The MacArthur Foundation: Investing in climate solutions–and fossil fuels.

Eighteen months ago, the people who manage the endowment at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation got some bad news: Investments they had made in funds managed by EnerVest, a Houston-based private equity firm that operates more than 33,000 oil and gas wells across the US, had plummeted in value to almost nothing.

The losses were small, relatively speaking — roughly $15 million, a fraction of the foundation’s $7 billion endowment — but they were unwelcome, if only because they called attention to the fact that MacArthur, whose mission is, famously, to build a “more just, verdant and peaceful world,” had taken a financial hit by investing in fossil fuels.

Lesson learned? No.

Despite its stature as a major funder of climate-change solutions, MacArthur continues to finance the fossil-fuel industry, a review of its most recent federal tax return shows. It does so deliberately–that is, by seeking out opportunities to invest in oil and gas, unlike investors who are inadvertently exposed to fossil-fuel companies because they own broad-based index funds that capture the entire stock market.

The MacArthur endowment holds investments valued at well over $200m in at least a dozen private equity firms, including Enervest, that finance the…