Ethical Approach: Divest of Fossil Fuels

It’s an age-old tension between radicalism and reform made more urgent by the existential threat of climate change.

From an Article by Chloe Maxmin, The Nation, May 18, 2016

At 11 pm on a cold Wednesday in February 2014, bleary-eyed Divest Harvard members gathered to discuss the campaign’s future. The group, which calls on Harvard to divest its 37.6 billion dollar endowment from fossil-fuel companies, was deeply torn. We had worked tirelessly for 18 months to build a campus movement, helping mobilize 72 percent of college students in support of divestment, organizing rallies, and hosting forums.

Still, after multiple meetings with our administration, there was no progress toward divestment. Some in our group wanted to “shake,” continuing dialogue with the administration in the hope that our voices could spark its conscience. Others wanted to bypass Harvard to try to “make” a new reality. They argued for escalation—blockades, sit-ins, and increasing forms of civil disobedience. Shake or make? That was the question.

The future of the fossil-fuel divestment movement today mirrors the dilemmas that Divest Harvard faced that frigid night. The movement oscillates between two paths forward. “Shake” aims to reorient existing institutions towards a climate consciousness. “Make” tries to confront, transcend and transform existing systems on the premise that only new structures can save us.

The shakers and makers of fossil-fuel divestment define its future. How are these distinct strategies playing out? I talked with youth leaders across the divestment movement to find out.

Fossil-fuel divestment organizing earned the title “historic” within three years of its inception. The first campaigns bubbled up on a few campuses in 2010. Led initially by Swarthmore students, divestment stood in solidarity with those on the front lines of fossil-fuel extraction. In July 2012, Bill McKibben wrote a now-famous article in Rolling Stone that showcased fossil-fuel divestment as a primary strategy for confronting climate change. Three months later, 350.org staged the “Do the Math” tour. Almost immediately, more than 100 campus campaigns emerged.

In October 2013, a report from Oxford University declared fossil-fuel divestment the fastest-growing divestment campaign in history. Now there are more than 400 campus and hundreds of off-campus campaigns. Over 500 institutions with more than $3.4 trillion in assets have divested. Hundreds of students have risked arrest. HSBC, the World Bank, and other major financial institutions have endorsed the economic rationale behind divestment. Even politicians—like Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley—now reject fossil-fuel money.

Fossil-fuel divestment has become one of the principal ways that youth engage with the climate movement. The movement aims to weaken the fossil-fuel sector’s influence in three ways: (1) pivot capital towards clean energy investments, (2) stigmatize the industry to create political support for climate action, and (3) ignite a massive social movement to fight the fossil-fuel industry. “It’s really mobilizing young people and making them feel like they do have a voice,” emphasizes Daphne Chang, a founding force behind Mt. Holyoke’s divestment campaign. The movement provides an inclusive platform for action.

Young people see another key goal of divestment: to hold institutions accountable in the age of climate crisis. Young Jong Cho, a campaigner for 350.org and 350 action says, “The divestment campaign and movement is more about highlighting the influence of the fossil-fuel industry on many of our institutions…[and] pushing our institutions to take a moral stance on climate change.” The climate crisis requires educational institutions to rethink how they operate and whether their practices threaten communities and jeopardize students’ futures.

Last spring, students organized the first nationwide coordinated escalation and activism surged. Since then, the movement has been in a “valley,” as Shea Riester, a young college alum who supports student activists, observes. “Generally, though,” he added, “you have valleys happen after spring escalations.… I think we’re going to see another round of escalation this spring…continuing some of this momentum.”

And he was right.

This spring so far, more than 40 divestment advocates have been arrested during campus protests. Four Divest Harvard students were arrested after a sit-in. Dozens of UMass students were arrested during an occupation. Yale announced partial divestment. The University of Mary Washington divested. The surge of student activity revived fossil-fuel divestment on campuses and reminded the world that student power is alive and well.

But the future of fossil-fuel divestment is defined by the tension between shake and make. This tension has existed since the movement’s inception, though it has not always been directly acknowledged. On the one hand, divestment is a financial tool of “the system.” The movement “shakes” things up within the current system by showcasing the total numbers of assets that have been divested, celebrating large pools of money that forswear fossil fuels, and highlighting financial experts’ support. At the same time, the movement uses divestment to confront the system and “make” a new reality. The divestment movement tackles the fossil-fuel industry, redirects capital towards new economies, and builds a mass movement working for climate justice.

Some campus campaigns accept divestment as a tool of traditional finance and aim to shake endowments into financial instruments that support a transition away from fossil fuels. These students build relationships with trustees to explore green investment opportunities. They encourage support for investments in climate solutions. These campaigns can be used to “facilitate incremental steps” or to look for “moments where interim compromises may exist, like a commitment to invest in local community development,” suggests Ophir Bruck, a former leader of Fossil Free University of California who now works in the sustainable investment field. For campus shakers, divestment is a way to change the conversations within administrations and reallocate endowments’ investments toward a livable planet.

