Welcome back, Shit Givers.

What a week! Lordy. It’s spring, which means I just ordered $500 of plant-protein shakes and belatedly committed to twice-weekly leg days. Mercy.

⚡️Last week’s most popular Action Step was looking up your home’s fire and flood risk at Risk Factor.

👩‍💻 You can read this on the website

🎧 Or you can listen to it (Apple Podcasts, Spotify)

📺️ Like to watch? Check out our YouTube channel

📧 New here? Sign up to join 12,000+ other Shit Givers

TOGETHER WITH NOTION

Over 20 million people and hundreds of thousands of teams around the world use Notion to organize their work and get more done.

Notion is the all-in-one workspace that combines notes, docs, project management, and wikis — and makes them all customizable.

Over 20 million people and teams (like ours!) around the world use it to collaborate, stay informed, and get more done together. If every person and business can tailor software to their problems, the world will be better at solving its problems — which would be pretty pretty great.

Notion’s mission is to make that a ubiquitous reality.

What We Can Do

⚡️Submit your comment to keep Virginia in the very-successful — and very lucrative — RGGI

⚡️ Some folks need shelter. Some need water. Or food. The data says giving them agency — and straight cash — works better. Do that by donating to GiveDirectly.

⚡️ Health care is a universal human right. Setup a new monthly donation to the legendary Partners in Health to provide care first to those who need it most.

⚡️ You know what’s cool? A BILLION oysters. Plant them with the Billion Oyster Project and help clean up New York’s waters.

⚡️ There’s 1000 words about ESG investing below, so now’s a good time to find a bank that supports climate action AND your community with Bank for Good.

This isn’t complicated.

Alongside books, teenagers’ periods, and the statue of David, the notion of even considering “ESG” parameters in an investment fund has become one of 2023’s political footballs. Florida’s built a whole stupid political machine fighting it, the Senate passed an even stupider bill banning it, cueing up Green Joe’s first veto.

That’s not to say ESG is perfect.

In fact, it’s become pretty difficult to pin down exactly what the hell ESG is. That’s in part because ESG is a bunch of great ideas smashed together in one acronym. Drilling down, each those ideas — to more comprehensively and aggressively consider environmental, social, and governance standards, all vitally important and overdue — doesn’t really have a standardized, measurable anything. Which means formalizing them through ratings and the like is asking for trouble.

It’s problematic! Does a complete lack of standards but need to burnish reputations among retail investors set the stage for massive greenwashing? Of course!

Friends, many things can be true at once. Capitalism can make civilizations prosperous, drive innovation, and fund the arts. Capitalism also has a track record of being horrifically exploitative of ecosystems and people and self-regulation more or less does not work.

This is all to say: I am fully cognizant that a corporation’s traditional purpose is to create value for shareholders.

But that is exactly why considering even just the “E” in ESG isn’t putting “politics over profits”. It’s the opposite.

Since the beginning of time, two things have been true:

Subscribe to Shit Giver Membership to read the rest.