 |
News focused exclusively on financing for
energy efficiency and renewable energy
|
|
 |
|
CEFF offers a monthly dose of real-world practical and strategic frames from experts and innovators. These Guest Editors correspond from all over the world to share stories, books, and policies that influenced their careers.
We're learning this month from Donovan Ervin, whose work in changemaking runs right up into his job description. Donovan graduated with a joint degree in business and environmental management from Yale in 2020 and promptly joined CBEY's Advisory Board. These days he helms climate-justice criteria and decisions for the Hive Fund for Gender and Climate Justice. His title of Climate Finance Officer hints that he thinks beyond energy - as all of us pricing and inking energy deals need to do, too.
This selection shows what Donovan sees blinking when he focuses on energy finance - and what we all ought to monitor in our dashboards.
| |
|
|
Donovan Ervin
(M.B.A. '20, M.E.M. '20)Job:
Climate Finance Officer
Hive Fund for Climate and Gender Justice
What That Means I Do:
I steer the applications we receive that involve redefining financial success around inclusion, opportunity for traditionally marginalized groups in new domains of clean energy and resilience, and a just transition that gets society off carbon fuels without aggravating air quality or extractive economies.
Where We Can Collaborate:
Philanthropy flows benefit to society when it fosters projects and ideas. If you're working on quickening markets that invest in clean local production with more democratic shares of power and ownership, then you're working with us to redefine wealth. We should talk.
| |
|
What Strengthened Me On This Journey
| |
|
Midway through graduate school, as I steered from the ecological models to the financial ones, I encountered this Medium essay by Deepa Iyer, a lawyer and writer. The essay organizes participants in a "social change ecosystem,' which when you think about it defines any nation or institution. The fact that it's a "mid-year check-in" confirms that our roles can change from job to job, or even hour to hour. Please read this, see what resonates with you and casts light on frozen moments with your teammates or customers, and tell CBEY what it prompts you to think. It all starts here. .
| |
|
A Policy Innovation You Should Know Inside and Out
| |
|
You'd be surprised how people committed to democracy and alert about climate need to think hard before they see the link from a thriving democracy to a stable climate. The Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act, which members of Congress are currently negotiating, works on bolstering voters' rights. (This article from E &E News spells out the climate context.) That franchise bears directly on how the truth, and thus the climate, fare in future lawmaking. Read the bill text here.
| |
|
What Sticks With Me From the Past Few Months
| |
|
A Fight to Keep Young Lungs From Harm's Way, Resolved Justly Thanks to Planning
The stuff we work on at Hive Fund grows so complicated when you dig into where and how to allocate capital, but the principles we uphold can come across in a few words. This Associated Press story shows how the community around a preschool in my home state of Texas stopped a drilling project through local organizing, which helped them amass power. Here's how they rose.
| |
|
The Ladder to Capital Growth Where Red Lines Once Landed Lights Up on Solar Power
When you start reading this story about equity-building through solar development in low-income communities, you'll see a prompt to create a free account. You should, because this story distillas a lot about our work to develop new measures of wealth - and because Impact Alpha, the source, delivers digestible and direct news about this kind of work every week. Start climbing here. .
| |
|
A Big-Picture Legislative Idea Whose Time Will Come Around (Even If It Starts Small)
My business, unlike some of your projects, never depended on a climate-aware outcome to negotiations over President Biden's Build Back Better project. Still, I yearn to see some of the forward-looking elements in that package become law. An example springs from this E&E News story, about how the House version of that package invested $29 billion for climate financing through small banks. (The story also quotes Neda Arabshahi, a future guest editor.) .
| |
| | Something Longer I Valued (And Would Love to Discuss)
| |
|
Getting Serious About Inequality Means Getting Serious About Carbon, Which Means...
My day-to-day work brings me less often into the intricacies of, oh, basis risk triggered by tariff investigations on bifacial as well as thin-film panels. It gets instead into the links from financing necessary climate projects to building necessary power and security for workers. A team led by Cornell University scholars produced this report on climate job possibilities in Texas, where I live, about a year ago. It serves as a jumping-off point for anyone building a company. Give it a read.
| |
| | Sources That Light My Way Every Week
| |
|
In addition to the lucid, relentless reporters at E&E News and the optimistic brisk writers at ImpactAlpha, the Southern storytellers and solidarity stalwarts at Scalawag magazine keep me attentive and ready on the regular. We'll need art and music, love and joy to steer the economic transition - please tell me how it goes as you get to know these three titles.
| |
| | The Book That Keeps Coming Back to Me (and Why)
| |
|
bell hooks’ All About Love is a sharp analysis about the role love can play in our personal, civic, and professional lives. (Plato also famously defined love, though perhaps in ways that offer dimmer guidance for our present moment.)
Her definition of a love ethic provides a helpful frame for how to approach relationships and work from a place of “care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect and knowledge." That must be at the heart of working for a more socially and ecologically harmonious world.
.
| |
|
|
|
