DealBook: Seeking Answers From Green Mountain Coffee

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Wealth Matters: Seeking Investments That Are Profitable and a Little Bit Green

SARAH KUPFERBERG’S youthful rebellion was slightly unconventional — she wanted to invest in green companies, not the big industrials her parents had preferred. But like most novice investors, she stumbled along the way, once putting money into a company that was trying to use buoys to turn ocean waves into electricity.

“When I started investing in companies on my own, I made a lot of bad choices,” Ms. Kupferberg, an ecologist who works on issues related to energy and power. “These were companies at the leading edge of technology. They weren’t great investments.”

Today, Ms. Kupferberg, 50, said she has taken a more pragmatic approach to investing. She is no longer looking for companies at the vanguard of the green movement. Instead, she’s interested in those that are making a profit while also acting in a way that takes into account sound environmental, social and governance practices.

A focus on these factors — known by the shorthand E.S.G. — is a distance from the pure green investments that had less to do with returns. She has invested in Starbucks (even though she prefers to drink Peet’s Coffee) because of its policies toward its employees, like health benefits for part-time workers.

Applying an E.S.G. screen in this instance is a way to look at how companies in similar sectors compare, said Matthew W. Patsky, chief executive of Trillium Asset Management. He drew a contrast between Starbucks and McDonald’s, which does not offer health care benefits for part-time workers. Ms. Kupferberg’s view of looking for the best-behaved companies in a sector is consistent with others who are using their investment dollars to try to push companies toward more socially responsible policies. Rebekah Helzel, a retired proprietary trader for an investment bank, for example, said her focus was on eliminating “carbon-based business models” from her investment portfolio. Yet she has invested in United Parcel Service, which, of course, moves packages around the world in planes and trucks.

“They have a lot of carbon in their business model but they have done remarkable things to reduce it,” Ms. Helzel said. She mentioned their use of new technologies to reduce their carbon footprint but also the company’s oft-cited mapping technology to allow drivers to make as many right-hand turns as possible on their routes.

And many of those who embrace green have distanced themselves from the view that to be environmentally conscious is to lack investment rigor.

“This doing good while doing well thing is getting to be a bit out of date,” said Garvin Jabusch, co-founder and chief investment officer at Shelton Green Alpha Fund. “We’re looking past mere tree-huggery.”

He said E.S.G. investors needed to focus on ways to generate electricity and recycle existing products that could save resources, make a profit and be widely used.

While most E.S.G. investors are not ready to give up on tree-hugging altogether, they are taking an approach that has come a long way from simply screening out certain companies — like oil and gas, military and tobacco. They are moving toward companies that are just as focused on being profitable businesses as operating in a way that is generally better all around.

But this approach lends itself to questions — at least it did for me.

First, let’s talk returns. Are they as good as a portfolio without an E.S.G. screen? The short answer is yes. But that does not mean the returns are always spectacular.

Joseph F. Keefe, president and chief executive of Pax World Management, a mutual fund company focused on E.S.G. investments, said there was no evidence that managers focused on companies committed to improving environmental, social and governance factors were at a disadvantage.

He said that the company’s Global Environmental Markets Fund has outperformed the MSCI World Index since the fund was started in March 2008. A newer fund that invests in exchange-traded funds with the same screen has also outperformed a broader index.

“Do we have funds that are underperforming?” Mr. Keefe asked. “We sure do. We’re in the stock-picking business.”

Advisers who have been taking E.S.G. factors into consideration for years bristle at the suggestion that their process is somehow less rigorous or still based on excluding certain sectors.

The Haggler: Seeking Vital Signs in a Lifetime Warranty

Nobody actually uses the words “blah, blah, blah,” by the way. That would be silly. But not as silly as asking the Haggler to intervene when a warranty has expired. That is very silly. If you, dear consumer, agree that your TV — or computer or dishwasher or whatever — is covered for three years, please do not get in touch four years after the purchase.

A product is either covered or not. And if it has a lifetime warranty, it most likely is covered. Unless, for some strange reason, it’s not.

Q. The waterproof lining on the inside of a backpack made by a company called Eagle Creek became sticky. The company offers lifetime warranties on workmanship and materials — the bag was bought in 1999, and used once or twice a year — so I e-mailed and asked for a solution or a replacement.

A customer service rep wrote back to say I was out of luck because “this stickiness is a result of the breakdown of the fabric over time.” My backpack, the rep explained, had reached the end of its life. Put another way, it had died, and a dead backpack is no longer eligible for the protections of a lifetime warranty.

Huh? When I protested, I was told that I could mail the backpack to the warranty department and hope for a different answer. I did, but that department gave me the same response.

