Mr Palmer was appointed to the position in March this year following a stint at the St James Ethics Centre.
Speaking to InvestorDaily, Mr Palmer said much of his focus in the past three months has been around the 'divestment movement' – that is, the push to remove fossil fuels from investment portfolios.
Most of the push has come from the NGO sector, he said, but there have also been cases of individual fund managers excluding fossil fuel stocks (either from their portfolio generally or from a specific fund).
"There is an ethical motivation as well as the financial motivation," said Mr Palmer.
On the one hand, there is the prospect of the adverse effect the current fossil fuel reserves would have on the environment if they were all burnt, he said.
The financial case for divestment from fossil fuels is made around the idea of 'stranded assets', said Mr Palmer.
If the global community "gets its act together" and realises "we can't burn all this stuff", the massive fossil fuel reserves on companies' balance sheets could end up being worthless, he said.
But what are companies actually doing about their fossil fuels exposure?
Mr Palmer pointed to the recent decision by AMP Capital to divest from companies that have more than a 20 per cent exposure to 'toxic' fossil fuels such as thermal coal, oil sands and brown coal.
"Of course that means in the case of AMP [Capital] it wouldn’t prevent them investing in Woodside Petroleum, Origin Energy, Rio Tinto or BHP," he said.
"Hunter Hall have come out and said: ‘We’ll look at the industry classification, the GIC [Global Industry Classification], and if you fall within certain categories there we’ll exclude you," said Mr Palmer.
Australian Ethical, however, takes a different approach.
"Our starting question is what’s going to deliver the 100 per cent renewable future as quickly as possible," said Mr Palmer.
"We think coal is no good, so we won’t be in BHP, Rio Tinto or Whitehaven Coal – anyone who has [a] percentage in coal, whether it’s a large percentage or not," he said.
Australian Ethical is willing to invest in conventional gas as a short-term replacement for coal – but coal-seam gas is definitely out, Mr Palmer stated.
"We don’t like coal-seam gas, and for that reason we don’t invest in Origin Energy and Santos, for example. Whilst we support conventional gas, we think the water table/water contamination issues are too uncertain at this point in time," he said.
