mitigation and adapation businesses to hedge against government inaction and inspire governments, as the article suggests, to live up to their promises. In general, it helps to create a financial playing field tilted in favor of clean, green businesses, a prospect that would be cause for global celebration.

The April 2009 G20 communique was remarkable for its emphasis on climate, green jobs and a recovery powered by sustainable principles and business practice. Its concluding point was that: “We reaffirm our commitment to address the threat of irreversible climate change, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, and to reach agreement at the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.”

Because of their influence on the G20 agreement and implementation, the Bank for International Settlements and the Financial Stability Board need to get involved. We all benefit if they will just take the time to more intimately familiarize themselves with the work of the London Accord, the World Bank and the Rainforests Project on these types of issues.

Reading through the London Accord’s remarkable research, it has occurred to me that Central Banks might well have to be the first movers on this front. As the largest purchasers of government debt, it may be up to them to signal to governments that they would be interested in these types of securities.

Some are despondent after Copenhagen, concerned that the pace of change is insufficient to address looming challenges. Constructive engagement with the central banking community may well prove instrumental to persuading sovereign nations of the wisdom (costs) of failing to confront climate change, the business issue of the millenium according to those at Davos. We can’t wait for them, but neither can we afford to ignore them.

Does it have to be one set of regional American economic interests over another? The answer is no. For example, research performed at Dauphin Island Sea Lab off the coast of Alabama develops “resource management strategies which will foster the wise stewardship of diminishing natural resources”. There are ways that such principles are being applied in the Midwest along the Mississippi river. The book, “From the Corn Belt to the Gulf” (Nassauer, Santelmann, and Scavia, eds., Resources for the Future Press), details how farmers and industrial agricultural operations could reduce the amount of nitrogen flowing into the Gulf of Mexico by 40 percent. And it is increasingly clear that by planting specific types of grasses and engineering buffers, grain production in the great American Midwest does not have to contract in order for coastal economies to thrive.

Scientists and policy-makers in the Midwest have been at the forefront on this work. The Science Museum of Minnesota has produced an excellent presentation on the Deadzone in the Gulf of Mexico.  Fund Balance is working with policy-makers and bankers on our capital markets strategy for dealing with this issue in Washington, DC.

We work in concert with globally recognized thought leaders in order to help investors understand that as climate and regulatory risk converge, Socially Responsible Investing has expanded to include Environmental and Social (ES) risk/return analysis across the investment spectrum.  A deep understanding of ES risks and opportunities enables Fund Balance to enhance our client’s understanding of management quality and therefore performance.

We provide investment research and consulting for accredited investors and entrepreneurs in all asset classes from fixed income and public equities to hedge funds and seed ventures. Projects we are involved with include Project Sea Clear, the World Bank’s Green Bond program as well as innovative new ES ventures like FarmlandLP.com.

You can familiarize yourself with our mission, outlook and strategy by reading through the articles below.

This outcome underscores the need for policy makers and those charged with execution of policy to factor in the serious crisis that the world’s oceans and riverine systems face: our Blue Economy in peril.

Dead Zone Remote Sensing Imagery: Sannich Inlet off coast of Vancouver, British Columbia

A major issue for the world’ s coastal regions are the rise of Dead Zones. These vast expanses of ocean contain oxygen levels that are too low to support life outside of algal blooms. The Gulf of Mexico Dead

Zone is the size of New Jersey, or approximately 22, 608 square kilometers. The hypoxic state of these dead zones is caused by run-off from fertilizers used in industrial agriculture. Some recent informal polling at i-say.com conducted by Fund Balance gives some hope that the issue registers with the public. In addition, Fund Balance learned from several Iowan farm ope

rators about their efforts to reduce their run off: from  relocating feed lots farther away from rivers, to applying buffers made of specific nitrogen loving indigenous plants and compounds of gravel and sand. Many have realized economic gains from reducing nitrogen application to crops and benefited from increased production. Informative coverage on these Dead Zones can be found at Link TV.

Demarcation from living to dead zone off the coast of North Carolina

Such activity makes important steps forward. These actions require increased attention from agronomists, urban planners, policy makers and consumers. Just last week major media expanded its coverage of Dead Zones off the coasts of California, Oregon and Washington. Such man-made disasters unfold daily in the Chesapeake Bay as well as in within coastal regions across the globe.

Tanya Ott’s recent coverage on WBHM reporting on the challenges the city of Anniston, Alabama has faced is instructive. A large military base, Fort McLellan, closed there in 1995. The city was largely dependent on the revenue this installation created. Then came wide-spread land devaluation as a result of PCB contamination in the surrounding waterways. Next there was national publicity over local resistance to the incineration of deadly nerve gases left over from the military installation.

