Domino of Good
The unintended climate benefits of restoring something unrelated: fiduciary law
In 2013, the New York City launched a cost-saving energy-efficiency initiative across public housing developments, upgrading outdated fixtures to LEDs. But then came an unexpected bonus: in neighborhoods with new lighting, nighttime violent crime like assault and robbery fell (36% according to a later study) — not because of new policing or social justice programs, but from a brighter, cheaper bulb.
A positive externality is an unintended beneficial side effect of a strategy that was not accounted for in the original decision. NYC executed a mechanical upgrade: a system correction made for cost, not care. But as a “Domino of Good”, it also made the city safer. It was a bonus:
Unpriced, because no one paid for the added nighttime safety;
Unintended, because reduced crime wasn’t the goal;
Diffuse, because the benefit extended beyond decision-makers.
This same logic explains our work around fiduciary duty and climate. We argue that current fiduciary practice is in breach of the law. Correcting that breach activates a structural benefit with far-reaching impact: a new way to fund global crises like climate, using capital already designed to safeguard the future.
Just as swapping outdated streetlights reduced violent crime by accident, restoring fiduciary duty in public pension systems can produce an unintended public benefit.
The challenge is technical: enforce long-standing legal standards of loyalty, prudence, and impartiality — minimums meant to protect workers’ right to a dignified retirement.
The ancillary benefit is far broader: unlocking capital that’s structurally aligned with long-term public good for everyone, not just pensioners.
When fiduciary systems function as designed, they don’t just safeguard individual futures — they ripple outward, offering a new way to confront global risks like climate without waiting for idealism, consensus, or reform.
Fix one thing — and unlock benefits elsewhere.
When fiduciaries review their portfolios for financings that fail fiduciary minimums, they’ll have to find alternatives that pass fiduciary minimums. For example, green energy utilities and other climate-affirming enterprises that make minimum returns without accruing damage to their plan participants’ futures suddenly become viable fiduciary investments.
Hidden essentials
The emergence of a positive externality can depend on raw materials that weren’t considered part of the original plan, yet turn out to be essential to how the benefit unfolds.
In the NYC case, features like neighborhood density, open public spaces, and high baseline crime rates — none of which were factored into the lighting budget analysis — amplified the safety outcome. The lighting intervention unlocked something already present but latent: a system ready to benefit from a small correction.
The same is true for fiduciary duty. Defined-benefit pensions are not designed as climate tools. But they hold a set of potent, unappreciated levers — legal, financial, and structural — that, once activated, can trigger a system-wide ripple effect. Among those raw materials:
The sheer financial scale, and global reach, of public pension capital
The long time horizons that align naturally with climate risk, and
The legal obligation to protect younger plan participants who will live longest with today’s investment decisions.
None of these conditions were invented to fight the climate crisis. But like shadowed streets before brighter lighting, they set the stage for a collateral benefit once the system is corrected. The fix is narrow. The effect is not.
Negative externalities are born effortless
and become everyone’s burden.Positive externalities are born effortful
and become everyone’s benefit.
Go around, not through
Most climate activism takes a head-on approach: confront government, challenge industry, demand moral reckoning in the face of ecological collapse. But the status quo isn’t listening — at least not at the scale or urgency required. Big oil co-opted COP events. The Paris Accord is a decade old. Climate damage — a textbook negative externality — keeps piling up: unpriced and unstoppable.
Waiting for moral clarity from eight billion people is not a strategy. Neither is pleading with systems designed to resist change.
That’s why we pursue side-door strategies — targeted interventions that bypass gridlock through narrow laws, finite constituencies, and structural levers with disproportionate effect. We’re not chasing hope. We’re enforcing duty. And when that duty is honored, climate alignment follows — not as activism, but as aftermath.
Here’s why: Fiduciaries of defined-benefit pensions control tens of trillions globally — mission-bound capital designed for long-term obligation. But many are failing those they serve, especially younger participants whose retirement lives will unfold under today’s decisions. Fossil fuels, for example, remain entrenched in these portfolios, threatening both fund performance and climate stability through stranded assets and unpriced systemic risk. A new hire today may still be collecting benefits in 2100 — long after the damage is locked in. Fiduciaries don’t need to fix the world. They need only honor their duty to the people paying for their services. When retirement systems prioritize the futures of their youngest contributors — those born into climate crisis — they begin allocating capital as if the next century mattered.
Fiduciary duty — once treated as narrow — is increasingly recognized as a structural tool for trust and long-term stewardship. When enforced as written, it may be one of the most scalable, overlooked climate strategies on Earth. It’s design integrity. Like a lighting upgrade that makes streets safer, or a pension review that redirects capital away from harm, the initial act is modest, exact, and catalytic.
A Domino of Good doesn’t require faith in the whole chain. Just trust the first move — and the law that compels it.
Perhaps the drop in the crime figures is good, a positive externality, however, you give no thought to biodiversity, and the element of "dark skies". Since I was as born the human species has nearly quadrupled while virtually all other species have declined, I'm old enough to remember car windscreens splattered at night with the "Moth Snowstorm". Roadkill, especially at night has rocketed.
I agree that LED lighting is far superior, and more efficient than Edison's invention and is beneficial - to humans - but please do not forget not simply solid pollution, but "light pollution"!
“ But the status quo isn’t listening”.
Certainly, there is silence.
Some interpret that silence as not listening.
Another interpretation is that they are listening, but they still are not hearing a plan of action that makes sense to their common sense.
It’s human nature not to spend a lot of energy worrying about something we can’t do anything about.
But what if we imagine the unintended benefits for climate action of shifting pensions out of Private Equity 1.0, and the financial mathematics of profit extraction from ownership, and into a next generation Private Equity 2.0, using the new math of equity paybacks for stewardship of suitability, longevity and fairness?
Would that make sense, and elicit a reaction from people who have been listening, and finally like what they hear?
What if one side-effect of this new math was reducing extraction in the economy more broadly, much the way LED street lights reduced crime in NYC?
What if part of that reduction in extraction included a reduction in the extraction of energy from hydrocarbons, making habitats on earth safer by stopping climate change at its source?
How might the status quo respond if that was the call to action they heard?