Health Trotter

October 05, 2021 at 06:55PM ESG funds—investment funds that are supposed to include companies that score the highest marks in environmental, social and governance factors—have become increasingly popular as more people look to put their money where their environmental concerns are. When BlackRock debuted a new ESG-aligned fund in April, investors couldn’t get enough. They poured $1.25 billion into the U.S. Carbon Transition Readiness ETF (stock ticker LCTU) on its first day. No ESG fund, or any type of exchange-traded fund (ETF) for that matter, had ever received that much investment so quickly . But this wasn’t entirely a feel good story about investors betting on a more environmentally-sound future. BlackRock’s ETF included the pipeline company Kinder Morgan and oil and gas companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] It wasn’t all that unusual for an ESG. The story of LCTU and the companies within it is representative of both the immense popul...

October 05, 2021 at 05:56AM A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up to get a new edition from Susanna every Saturday. Recently, researchers reported that they’d found the oldest human footprints in North America. These fossilized tracks were made more than 21,000 years ago in what is now the White Sands National Park in New Mexico. It’s hard to comprehend that span of years and how many generations of humanity have come and gone since then. These were the slighted impressions on the earth—trace markings made by bare human feet pressing into the pliant mud of ancient lake. Yet they survived the Ice Age and everything since to represent people who left hardly any indications that they existed. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] I think about the mountain of documentation we each have of our lives in comparison to those ancient footprints. We’re sure we’ll leave acres of personal history when we go—thousands of photos on dozen...