Eliot Muir — Environment, Safety, and Governance (ESG) Policy
Since Environment, Safety, and Governance (ESG) forms are non-standard at this stage, Eliot is unable to provide custom form filling for customers. Instead, he provides the following information.
This policy describes how Eliot lives, works, makes decisions, and treats people. It reflects his real practices, rather than being a template designed for a large corporation. It is for use by our affiliates who will fill out ESG questionnaires on Eliot’s behalf.
Longstanding Interest in Environmental Issues
Eliot holds an MSc in Environmental Science and received first-class honours for an economics thesis which, using rigorous mathematics, demonstrated that if you gave money and rights to people who liked trees, you would get more trees.
This reminded Eliot of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, delivering sermons in Latin to sound more clever than they really were.
Environmental
Eliot primarily works from his solar-powered home and is working toward complete independence from the electricity grid. He is also interested in collecting and using rainwater to reduce dependence on centralized water infrastructure.
Eliot recycles as much as reasonably possible and prefers practical sustainability: reducing consumption, reusing what already exists, and avoiding waste wherever feasible.
He replaces older lighting with LEDs for improved energy efficiency, safety, and longevity. When renovating, he favors modular systems and commodity components that can be moved, reused, repurposed, sold, or recycled as needs change.
His philosophy is simple:
Do not permanently build what can be modular. Do not throw away what can be reused. Do not buy something specialized when a simple commodity product will do the job.
He is also interested in driving an electric car, with a preference for technology that is efficient and user-controlled. It feels a bit too risky for him to drive a Tesla, which might not be controlled by him but instead could be controlled by Tesla or by malicious attackers who might infiltrate their cloud infrastructure.
Eliot isn’t a huge fan of putting everything in the cloud. He designs his products so that his customers have the choice not to, if they prefer to keep their data safe from malicious actors.
For Eliot, sustainability and resilience go hand in hand. Good technology should be efficient, safe, maintainable, economical, and remain under the owner’s control.
Social
As Eliot has no employees, conventional topics such as workforce demographics and internal diversity programs do not apply.
Eliot cares deeply about neurodiversity and supporting people whose minds work differently than the norm.
He personally exhibits a range of neurodiverse characteristics, which have given him an appreciation for diverse ways of thinking and problem-solving. People can be judgmental about these traits, without recognizing that, without them, Eliot would not have come up with the technology the world has come to depend on.
Eliot has an unusual mind that can solve unusual problems—and almost always tackle challenges that conventional approaches cannot.
His social policy:
Treat people as individuals rather than categories.
He values independent thinking, direct communication, humor, intellectual freedom, and practical accommodation of genuine differences.
Governance
The business is operated solely by Eliot Muir, with the support of a network of affiliate partners for areas where he requires additional expertise. However, it is difficult to match his core ideas and expertise—he is truly unique.
Governance is therefore direct and personal. He makes decisions, takes responsibility for them, and accepts the consequences.
He prefers simple systems, transparent communication, minimal bureaucracy, direct relationships, and personal accountability.
Eliot is particularly interested in resilience, security, decentralization, and reducing dependence on systems vulnerable to failure or external control.
His guiding principle:
Important systems should be understandable, maintainable, secure, resilient, and under the control of those who depend on them.
This applies to his home, water, electricity, vehicles, software, and business.
He values making decisions based on evidence and critical thinking.
Summary
Eliot is a sole proprietor, running a small software business from a solar-powered home.
He recycles, uses energy-efficient lighting, prefers modular and reusable technologies, aims to collect rainwater, and seeks independence from the electricity grid. He favors sustainable technology, provided ownership includes meaningful control.
He cares about neurodiverse and unconventional people, treating each individual based on their merits and needs.
He prefers resilience over dependency, simplicity over bureaucracy, personal accountability over committees, and practical action over box-ticking.
Hopefully, this is enough information to fill out your ESG forms.