In the finance world, shakers aim to use the existing economic system to rechannel capital towards investments in carbon-free technologies and capabilities. Lily Tomson, a student organizer with Positive Investment Cambridge, describes divestment as “genuinely trying to shift the financial territory.” Fossil fuel divestment adheres to its literal definition: a financial mechanism to move capital from one set of assets to another.

Campus makers, in contrast, see divestment as a tool to radicalize students against the fossil-fuel industry and any institution that colludes with its practices. They regard divestment as demanding more than just a shift in investment strategies. They aim to birth a new ethos of confrontation in the face of corruption and crisis. Riester sums it up: “We’ve seen how many hundreds of students have been at the table…and how little that has gotten them.” Instead, he says, students need to commit to nonviolent civil disobedience, “putting it all on the line” and not being afraid to “demand divestment in that direct way.” Divestment becomes a symbol for what young people are willing to do for all that they love. The end goal may not be whether a school divests or not. Power is built from struggle.

This view holds that divestment can be used to disrupt the economic system and build a new economy. Katie Hoffman, who co-founded the University of California’s divestment campaign, told me, “Finance for finance sake is one of the greatest challenges we’re up against in our society right now.” Iliana Salazar-Dodge, a senior divestment campaigner at Columbia University, paints a vision of this new system in a recent op-ed: “Worker-owned businesses and local funds are springing up across the nation…. They are building something beautiful.” Divestment and reinvestment can not only accelerate the clean-energy revolution, they can also be the building blocks of a new economy.

Shake and make contradict each other in many ways, but these two approaches also allow for broad engagement. Will divestment be able to succeed on both terms? Or will the different aims produce internal divisions that pit one activist against another and jeopardize the ability to build power? Can shake and make coexist? It’s an age-old tension between radicalism and reform made more urgent by the existential threat of climate change.

I have argued in the pages of The Nation that fossil-fuel divestment is a step towards true political prowess for the climate movement. Divestment stigmatizes the fossil-fuel industry, limits its political influence, and creates new political space for real climate solutions. To fulfill this theory of change, the divestment movement must actually claim that new political space. It needs to pivot its networks and engage with electoral politics.

Divestment can be an opportunity to make a new kind of politics. It’s time to “look beyond the divestment movement,” says Becca Rast, a US Campus Organizer with 350.org. “That includes young people running for office.” As many interviewees argued, divestment organizing trains a new generation of politicians. Campus activists learn the tools of politics immemorial: how to negotiate, organize, and engage in collective decision-making. When these millennials run for office, they will infuse new perspectives, capabilities, and values into our political system.

The shakers know what they are for: the shake modifies endowments, shifts the finance sector, bird-dogs politicians. But can the agents of destruction be shaken quickly enough to become agents of salvation?

The makers know exactly what they are against, but their solutions are still developing. They use direct action to confront and expose the status quo but still face the work of creating fresh solutions and new systems. This work takes time, effort, and creativity at a moment in history when we race against physics. Can the makers become a regenerative force in time?

After a winter snow, I watch the branches of Maine’s pine trees bend under the weight. I shake the branches and watch the limbs bounce back to their proud height. I feel satisfied to have released them from their burden. There are times, though, when the branch cannot snap back. It’s too damaged to withstand the next storm, and the trunk itself is compromised. No matter how much I shake, its life is over. A new tree will one day take its place and, in time, a new forest will grow.

<<< Members of the Divest Harvard campaign protest outside the Harvard Management Company in Boston on April 12, 2016. (Photo courtesy of Divest Harvard) >>>

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Trees & Soil Capture Greenhouse Gases

Doing Nothing Isn’t an Option: How to Avoid the Worst of Climate Change

From an Article by Dr. David Suzuki and Ian Hanington, EcoWatch.com, April 23, 2014

It’s fitting that the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was released during Earth Month. After all, the third chapter of its Fifth Assessment focuses on ways to keep our planet healthy and livable by warding off extreme climatic shifts and weather events caused by escalating atmospheric carbon.

Doing so will require substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions–40 to 70 percent by 2050 and to near-zero by the end of the century. We must also protect carbon “sinks” such as forests and wetlands and find ways to store or bury carbon. The good news is that weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, conserving energy and shifting to cleaner sources comes with economic and quality-of-life benefits.

“There is a clear message from science: To avoid dangerous interference with the climate system, we need to move away from business as usual,” said economist Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of Working Group III, which produced the chapter.

Doing nothing isn’t an option. That would lead to a significant increase in global average temperatures and extreme weather-related events such as storms, droughts and floods, wreaking havoc on our food systems, communities and the natural environment we depend on for our health and survival. Technological measures and behavioral change could limit global mean temperatures to less than 2 C above pre-industrial levels, but only with “major institutional and technological change.”

Because we’ve stalled so long, thanks largely to deceptive campaigns run by a small but powerful group of entrenched fossil fuel industry interests and the intransigence of some short-sighted governments, we must also consider ways to adapt to climate change that’s already occurring and that we can’t stop.