That was not the last chapter in the story. Ms. Ott notes how arts and humanities-based activities are leading the way toward the revitalization of downtown Anniston. This process also includes uncovering a formerly paved-over creek that runs through downtown.

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On the policy front, various campaign officials for local and federal offices insist that jobs matter more than the environment in the vox populi and voting booth.  A recent article in the Demopolis Times on concerns over coal ash disposal indicates that wastewater from coal fired plants might not just be a NIMBY (not in my backyard) issue. Rather it may well indicate that yet another zone in the Black Belt is starting to question the long-term cost/benefit analysis of energy consumption that produces toxic water:

“While the Tennessee Valley Authority’s cleanup has removed much of the ash from the river, the arsenic- and mercury-laced muck or its watery discharge has been moving by rail and truck through three states to at least six different sites. Some of it may end up as far away as Louisiana.

At every stop along the route, new environmental concerns pop up. The coal-ash muck is laden with heavy metals linked to cancer, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering declaring coal ash hazardous.

“I’m really concerned about my health,” said retiree James Gibbs, 53, who lives near a west-central Alabama landfill that is taking the ash. “I want to plant a garden. I’m concerned about it getting in the soil.” Gibbs said that since last summer there has been a “bad odor, like a natural gas odor.”

After the spill, the TVA started sending as many as 17,000 rail carloads of ash almost 350 miles south to the landfill in Uniontown, Ala. At least 160 rail shipments have gone out from the cleanup site, said TVA spokeswoman Barbara Martocci.

Since the EPA approved that plan, unusually heavy rain – including about 25 inches from November through February – has forced the landfill to deal with up to 100,000 gallons a day of tainted water.

The landfill operators first sent it to wastewater treatment plants – a common way that landfills deal with excess liquid – in two nearby Alabama cities, Marion and Demopolis…”

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Birmingham’s Green Building Focus, mentioned in last week’s blog for their Green Industrial Real Estate Project, has just announced their second Green Building Focus Conference and Expo to be held in Birmingham, Alabama this August 24-26. Such activity exemplifies economic opportunity emerging from ecologic planning.

This cartoon, from the front cover of the February 2010 issue of Funny Times, describes the Fund Balance position with respect to Climate Change. We acknowledge that there remains uncertainty in the scientific community about the extent to which anthropogenic CO2 emissions drive global temperature increases. We also regret the polarization of the discussion and the slide into judgmental invective that has accompanied the debate on both sides.

However, we cannot deny the observation that modern mankind does have adverse macroimpacts on the environment. The evidence on this subject is not open to question. From the Pacific Garbage Patch to acid rain to Chernobyl to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, human pollution has damaged Mother Earth in catastrophic ways. It is not difficult to understand global climate change as the emergent property of the various regional macro changes that are already well-known.

Therefore, as the cartoon suggests, the issue of CO2 and anthropogenic warming may well be an esoteric, even moot point. The precautionary principle will require most well-intentioned people to acknowledge the need to restrict global pollution, and not just CO2. Furthermore, the principles guiding the global environmental community, vulnerable as they may be to subversion, are good in and of themselves, and do not require scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming to warrant action.

It is regrettable that the international scientific community has chosen to focus on CO2 to the exclusion of all the other major impacts of modern techno-industrial civilization. The overemphasis on this one often innocuous molecule has allowed the proponents of global climate action to appear simplistic, propagandistic and even self-interested. Those who overly focus on a cap and trade system that would personally enrich themselves must be recruited to a more holistic regulatory and capital markets strategy that is based on holistic science and balanced capital markets incentivization. Such a system would include taxes, policies and accounting rules on an equal footing with capital markets strategies like cap and trade.

To this end, we call upon the international political, financial and scientific community to reframe the global climate change debate in more holistic terms. A successful regulatory regime will adequately account for the role of other global warming gases, other toxins and other adverse aspects of human ecological impact. Only a holistic approach – which also acknowledges the impact of solar cycles – will achieve a scientific consensus and produce the kind of international system which takes into account all externalities. All “externalities” must be put back on the balance sheet of global industry and investment,  such that capital and trade flows move naturally towards truly clean and green businesses.

Writing in The New York Times, Thomas Friedman quotes Senator Lindsay Graham: “I have been to enough college campuses to know if you are 30 or younger this climate issue is not a debate. It’s a value. These young people grew up with recycling and a sensitivity to the environment — and the world will be better off for it. They are not brainwashed. … From a Republican point of view, we should buy into it and embrace it and not belittle them.”

In addition, the Times reports on a natural gas power plant in Indiantown Florida integrating an array of solar panels within its infrastructure. To quote the Times “It is an experiment in whether conventional power generation can be married with renewable power in a way that lowers costs and spares the environment.” It’s an interesting report addressing the challenges involved in scaling clean renewable supply along with issues of storage and transmission.