AS CORPORATE speeches go, it was eventful. Last week,
One week and a media storm later,
Kirk's crime was to question a string of sustainability shibboleths, and to do so in language more colourful than is usually heard at a corporate conference, let alone one focused on sustainability.
Delivering his speech in an exasperated tone, Kirk noted that throughout his career in finance "there was always some nut job telling me about the end of the world." Climate change, in his telling, is simply the most recent suggested cause.
To understand Kirk, it should be noted that his dissent was limited in its scope. He did not question the science of climate change. Nor did he argue against a transition from dirty to clean fuel - in fact, he clearly stated that he supports a "just transition".
Instead, Kirk argued that pessimism about the financial impact of climate change is misguided, and that focusing excessively on the issue draws attention away from more pressing, immediate ones, like rising inflation, squeezed growth and falling equity prices.
One can reasonably disagree with Kirk's opinion and many have. By suspending him, however, Kirk's employer disagreed with something different: his right to have one.
That is dangerous because dissenters are important to a business and to society itself, not just because they offer up new ideas, but also because they force us to reconsider our own.
In a seminal study on the subject,
The sociologist
The world of responsible investing, often referred to by the acronym ESG (environmental, social, governance), could use a similar dose of challenge.
Money is flooding into the sector.
Bloomberg estimates that one third of all assets under management, some
The sector's intellectual underpinning, however, is shaky. Greenwashing is so rife that the US securities regulator, the
Dissenters like these are the exception, not the rule, however. The rhetoric of responsible investing has become a consensus, albeit an ill-defined one. Money ploughs into funds that wrap themselves in a comforting acronym with little transparency about what they are investing in and why they are doing so.
Dissenters force us to think more deeply, asking the difficult questions that consensus encourages us not to ask. As Kirk has discovered, the dissenter is rarely a comfortable position to assume. In
You don't have to agree with Kirk to appreciate him presenting an argument against the flow of the mainstream consensus. Dissenters like him will force everyone to consider more deeply their own points of view.
For that reason,
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(c) 2022 City A.M., source