Quick Read: Looking Forward to 2025, Politics Aside

In3’s role as an impact investor, venture catalyst, and ESG advisors, helping to create a more sustainable and resilient future, has never been more vital. “Sustainable investing identifies unmanaged risks and unlocks investment opportunities in order to safeguard and increase long-term portfolio value,” says Sustainable Investment Forum (SIF). Investors require transparency through clear reporting requirements, the ability to engage the companies they own on financially material issues, and certainty that policymakers will support robust climate action. That remains true regardless of the political landscape.

One of the best aspects of working in the private sector is our ability to largely ignore politics. We work with everybody, and although change is inevitable, relationships and the strong projects that get built because them, we see a bright future where more of the solutions that benefit everyone get implemented whether the prognosis is that we have little time to act, or that incentives that have helped accelerate US renewables will soon disappear. We have never relied on such incentives, precisely for that reason — strong projects stand on their own merits, where carbon credits, tax credits, and other tools usher in a more just and sustainable world. The playing field is already unlevel enough that, worst case, we don’t need governments to make it more so.

Good business always works, no matter what the political climate. We responded to the higher interest rates by eliminating interest expense — minority equity funding up to 100% of the project’s budget. If interest rates come back down, that will enable developers to leverage debt and lower the threshold for qualification while keeping incrementally more of their own equity.

Although based in the US, we’ve always had global reach, and prioritize developing and emerging markets in our investment strategy, a large part of social justice in that most of these countries had no part in creating the climate mess, but can be and often are part of the solution.

For example, housing is a bipartisan issue. Healthy food and food security . . . Living with decent quality of life — access to clean water, clean air … these all transcend political ideologies. Further, we need to work together without regard to political views to get things done, as we always have. We help create good jobs, meaningful work, and professional roles that withstand political polarization, delivering essential value. That never gets old.

Lastly, have you noticed that the natural world doesn’t actually need us? Even if our society makes a bigger mess of the climate (short-term thinking tends to perpetuate profit centers of the past rather than seeking to innovate new, more sustainable ones), although this would be heading in the wrong direction by most assessments, nature will prevail. Just as we witnessed during the Covid Pandemic, nature moved back into the places and spaces we humans had previously occupied. Overall energy consumption declined as people “sheltered in place,” and degraded lands were given a chance to bounce back.

Worst case, even if we neglect or ignore our overall role with repairing the environment and healing the toxic political environment in the near-term, causing greater risk down the road for subsequent generations, there has never before been such a uniting force as planetary health and sustainability, now much more prominent in decision making. Because no matter how you vote, we all live here.

This offers hope and prosperity while doing the right things. Something much more rewarding than living in fear about what the future may hold, such as whether or not we’ll survive the next climate-related natural disaster.