Do my thing

I woke up today with the song Do My Thing by Estelle and Janelle Monáe bopping around in my head. It’s a more upbeat song than I expected to be humming on a day like today. But as I went through my morning routine, I realized how appropriate it is. Let me explain:

Sphere came into being during the first Trump presidency. As a result, resiliency is built into the fiber of its mission.

In 2020, the Trump administration passed new rules saying that climate friendly investing was not allowed in 401(k)s. But: the rule clarified that employers could add any kind of investment option, including a climate-friendly one, if their decision was based on financial data points.

Looking at history, we realized that excluding fossil fuel companies from investment portfolios has been a winning prospect over the time horizons that matter in retirement. We didn’t need permission to make climate-friendly investment choices. The financial data was on our side.

Since then, the Biden administration has reversed the Trump-era rules and made it clear that climate-friendly investing is allowed in 401(k)s. But the reality is, our mission has remained unchanged, despite that rule update.

In the years since we founded this company, excluding fossil fuels has continued to perform well over retirement-scale time horizons, even though oil prices had a short-term spike when Putin invaded Ukraine.

So as I think about what to do in our new political reality, the lyrics of Do My Thing feel especially appropriate. I’m gonna keep doing my thing. Climate-friendly investing in 401(k)s makes sense, regardless of who is president. And no president can stop us from getting climate-friendly options in every 401(k).

In some ways, it’s a good allegory for the climate movement at large. No president is ever going to be able to save us from climate change. Politicians respond to people. We need to demand a better future for ourselves, if we want to make that a reality. That was going to be true regardless of who won yesterday‘s election.

I saw something on a walk the other day that made me laugh:

This house had a Trump sign on its lawn and a cybertruck parked in its driveway. What a great encapsulation of the moment we find ourselves in. Solar, wind, and batteries are less expensive than fossil fuels for power generation. And electric cars are popular (thank you, Elon Musk, despite everything else.)

If this Trump-supporting person can feel good showing off his or her Trump/Vance yard sign while also having a flashy electric pickup truck, that tells us something. It tells us that clean energy is here to stay. Even for people who voted for Trump.

So we just need to keep doing our thing. Spreading the word about how avoiding fossil fuel investments can help us earn more for retirement. About how the single biggest action we can take to have a positive impact on climate change is to move our retirement savings out of fossil fuels. And about how we can amplify that impact by bringing climate-friendly options to the people within our own spheres of influence: our companies, our localities, and our states.

When we do that, we take away the fossil fuel industry’s power to influence our political leaders. We pressure the biggest companies in our economy to do better on climate change with our shareholder votes. Those two actions alone might be more powerful than anything the president of this country can do to help or prevent us from having a safe climate future.

So no matter how you feel waking up to the news of Trump’s win this morning, just keep doing your thing. That can make all the difference in the world.