Today’s guest is Alicia Seiger, a lecturer at Stanford Law School who leads sustainability and energy finance initiatives at Stanford Law, Graduate School of Business and the Precourt Institute for Energy. Alicia serves as Managing Director for both the Stanford Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance and the Sustainable Finance Initiative. Her work focuses on business and financial innovations to accelerate the transition to a decarbonized and climate resilient global economy.

In 2018, Alicia was appointed by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli to serve on the first-ever Decarbonization Advisory Panel for the $209 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund. She also serves on the boards of Ceres and PRIME Coalition, and co-founded Stanford Professionals in Energy (SPIE). In 2014, she created Investing in a New Climate, an investor workshop series to help asset owners manage climate risk and capitalize on innovation opportunities.

A serial entrepreneur and pioneer of new business models, Alicia has been designing and executing climate and energy strategies for businesses, foundations, investors, and NGOs since 2004. She has served on the management teams of multiple startups, including at TerraPass, a pioneer of the US carbon offset market, and Flycast Communications, one of the world’s first web advertising networks.

In this episode we discuss:

• The type of work Alicia does at Stanford with the Stanford Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance and the Sustainable Finance Initiative
• How the financial world is thinking of climate change, including the disconnect between valuations and climate risk
• Where the US stacks up against the rest of the world in terms of sustainable investing
• Advice for people trying to figure out how to find their place in the climate fight
• What Alicia would do with a big pot of money, if she could put it to work to maximize its impact on deep decarbonization

I hope you enjoy the show!

You can find me on twitter @jjacobs22 or @mcjpod and email at [email protected], where I encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.

Edit notes from Alicia:

• I failed to mention “minimum standards”, which was the third headline of our report. To read more on this check out the NYCRF climate action plan (https://www.osc.state.ny.us/pension/climate-action-plan-2019.pdf) or our panel’s recommendations (https://www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/newer.PDF-NYCRF_DAP_FinalReport_Full.pdf.pdf).
• NYCRF did everything except adopt the headline. They didn’t actually publicly commit to 100% sustainable assets by 2030, but they started on the road towards that goal.

Links for topics discussed in this episode:

• Alicia Seiger’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aseiger
• Alicia Seiger’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/aaseiger
• Alicia Seiger’s Stanford Bio: https://law.stanford.edu/directory/alicia-seiger/
• Stanford Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance: https://law.stanford.edu/steyer-taylor-center-for-energy-policy-and-finance/
• Stanford Sustainable Finance Initiative, Precourt Institute for Energy: https://energy.stanford.edu/sustainable-finance-initiative
• Ceres: https://www.ceres.org/
• FSB, TCFD Website: https://www.fsb-tcfd.org/
• FSB, Mark Carney Video on TCMD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvLsLJ7kl3E
• Sarah Kearney: https://www.myclimatejourney.co/episodes/sarah-kearney
• Matthew Nordan: https://www.myclimatejourney.co/episodes/matthew-nordan
• Prime Coalition: https://primecoalition.org/
• Cyclotron Road: https://www.cyclotronroad.org/
• Tom Steyer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Steyer

Get connected with MCJ: 

• Jason Jacobs X / LinkedIn
• Cody Simms X / LinkedIn
• MCJ Podcast / Collective / YouTube

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