Care to give this a shot?

MARGARET JAHRLING

Redmond, Wash.

A. The Haggler has never thought about a lifetime warranty in such literal terms. But Eagle Creek’s logic makes its own insane sense. It could be summed up as: “Enjoy our lifetime warranty. Until your product dies. Then leave us alone.”

The tricky part of analogizing between humans and inanimate objects is that it’s far easier to tell when humans have expired. What constitutes a dead backpack? What if your backpack is just, you know, asleep? Or unconscious?

That Eagle Creek thinks the list of dead-backpack symptoms includes sticky linings seems a little — what’s the right word here? — fatalistic. It’s a bit like a doctor deciding that people are goners if they catch a cold. But here is what an Eagle Creek rep named Sadie Schroeder told Ms. Jahrling, in an e-mail:

“Our warranty protects against defect for the life of the product. Our warranty department has deemed that items that are breaking down due to age have reached the end of their life and will not be covered by warranty.”

In another e-mail, Ms. Schroeder said of the sticky lining malady, “There is no real cure for it.”

Anyone know the last rites for a backpack?

The Haggler read all this and detected the potential for a conflict of interest. Eagle Creek offers a lifetime warranty and then gets to decide when its products have flatlined, which saves the company money on resuscitation efforts.

So the Haggler wrote to the company, which is based in Carlsbad, Calif., and sells a wide variety of travel pillows, money belts and luggage, all with the adventure traveler in mind. In late August, the company president, Roger Spatz, agreed to chat on the phone.

“It’s not often that we have these issues,” he said, early in the conversation. “Situations like this are a very small percentage of the total.”

Understood, said the Haggler, eager to get to specifics.

What about a seven-year-old backpack with a rusted zipper and a bad case of dropsy?

“I don’t know,” Mr. Spatz said, after a pause. “If we’re going to get into a list, I’m not the person qualified to give you an answer.”

What about a 12-year-old rolling bag with a frayed pocket and a touch of gout?

“I don’t know what to tell you there,” he said. “We’d have to take a look at it and see.”

The Haggler was going to ask about a five-year-old tote with some torn mesh and a social disease, but it seemed pointless. Mr. Spatz noted that Ms. Jahrling was offered the chance to buy any Eagle Creek product at 50 percent off, and he underscored that the company worked diligently to please its customers.

That actually rings true. The Haggler finds little negative static about Eagle Creek on the Internet. We are most likely talking here about a rare and relatively isolated incident. But to his credit, Mr. Spatz grasped that errors were made in Ms. Jahrling’s case.

“What I object to most is that she was told. ‘If you want to send your bag to the warranty department, maybe they’ll give you a different answer,’ ” he said. “I will take this opportunity to make sure that we’re having proper conversations with our customers.”

He also hinted that Eagle Creek was willing to do more for Ms. Jahrling. “We’re going to go back and take care of this situation,” he said.

The Haggler ended that conversation heartened and anticipating an e-mail from Ms. Jahrling with some good news. But that was more than three weeks ago and as of Friday, no one from Eagle Creek had been in touch with her. Maybe the company isn’t quite as customer-
focused as it believes. Or maybe its phone and e-mail systems are currently in the hospital.

E-mail: haggler@nytimes.com. Keep it brief and family-friendly, include your hometown and go easy on the caps-lock key. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Wealth Matters: Seeking Light Amid the Heat of Energy Investments

It took last week’s heat dome, with the searing heat outside and that equally uncomfortable arctic blast when you walked inside, to get me thinking about energy — and not just how much of it I was consuming. I started wondering about the investment opportunities and the associated risks around the boom in oil and gas production and the push for alternative sources of energy. So many people seemed so sure that investing in energy was the way to go, and naturally that spooked me.

The United States is set to become the world’s leading producer of natural gas in 2015 and oil in 2017, according to the International Energy Agency, and there is money to be made in getting both out of the ground, to the coasts and on ships. Some energy companies and new technologies will surely be wildly successful, while others that seem promising will no doubt fail. But as people rush to invest in energy, how should they think about what they are doing?

“The energy renaissance is very similar to the Internet renaissance that started to develop in 1985,” said Anton Bayer, chief executive of Up Capital Management. “In order to find the next Apple, you need to find the next industry. Then you need to drill down to find where the innovation is.”

I thought that was an apt way of describing this moment. Looking back, it’s easy to talk about what a great investment Apple has been, but as a youngster in the early 1980s my bet would have on the Commodore 64, with its eight-tracklike game cartridges, that I had in my bedroom.

What do investors need to keep in mind when they are looking for the Apple of energy, not the Commodore?

