In Gala’s timeless classic Freed from Desire, a song I had the pleasure of enjoying just last week in Central Europe’s largest nightclub, Gala claims that “her love has got no money”.
This is the case for open-source models in a nutshell.
Free of commercial conflicts of interest, guided only by the true “mind and senses purified” academic or NGO, “freed from desire”.
In sustainability, open-source and public good are shibboleths, cleaving the true believers from the corrupted, idols to be worshipped at any cost.
What nonsense, honestly.
The most recent example: a blog published this summer by two academics suggested that climate risk providers’ financial conflicts of interest would drive “riskwashing”. It pointed to the academic modellers from the NGFS without financial interests and “meagre budgets if any at all” as a notable and laudable contrast.
First, that’s not what riskwashing means. Greenwashing is making something seem green when it isn’t. Riskwashing is dressing up a sustainability issue in the language of risk. Like that NGO report that claimed fossil fuel exposure was five times higher than banks’ exposure to the US subprime market. If anything, it’s risk tumble-drying…
Second, let’s have a quick look at our poor academics for a minute.
Wonder if the blog means the same modellers responsible for the Economic commitment of climate change paper and the most significant retraction since I told my first girlfriend I loved her and got a “thanks” in response?
Or perhaps the blog meant the academics that recently peer-reviewed a journal article and requested as part of the rewrite process that the authors use the outlier/ edge case as the central assumption. You know, to motivate action, “make the numbers bigger”.
Third, the tell is in the second part of the sentence. “Meagre budgets if any at all”.
Climate risk modelling is some of the most expensive analytics in the world. And one that many institutions are able to offer profitably. Surely, crowding in private capital that enhances the quality and investment in public interest analytics has some value.
And this is the key point, ultimately. Not everything that is in the public interest should be a public good. And not everything that is a public good is free from conflicts of interest.
Academics and NGOs face financial conflicts of interest, too. I should know. I am one. And I’ve seen philanthropies withdraw grant funding from my organisation when our research findings went against their beliefs or when we refused to endorse their interests. Gun to head, either you change your research finding or we pull the money.
I know very few people in this industry driven solely by money. And everyone in their career – for profit or non-profit – has to figure out how to fund their work. In this context, more often than not, it is personal integrity – not the logo on the pay cheque – that in my experience determines who is truth-seeking and who is profit or attention-seeking.
I am not arguing against public goods as a matter of principle. I have spent most of my career trying to build them. But that experience has also taught me how careful we need to be in building them.
I’ve built public goods that are now dead websites because ultimately the public funding dried out. Loads of good that did the public. Actually, even worse, we wasted public resources.
Deciding where to draw the line depends on the benefit of the public good, of course, but also on the cost of maintaining it, and the ability to mobilise the resources to cover that cost.
The easy oped to write is that not everything should be a public good – and commercial physical climate risk analytics is probably at the bottom of the totem pole on that list.
Negativity sells. You may have clicked on this op ed title because of it.
But I am not writing this just to vent. I am writing this because we actually need a public conversation in the industry about where we draw the line between the goods we think should be public and those that should be private, rather than blindly endorsing public goods or blindly suggesting commercial services have cracked the code.
In that spirit, I am grateful for the blog, even if I disagree with it.
So this op-ed should help stimulate this conversation. I’ll give my take.
It is in the public interest for research on climate science to be a public good. It is also in the public interest for commercial providers to translate that science into business implications for investors and businesses, and for some diversity to motivate excellence, innovation and debate.
It is in the public interest to socialise some of the costs of climate analysis in order to reduce the costs of said analysis (eg through public standards, public models), and by extension, increase the commercial budget available for action.
It is in the public interest for financial regulators and central banks to benefit from non-commercially interested research and science. It is not in the public interest to pay for commercial risk analytics (with some narrow and time-bound exceptions – eg in emerging markets in the context of resilience development).
It is in the public interest for there to be public benchmarks in the analytical value chain in order to put upward pressure on the quality and rigour of commercial risk analysis and management. And while I admit there is a public interest in company-level risk data, I don’t think that should be a philanthropically funded public good.
It’s New York Climate Week this week, so I’m making this my cocktail topic question – what do you think?
