01. A Starters Guide to ESG, Energy and Climate - Lesson 1.01: Intro to ESG
Welcome to A Starters Guide to ESG, Energy and Climate. My name is Dr. Ellen R. Wald, Ph.D., and I'm going to be teaching this course. I actually am a historian by training, so we are going to be covering a little bit of the history of ESG and socially responsible investing in this course. I actually studied Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, and then I got my Ph.D. at Boston University, where I studied American and British oil companies in the Middle East in the 1940s and 1950s. And after that, I taught a variety of different courses, international relations, Middle East history before deciding to go into energy consulting. I have written a book called Saudi Inc., which is a history of the Saudi oil industry, but also Saudi Arabia and really looking at the history of Saudi Arabia through the eyes of Aramco. And that book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, anywhere that you buy books. And I am the president of a consulting firm, Transversal Consulting, where we do a variety of different projects and consulting. It's really a boutique consulting firm. We do issues in geopolitics and energy and policy for all sorts of different energy-related concerns. Oil companies, oil services companies, management consulting, a variety of issues. And you can find our website on the slides below. And I'm also a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute as well as a senior nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Global Energy Center. Welcome to A Starters Guide to ESG, Energy and Climate. Today, we're going to be looking at what is ESG? This is Chapter 1. And why is it important to the energy industry? And ESG is a really big buzzword today. But unlike some of the buzzwords in the past, it seems to have a lot of staying power and will be important both in terms of energy and also in terms of finance. So we're going to look at a variety of these issues and hopefully gain a better understanding of both what ESG is, what it is not, how it can apply in both the energy sphere and also how it applies in the finance sphere and what that means for energy companies and people who work there.