Although carbon emissions are rising faster than efforts to curtail them, there are glimmers of hope. A growing number of networks–including cities, states, regions and even markets–are working together to implement climate plans. And costs of renewable energy, such as solar and wind, are falling so quickly that large-scale deployment is practical. Putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions through carbon taxes or other methods is one critical way to shift investment from fossil fuels to renewables.

Carbon-intensive fossil fuel economies will suffer as renewable energy technologies mature–especially those relying heavily on coal and unconventional oil such as bitumen from tar sands. Canada’s choice: take advantage of the growing worldwide demand for clean energy technology, transit infrastructure and sustainable building techniques or continue to focus on selling our non-renewable resources at bargain-basement prices until climate and food-system destabilization swamps global markets and the world rejects Canada’s high-carbon fuels.

The IPCC found responsibly addressing climate change by pricing carbon and making needed investments is affordable: ambitious mitigation would reduce economic growth by just .06 percent a year. That’s not taking into account the many economic benefits of reducing climate change–from less spending on health and disease to reduced traffic congestion and increased activity in the clean-energy sector. Considering the costs and losses climate change and extreme weather impose on our cities, communities and food systems, we can’t afford not to act.

A clean energy revolution is already underway and, as the world comes to grips with the need to change, it will inevitably spread. As Canadians, we can choose to join or remain stuck in the past. Tackling global warming will require all nations to get on board. That’s because greenhouse gases accumulate and spill over national boundaries. And, according to the IPCC, “International cooperation can play a constructive role in the development, diffusion and transfer of knowledge and environmentally sound technologies.”

As a policy-neutral scientific and socioeconomic organization, the IPCC doesn’t make specific recommendations, but it reviews the available science and spells out in clear, albeit technical, terms that if we fail to act, the costs and losses to our homes, food systems and human security will only get worse.

It’s been seven years since the fourth assessment report in 2007. We can’t wait another seven to resolve this crisis. As nations gear up to for the twenty-first climate summit in Paris in late 2015, where the world’s governments have pledged to reach a universal legal climate agreement, international co-operation is needed more than ever. Let’s urge our government to play a constructive role in this critical process.

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See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Celebrating Our Small Blue Planet

Geoengineering is Not the Answer to Climate Change

Survey Says Mayors Actively Curbing Climate Change in Their Cities

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MarkWest Energy Partners Signs Agreements with Antero Resources to Expand Sherwood Processing Complex to 1 Bcf/d

Press Release, Mark West Energy Partners, Business Wire, November 7, 2013

NOTE: The Sherwood Processing Complex is visible south of US Route 50 about five miles east of West Union, in Doddridge County, WV.

DENVER — MarkWest Energy Partners, L.P. announced the completion of long-term, fee-based agreements with Antero Resources for the development of an additional cryogenic gas processing plant at the Partnership’s Sherwood complex in Doddridge County, West Virginia. 

Under terms of the agreements, MarkWest will construct a fifth 200 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) processing facility that is expected to begin operations in the third quarter of 2014. Upon completion of the new plant, the Sherwood complex will have 1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of total processing capacity.

Antero is a premier producer in the Northeast and is aggressively developing their acreage position throughout the rich-gas Marcellus. The Sherwood complex currently consists of two plants with 400 MMcf/d of capacity and is operating near full utilization. By the end of this year, MarkWest will bring online a third 200 MMcf/d plant at the complex and is quickly moving forward with the construction of a fourth plant by the second quarter of 2014.

Antero’s natural gas liquids (NGLs) recovered at the Sherwood complex are currently being delivered to MarkWest’s Houston complex in Washington County, Pennsylvania for fractionation and marketing. The Houston complex is the largest fractionation facility in the Northeast and provides extensive logistics services, including storage and the delivery of purity products to market by truck, rail and pipeline. 

In addition, the Houston complex offers Marcellus producers the first large-scale de-ethanization facility in the Northeast capable of producing purity ethane for delivery to Mariner West, and ultimately to the ATEX and Mariner East projects.

“We are delighted to further expand our strong relationship with Antero and develop additional processing capacity at the Sherwood complex to support their highly successful drilling program,” said Frank Semple, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of MarkWest. “The ability to offer producers fully integrated midstream services throughout northern West Virginia and southwest Pennsylvania is critical to unlocking the abundant rich-gas reserves of the Marcellus Shale.”      

MarkWest Energy Partners, L.P. is a master limited partnership engaged in the gathering, processing and transportation of natural gas; the gathering, transportation, fractionation, storage and marketing of natural gas liquids; and the gathering and transportation of crude oil. 

MarkWest has a leading presence in many unconventional gas plays including the Marcellus Shale, Utica Shale, Huron/Berea Shale, Haynesville Shale, Woodford Shale and Granite Wash formation.

SOURCE: MarkWest Energy Partners, L.P.

See also: www.EcoWatch.com and  www.FrackCheckWV.net