It's already happening. In October of 2006, for example, Goldman Sachs released a 105-page report on the global energy industry that made extensive use of Asset4 data and noted that "winners" in an E.S.G. framework had outperformed their peers by 6 percent since August 2005. "We believe the strong relationship between E.S.G. leaders and stock market performance will persist," the bank's analysts wrote.

Bank Sarasin, a Swiss private bank that in 1994 launched the world's first investment fund based on the concepts of eco-efficiency, has also chosen to integrate Asset4 data into its own research. Dr. Eckhard Plinke, head of sustainability research at Bank Sarasin, says that the sheer number of companies covered by Asset4 makes the database valuable, as well as the ability to customize the information for the bank's own in-house rating systems. "Those are major advantages for us," he says.

With those who argue that the most important thing a company must do is-and always will be-to make money, Ohnemus doesn't entirely disagree. "I'm a capitalist," he says. "I believe the business of business is to do business. But if consumers start to dictate that they want companies to behave in a certain way, business is going to have to start caring about that as well."

Investors, it seems, already have. An index of top-ranked companies in the Asset4 model outperformed the MSCI World Index by 67.1 percent from July of 2000 through July of 2005. The following year, that margin expanded to a full 84.8 percent.

The inescapable conclusion is that the market already cares about things other than the bottom line, and investors who fail to do so themselves do so at their own peril.

And what about Ohnemus' own problem: investing his money? It looks like that's one problem that will probably get worse.