Finding Energy The technology that has allowed horizontal drilling — as opposed to drilling straight down — has radically changed how oil and natural gas are extracted. Yet drilling has always been boom and bust; five years ago, the price of natural gas was over $13 per million British thermal units before beginning a steady fall to its low of less than $2 per million B.T.U. in April 2012.

There are less speculative ways to benefit than investing in the exploration and production boom. Jason T. O’Connell, director of equity research at Boston Private Bank & Trust, said he had been talking to clients about companies like Schlumberger, Cameron International and Dril-Quip that make the equipment to reach the oil.

“It’s become a lot harder to get this stuff out of the ground or from under the sea,” Mr. O’Connell said. “There is an increasing capital intensity that’s a little more insulated from the price of oil.”

He said he was also interested in companies that work in areas related to drilling, like those that look to reduce the environmental impact of newer types of drilling, such as hydraulic fracturing, which pumps high-pressured fluids into rock to increase a well’s production. Fracking has helped increase the productivity of wells, but it has drawn concern about what the process does to drinking water and the areas around wells.

He said he liked companies like Waste Connections and Clean Harbors that could benefit from energy companies paying them to prevent damage and also to clean up if damage occurs.

Christopher Grisanti, co-founder of Grisanti Capital Management, said he believed that companies that refine oil, like Valero Energy, Marathon Petroleum, HollyFrontier and Western Refining, are going to do well, even though the sector has struggled this year.

“In the past, refiners have needed a robust economy to make strong profits, but because of the new export market brought about by the American oil renaissance, refiners are making a lot of money right now, in a mediocre economy,” he wrote. “As the U.S. economy strengthens, the refining industry should enter a sweet spot of profitability.”

Yet Matthew Rubin, director of investment strategy at Neuberger Berman, said he had urged clients to look at companies with track records, and warned about those that have rushed to make money in the Bakken shale around North Dakota.

“The evolution of wealth there is being talked about as the new Saudi Arabia,” Mr. Rubin said. “Where the dangers and pitfalls exist is looking at companies that are much more speculative in nature, that don’t have the technology to do the fracking.”

Moving Energy Once the oil or natural gas is out of the ground, it has to go somewhere.

Wealth Matters: For a Fee, Seeking Owners of Unclaimed Money

His father had kept meticulous records, Mr. Sinclair said, and little had changed since his death several years earlier. Mr. Sinclair and his two siblings were also skeptical of the fee the company, Legal Claimant Services, a division of Keane, was seeking: 36 percent of the account’s value.

But this spring, Mr. Sinclair said, Keane told them the unclaimed money was $148,400 in stock. He and other family members decided they needed to account for everything so they could finally close their mother’s estate. At $1.5 million, it was small by federal standards but large enough to owe Ohio estate taxes. So on May 24, Mr. Sinclair, as the executor, signed a contract with Keane to get details on the unknown account for a 25 percent fee.

“Within a matter of days, I got a letter from them detailing what they had found, right down to the numbers on the stock certificates,” he said. “My stomach fell out of my body. I e-mailed them back and said, ‘This is stock we’ve always been aware of, and you didn’t find it.’ ”

The stock, for First Bancorporation of Ohio, which is now part of FirstMerit Bank, was in his mother’s safe deposit box, where it had been for years, he said. Nonetheless, Keane still expected its $37,100 fee.

Stephen Lochner, a representative for Keane, wrote in e-mails shown to The New York Times that the company had based its claim on the fact that $11,400 in dividend checks on the stock had never been cashed. “Please realize that knowledge of the asset or possession of shares doesn’t take away the fact the account is dormant, needs attention and subject to abandoned property laws of the state,” Mr. Lochner wrote.

“If you wish to retain the account, I can provide an updated set of documents for you to complete,” he added. “The revised documents will give you the option to retain most of this account and we can update the address and registration.”

When Mr. Sinclair balked at a fee being charged on the whole account — and not the dividend check, which he admits he did not know about — Mr. Lochner suggested Keane’s general counsel talk to Mr. Sinclair’s lawyer. The company contends the contract is clear about the basis for the fee. The two sides have been locked in a legal dispute, which only this week seemed headed toward a resolution.

It may strain credulity that a company could charge a fee for saying it found something in a person’s safe deposit box. But the amount of unclaimed property in the United States is rising and so, too, is the pressure on companies to find owners of dormant accounts. This has given rise to locator companies that look for account owners and often charge them a fee for informing them about an account.

The National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, the membership organization of state unclaimed property offices, estimated that $41.7 billion is sitting in state coffers, where it goes if it has been unclaimed after a period of years. But the amount of unclaimed property that has not reached that point is certainly higher. (In 2011, only $2.25 billion in 2.5 million claims went back to people.)

