A new investment tactic to reduce oil and gas production

New paper shows how cutting demand from fossil fuel customers can force change.

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Photo: Ali Eminov/flickr.

(Mark Hulbert, an author and longtime investment columnist, is the founder of the Hulbert Financial Digest; his Hulbert Ratings audits investment newsletter returns.)

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (Callaway Climate Insights) — To shrink demand for fossil fuels, climate-friendly investors should shift their focus away from trying to convince fossil fuel companies to cut their production, and instead campaign for large users of fossil fuel-using products to shift to other energy sources.

That is the provocative argument recently advanced by Jeffrey Gordon, a Columbia University law professor who is co-director of the university’s Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership, as well as co-director of the Richman Center for Business, Law and Public Policy. “A demand side strategy is more likely to hasten a net-zero transformation than a supply side strategy,” he writes in a paper recently posted on the Social Science Research Network entitled “Unbundling Climate Change Risk from ESG.”