Investment Bank Understands a Green Environment Means Business

While the folks over at Rapture Ready are praying for the end of the world and the Bush administration hides its own Pentagon reports warning that global climate change is a National Security Issue on PAR with terrorism, our own population sucks up air quibbling over imaginary affronts in the selection of Holiday greetings.

I say, 'smart' follows the money. The money is following the Pentagon:

"Last year the investment bank Goldman Sachs acquired a portfolio of mortgages in default that involved a remarkable piece of land in Tierra del Fuego, Chile. The wild, starkly beautiful island on the far tip of South America is a haven of biodiversity, home to old-growth beech forests and a unique network of peat bogs. So when the bank donated all 680,000 acres of the property -- an area about a third the size of Yellowstone -- to the Wildlife Conservation Society in trust to the people of Chile, it was a boon to ecological preservation.

It was also a source of perplexity in some quarters. While Goldman Sachs explained that it had simply acted on a 'rare opportunity for the firm to benefit global conservation,' many people found it hard to trust such a gesture of generosity from a financial institution.

But there is reason to think that skeptics can relax their vigilance on this one and maybe even entertain some hope. In November Goldman Sachs, a financial sector leader worth $60 billion, rolled out a new environmental policy that goes further, and is smarter, than any comparable policy in the corporate world."