I’ll be honest, over the past year, I’ve grown rather weary of the debate, largely because it always seems to focus exclusively on the performance of individual portfolios over relatively short time horizons, which strikes me as silly when we’re talking about long-term investing and long-term planetary health. It’s left me hunting for a different framework — ESG 2.0, if you will — in which to think about the issue. I wanted to get way below the portfolio management level and start talking to people in the trenches every day. Not picking companies or cleaning data sets, but building water systems, making supply chain decisions, and re-imagining actual business processes. After all, isn’t that the entire point of ESG investing? Enabling and encouraging the on-the-ground companies to “do the right thing” by the planet? What follows is an interview with Andrew Howell, director of investor influence at the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the only organizations that exists that is trying to actually have honest conversations among all the stakeholders in corporate environmental action, and Matt Sekol from Microsoft, an absolute frontrunner in almost every ESG data point you’d care to dig up, a massive spender on climate initiatives, and also a partner to countless businesses trying to rethink their own business processes. I hope you find it as hopeful and reality-based as I did.