From Black Gold …… to Brown Bonds

The founding CEO of Norway’s massive oil fund says the way to punish big polluters is to attack them in the fixed-income market

- CHARLES DALY

Knut Kjaer rummages through kitchen cabinets to find some water glasses. The founding chief executive officer of Norway’s oil fund now chairs Sector Asset Management, a firm focused on actively managed funds that he says can help create a greener planet by altering investor behavior. Right now, though, his challenge is to find some matching tableware in Sector’s offices, which are still under construction in Oslo. It’s a gray January afternoon. He looks out the windows and gestures toward the hills that surround the Norwegian capital. “They should be covered in snow at this time of year,” he says. “But it’s too warm.”

After running one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds for Western Europe’s biggest oil-producing nation, Kjaer has become something of an activist. “Climate change is a threat to our civilization,” he says after gathering up some old Ikea glasses and heading to his 10th-floor conference room. “We only have a few decades to handle it.”

That realization sent Kjaer, 63, down a somewhat unusual path—he’s become a green missionary who remains a suit-clad member of the investing establishment. He’s not one for making speeches at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. That, he says, should be left to the “jet set.” Instead he’s quietly begun to argue for change from within the more obscure corners of the global bond market.