Al Gore has a new “inconvenient truth,” and it’s casting a shadow over his reputation as a green eco-warrior.
That after a new data from Bloomberg News showed Al Gore’s Generation’s Global Equity Fund is chock full of regular corporate polluters.
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Al Gore's Investment Portfolio Has Some Explaining to Do
Gore is the chair and co-founder of Generation Investment Management, a London-based money management firm that runs the Global Equity Fund, a flagship fund that promises to “deliver investment performance by identifying sustainable business models and high management quality.”
The Bloomberg report begs to differ, citing data that shows the fund holds $26 billion in two dozen companies that have boosted “planet-warming” greenhouse gas emissions between 2015 and 20121.
Some of the companies in the portfolio include well-known multinational giants, including Adidas (ADDDF) , Microsoft (MSFT), and Amazon (AMZN).
GIM, which has $40.4 billion in assets under management, is reputed to be a standout in the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing market.
The Bloomberg report throws shade on that sterling reputation.
“In its public updates, the firm says the companies held by that fund emit roughly 75% less greenhouse gas per dollar of revenue than those in the MSCI World Index, a basket of more than 1,500 companies that Generation uses as a benchmark to measure its financial performance,” the report stated.
Noting that the Generation Global Equity Fund held 42 companies at the end of 2022, the report cited 18 fund companies, accounting for 46% of GEF’s assets, that “showed emission increases from the first year of available data to the last.”
Even accounting for company revenue increases, which can inflate emissions figures, Bloomberg estimates “about a sixth” of GEF’s holdings are in businesses that have steadily generated a higher rate of emissions between 2015 and 2021.
The report comes at a time when ESG funds, which account for $2.2 trillion in global investable assets, are increasingly under the spotlight.
In late 2022, Bloomberg released a separate study showing 65% of Wall Street executives surveyed expected ESG funds to “underperform” the broader market.
