A field journal for capital that thinks in decades — six features on what climate-aligned investing learned the hard way, this year.
This is the fourteenth issue. We started Emerald Edge because the trade press could not seem to decide whether climate-aligned capital was a movement, a marketing exercise, or a memo from compliance. Three years on, the answer is: all three, on different days, depending on what's been priced in.
Issue 14 reads as a long second draft. Six features ask harder versions of the questions we asked in 2023. The data essay revisits five-year returns in transition equities and finds them, embarrassingly, durable. The photo essay walks the Snowy hydro tunnels in a week the rest of the news cycle ignored. The interview is forty-five honest minutes with the chair of an Australian super fund who has stopped pretending divestment is the same thing as decarbonisation.
Read it slowly. The pagination is a feature, not a bug.
A four-page feature. Use the pager to turn — the page transition uses the View Transitions API where supported, and a falls-back skew on browsers that don't.
A simple chart, drawn straight from MSCI and Bloomberg data. The shaded band is the spread between the two indices — the part that disappeared, then quietly came back.
For all the noise of 2023, the five-year compounded total return on transition-aligned equities is now within 60 basis points of the broad benchmark.
What changed isn't the climate; it's how the market priced the duration of the transition. Carbon pricing in three more jurisdictions, a rewriting of EU disclosure rules that even the IFRS adopted, and a quiet capitulation by US private credit toward greener exposure tilted the curve back.
This isn't a vindication. It's an audit. Read off the chart: the worst single year was 2023, when transition equities trailed by 8.4%. The best single year was 2025, when they led by 9.1%. The mean reverts faster than commentators want.
R. Iijima spent four days underground at the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project. These are six of the 142 plates we held back from the print run.
Mira Wenz interviews Pia Hartwell, chair of Aurora Super, after the fund's first full year of climate-aligned voting.
Three years ago we used "ESG" in every member letter. We have stopped. Not because we changed our mind, but because the term started doing the opposite of what we needed it to do — it became something to win an argument with, and we lost interest in arguing.
Selling a coal-fired generator to a private credit fund that doesn't have to disclose anything is not decarbonisation. It is a paperwork exercise. We hold, we vote, we sometimes lose, and we publish the votes. That has been more uncomfortable, and more useful, than the press releases we used to write.
The market still acts as if there are two portfolios — a green one with bad returns, a brown one with good returns — and we should pick one. The five-year data flatly disagrees. Members care about returns and they care about the planet they retire onto. We owe them both. The split was always a story.
Three things, in order: physical-risk pricing in property, a credible carbon market that survives a bad year, and at least two LNG majors that stop describing themselves as transition companies. We will know we have made it when those become boring.
A coalition of small-holders, a state forester, and one stubborn microfinance branch are running the largest privately-funded mangrove replant in South Asia. They expect to finish in 2031. They will not.
Rice growers north of Cần Thơ have lost a half-season to salt intrusion. Two of three insurance products that paid out last year are not renewing. The third is an unlikely Singaporean re-insurer.
For the third year, environmental flows held in NSW. Water trades between irrigators and the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder cleared at premiums no one priced in 2018.
Four issues a year, by mail, printed on FSC paper at a press in Botany. Subscribers also get the unabridged digital edition with our raw data downloads.