Common types of unclaimed money include paychecks, utility deposits and life insurance policies as well as bank, 401(k) and brokerage accounts.

Kristina Koutrakos, a managing director at Manchester Capital, which manages money for people with $10 million to $400 million in assets, said that when new clients came to the firm, 30 percent of the time, they had forgotten about some asset. A separate 30 percent of the time — albeit with some overlap — her company finds property that clients never knew they had.

“We’ve found all kinds of stuff, from a $15 stock certificate to 25 acres of land in North Carolina,” she said. “People lose 401(k)’s if they’ve moved around a lot. They forget about stock options or old country club investments.”

Manchester does not charge its clients an additional fee for the search, only a fee to manage money.

NM couple files lawsuit seeking same-sex marriage

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - Two Santa Fe men filed a lawsuit Thursday to force New Mexico courts to decide the politically thorny issue of whether gay marriage is legal in the state.

Bits Blog: Seeking a Magic Tool for Personal Productivity

Yuri Kochetkov/European Pressphoto Agency Charles Simonyi preparing for a ride in the Soyuz spacecraft in 2009.

If big names and bold ambitions predicted success, then the new partnership between David Allen, the personal productivity guru and author of “Getting Things Done,” and Intentional Software would surely be a winner. The goal: to help organize a person’s digital life

Intentional Software was founded a decade ago by Charles Simonyi, a software wizard and an early hire at Microsoft, who oversaw the design of its Office productivity applications. Recently, Mr. Simonyi is probably best known as a billionaire space tourist, having twice taken rides on the Soyuz spacecraft.

Yet Mr. Simonyi’s greatest achievements are in computing. His pedigree goes back before Microsoft. In the 1970s, Mr. Simonyi, who holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, was a member of the group at Xerox PARC that largely invented modern personal computing. He wrote a word processor called Bravo that displayed text on a computer screen as it would appear when printed on a page — a breakthrough technique at the time, called WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get. Bravo would become Microsoft Word.

The company, based in Bellevue, Wash., sprang from Mr. Simonyi’s research at Microsoft on “intentional programming,” clever software that better understands what a user wants to do, his or her intentions. That goal has been around since the beginning of software. Fortran, the first successful, higher-level programming language, was designed to let engineers and scientists write programs in a vernacular that closely resembled math formulas familiar to them. Fortran is an abbreviation for FORmula TRANslator.

But intentional programming, in its ultimate vision, would be a big step above programming languages — essentially allowing people to tell machines what computing tasks they want done. If this sounds like science fiction to you, you have plenty of company among the skeptics.

Whether Intentional Software is an intriguing research venture or a real company is an unanswered question. Its work has attracted a couple of contracts from Darpa, the Pentagon’s advanced research agency, and some private-sector projects.

Eric Anderson, a software engineer, entrepreneur and chairman of Space Adventures, a space tourism pioneer, was recruited to Intentional Software less than two years ago. His mission is to find wider markets for the company’s technology.

Mr. Anderson, a devotee of the Getting Things Done regimen, got in touch with Mr. Allen and explained the potential of Intentional Software’s technology as a “meta-tool” to help organize a person’s digital life.

Mr. Allen was intrigued and both sides eventually agreed to pursue the opportunity, with a partnership announced on Tuesday. Mr. Allen describes the company’s software as “a solution looking for the right problem.”

The partnership, Mr. Anderson said, will design software that sits on top of a person’s digital calendar and communications, including e-mail, text messages, Facebook and Twitter feeds. Then, the software will automatically apply the G.T.D. principles of capturing, clarifying, organizing, reviewing and prioritizing the various channels of information in a person’s life.

“This could be as transformative to the way people work as Microsoft Office has been,” Mr. Anderson said.

Every person, though, would be able to tailor the behavior of the software to individual priorities, like work chores filtered by what is immediate and what is important.

Flexibility, Mr. Allen says, is crucial to avoid the pitfall of most software, which he refers to as “Naziware.” What is needed, he said, is “an orientation tool.”

“Right now, the computer is not an orientation tool — it’s a disorientation tool,” he said.

The partnership plans to crowdsource the design of the new productivity software. It is hoping to tap ideas from the many Getting Things Done fans about what they want to see in a superproductivity product and be beta testers for experimental versions of the software. And Intentional Software has set up a Web site for interested individuals and corporations, www.intentsoft.com/gtd.

A timetable for shipping a product? Too soon to say precisely, Mr. Anderson said, though probably a year or so. “This isn’t going to be years and years,” he said.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 16, 2012

A previous version of this post said that the partnership between Intentional Software and David Allen was announced on Wednesday, not on Tuesday.