Karen Ye

Karen Ye
Degree Programs Yale School of Management, MBA, 2023

Karen Ye is a second year MBA student at the School of Management exploring cross-sector climate and decarbonization solutions. At CBEY, Karen writes for the Clean Energy Finance Forum.

This past summer, Karen interned at DBL Partners, an impact VC based out of California, and supported capital deployment out of their $600M Fund IV. Prior to attending Yale, Karen worked as a strategy consultant at Bain & Co. and advised utilities and pension funds on navigating the energy transition. Outside of consulting, Karen has experience in the philanthropic sector, working on Google.org's Strategy & Operations team during COVID-19 to help manage their corporate giving strategy.

Karen is interested in accelerating the transition towards a sustainable future and is currently supporting research on stakeholder capitalism at Yale’s Center for Customer Insights and International Center for Finance.

In her spare time, you can find Karen enjoying podcasts, exploring New Haven’s food truck scene, and reminiscing about the metric system (as a Canadian studying abroad).

Authored Articles
Solar Decathlon

Explainer: What Does Carbon Accounting Add Up to Today?

Karen Ye
With the proliferation of net-zero pledges, these commitments have become a new criterion for businesses that only a few understand but many proffer as an appeal to investors. But how can an investor or a customer know how much greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions a soap maker or bank really dumped...
Can pledges prompt fast and sure deployment? Many want to know.

In San Francisco, youth are protesting the climate crisis as pledges emerge in Glasgow. (Photo outside BlackRock's San Francisco office by Peg Hunter, via Flickr Creative Commons.) 

Amid a Storm of Pledges, Finding a Blueprint for Climate Capital Deployment

Karen Ye
A bumper crop of climate pledges and plans land in your inbox, but how many make it to your term sheet? This investigation follows a few global finance pledges, setting them against capital needs and focusing on partnerships and local efforts as units of action.
Larry Fink and the then-chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, courtesy the Financial Times

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, the world's leading asset manager, has called on all managers to align with climate goals. Do ESG metrics do that? (This photo shows Fink with the then-chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, Duncan Niederauer, at the FT CNBC Nightcap in Davos in 2014. Courtesy the Financial Times.) 

ESG Isn't Perfect (Quite Far From It) - But It Is Progress

Karen Ye
There’s an elephant in the fund: Earlier this year, some of the most vocal and proactive ESG firms, each with multiple commitments towards a net-zero future, actively funded lobbying efforts against President Biden's infrastructure bill and Build Back Better Act. These bills contain some of the most assertive climate provisions...