Are Bono and Harold Hamm Pipeline Partners?

Jason Spiess

According to a recent study released by The Oakland Institute, commissioned by concerned landowners, shows that humanitarian music icon Bono is one of the investors in a controversial Midwest pipeline project.

The new study shows the ownership of the pipeline project and TPG Rise is listed as the largest investor in the carbon pipeline at 30%.

On January 24, 2019, U.S. private equity firm TPG announced that U2 star Bono’s had joined forces to create a new organization for measuring the social and environmental returns of investments appears to be a signal of growing investor demand for tools to assess impact.

The Rise Fund, based in San Francisco is a $2 billion impact investing fund managed by TPG Growth and the social impact advisory firm Bridgespan Group.

Bono is a co-founder alongside several well-known philanthropists, including Jeff Skoll, former president of eBay.

The first platform available through Y Analytics is a metric called the impact multiple of money, or IMM, which Bridgespan developed along with The Rise Fund since the fund formed in 2017.

“A lot of what happens with impact investing and philanthropy is people measure afterward,” says Chris Addy, a partner at Bridgespan. The IMM is a metric “to quantitatively account for” social or environmental impact before an investment is made, he says, “with a goal being, you can actually look at hard numbers.”

For the Rise Fund, the detailed analysis that goes into calculating the IMM for a specific company has to suggest “a minimum social return on investment of $2.50 for every $1 invested,” Bridgespan and TPG executives said in a January article in Harvard Business Review.

Currently the Protest War Drums are beating loud in the Upper Midwest that might see history repeating itself, only this time it’s a Carbon Pipeline, a oil tycoon and an international environmental and music icon.

For many in North Dakota, the memory of a pipeline protest is still fresh. In the spring of 2016 protests began at pipeline construction sites in North Dakota and drew indigenous people, calling themselves water protectors and land defenders, from throughout North America as well as many other supporters, creating the largest gathering of Native Americans in the past hundred years.

What often goes under reported about the DAPL protest is that Iowa was heavily involved against the pipeline as well.