(TechCrunch) Google suffered a major defeat in its legal battle with Sonos in August, when a U.S. International Trade Commission judge ruled that Google infringed on five of Sonos’ audio technology patents. If the ruling is upheld, Google could pay hundreds of millions and face a ban on importing everything from Pixel smartphones to Nest…

(Top 1000 Funds) The costs of inaction on climate change are catastrophic. With the last five years the warmest on record, the impact on our planet’s ecosystems is accelerating. To hold back this tide, the next eight years are critical. The IPPC’s ‘report on 1.5C’ indicates that the world needs to cut annual global emissions in…

(Grist) In less than a week, world leaders will convene in Glasgow for the most important climate conference of the year, the United Nations’ COP26. One of the biggest questions of the conference is whether developed countries like the U.S. will finally cough up the rest of the money they promised to poorer nations a…

(Forbes) The Commonwealth Climate and Law Initiative (CCLI) has just published “Fiduciary Duties and Climate Change in the United States” by Sarah Barker, Cynthia Williams, and Alex Cooper. This is an extremely important report for reasons I will explain. The CCLI is a UK-based NGO which works with leading academic institutions (e.g., the University of…

(Financial Times) Sustainable investing may be gratifying for wealthy individuals and families, but it is far from simple. A lack of standards in the measurement and reporting of ESG (environmental, social and governance) products and funds can leave investors confused. And when it comes to impact investments, capturing the right data takes time, effort and,…

(Financial Times) Venture capital money is flooding back into clean tech companies a decade after the “mini green bubble” saw private financing for the sector dry up. But John Thornhill argues that the climate tech 2.0 investment boom has better promise than version 1.0. Between 2006 and 2011, VCs spent more than $25bn funding clean…

(Techcrunch) With the increase in attention on environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues over the past few years, it’s easy for companies to assume that we’ve reached the crest of the ESG wave. However, we are only at the early stages — an ESG tsunami is headed toward Silicon Valley. The increased attention on ESG…

(Protocol) Twitter is publicly sharing research findings today that show that the platform’s algorithms amplify tweets from right-wing politicians and content from right-leaning news outlets more than people and content from the political left. The research did not identify whether or not the algorithms that run Twitter’s Home feed are actually biased toward conservative political…

(Reuters) The U.S. Federal Reserve on Thursday banned individual stock purchases by top officials at the central bank and unveiled a broad set of other restrictions on their investing activities roughly six weeks after reports of active trading by some senior policymakers triggered an ethics uproar. The new rules will limit the types of financial…

(New York Times) Consumers and investors alike have gobbled up Beyond Meat’s burgers, sausage and chicken in recent years, thanks at least in part to the company’s message that its plant-based products are good for the environment. But some aren’t so sure. One investor tracking firm gives Beyond Meat a zero when it comes to…