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2 weeks ago | 
kwbu.org | Amy Scott |Sophia Paliza-Carre
This story originally aired on “Marketplace” on June 12. Gwendolyn Comeaux stood at the end of her driveway in Houston, Texas, wearing a black World Wrestling Entertainment T-shirt and matching shoes — she’s a fan. But on this day she was watching a different kind of spectacle: the gut renovation of her little beige house. “They’re putting up a roof,” she said.
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2 weeks ago | 
marketplace.org | Amy Scott |Sophia Paliza-Carre
Gwendolyn Comeaux stood at the end of her driveway in Houston, Texas, wearing a black World Wrestling Entertainment T-shirt and matching shoes — she’s a fan. But on this day she was watching a different kind of spectacle: the gut renovation of her little beige house. “They’re putting up a roof,” she said.
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2 weeks ago | 
marketplace.org | Amy Scott |Sophia Paliza-Carre
Doris Brown used to park her car in the garage attached to her small, cream-colored house in northeast Houston, Texas, but these days there’s no room. The place is chock full of emergency supplies, neatly organized and labeled on shelves, from medical supplies and solar batteries, to sleeping bags and boxes of ready-to-eat meals. “And the food is pretty good, because we tested it,” Brown said, laughing. “Especially the dessert back there.”There’s even an inflatable kayak, in case of flooding.
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1 month ago | 
marketplace.org | Amy Scott |Sophia Paliza-Carre
One of the most powerful tools in the fight against climate change is the money sitting in investment portfolios. The trillions of dollars of investor capital in these portfolios could fund climate solutions or keep fueling the crisis. But it’s not just companies that can have an impact — individual investors can create change, too. More than half of U.S. households have a dedicated retirement account, like a 401(k) or IRA, and those accounts hold a lot of invisible power.
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2 months ago | 
marketplace.org | Amy Scott |Caitlin Esch |Hayley Hershman |Sophia Paliza-Carre
Can we invest our way out of the climate crisis? That’s the question we started this series with, and in this episode, we try to answer that question. So far, we’ve been talking about the trillions of dollars of investor capital that could fund climate solutions or keep fueling the crisis. But what about our own money? What can we as individuals do to protect our savings from climate risk and not contribute to the problem?
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2 months ago | 
marketplace.org | Amy Scott |Caitlin Esch |Hayley Hershman |Sophia Paliza-Carre
Over the past few years, ESG investing has moved from a mainstream strategy promoted by the biggest asset managers in the world to a polarizing topic. Financial firms have scrubbed the acronym from their websites, dropped out of net-zero initiatives, and stopped advertising their climate efforts. Some have proclaimed ESG dead and buried. But if so, who killed it and why? The pushback to ESG gained steam in 2021, when Texas passed Senate Bill 13, an anti-ESG law.
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2 months ago | 
marketplace.org | Amy Scott |Caitlin Esch |Hayley Hershman |Sophia Paliza-Carre
Can capitalism save us from the climate crisis? In 2020 it seemed like the answer was “possibly.” That year, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink shook up the investment world in his annual letter to companies, in which he made climate change a major focus.
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2 months ago | 
marketplace.org | Amy Scott |Caitlin Esch |Hayley Hershman |Sophia Paliza-Carre
In 2020, an investment strategy was all the rage on Wall Street: ESG, or environmental, social and governance investing. It’s a wonky term with a simple premise: Companies that manage the risks and opportunities posed by societal issues like climate change will perform better, especially in the long term. For a moment, it seemed Wall Street could be part of the solution to the climate crisis, driving companies to decarbonize — if not to save the planet, to protect their own bottom lines.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
marketplace.org | Kai Ryssdal |Sophia Paliza-Carre
For the last 25 years, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has been mapping the coastline from the U.S.-Mexico border to Oceanside, California, as a way of measuring the impact of climate change and sea-level rise. This research is part of how Scripps provides coastal-flooding warnings for a Navy base right on the San Diego waterfront — the Naval Amphibious Base Coronado.
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
marketplace.org | Kai Ryssdal |Sophia Paliza-Carre
The Department of Defense is an enormous consumer of energy, using 73 million barrels of fuel annually. Airplane fuel is a huge part of that; it accounts for half the carbon footprint of the entire DoD. Yet the Department is also investing in some climate-friendly tech in the private sector. Through the Defense Innovation Unit — a kind of Silicon Valley accelerator for commercial technology — the Air Force has a $131 million contract with electric aircraft company Joby Aviation.
