Pope Francis is unequivocal in his call for urgent action on climate change

From an Article by Rebecca Beitsch, The Hill, June 19, 2020

The Vatican on Thursday urged Catholics to divest from fossil fuels, a call made in church documents warning against the dangers of climate change.

The 225-page encyclical, which is sent to all bishops within the church, also encouraged divesting from arms as well as monitoring sectors like mining to ensure they are not damaging the environment.

The document, “Journeying Towards Care For Our Common Home,” argues people “could favor positive changes … by excluding from their investments companies that do not satisfy certain parameters,” according to Reuters.

That includes environmental factors, along with monitoring for human rights abuses like child labor.

It goes on to suggest that Catholics “shun companies that are harmful to human or social ecology, such as abortion and armaments, and to the environment, such as fossil fuels.”

Pope Francis has repeatedly urged action on climate change, calling on countries to uphold the Paris climate accord and admonishing oil and gas executives.

“Time is running out. Deliberations must go beyond mere exploration of what can be done and concentrate on what needs to be done from today onward,” he told a group of oil executives gathered at the Vatican last year.

“We do not have the luxury of waiting for others to step forward or of prioritizing short-term economic benefits. The climate crisis requires our decisive action, here and now,” he said.

The Vatican has said it does not invest in fossil fuels.

The latest document marks the fifth anniversary of Pope Francis’s encyclical calling for protection of nature, life and defenseless people.

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See also: New Vatican Document Urges Fossil Fuel Divestment to Serve Planet and the Common Good, John Queally, Common Dreams, June 18, 2020

The Vatican’s call for divestment is a breath of hope in times when faith is more needed than ever,” said 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben. “It is a powerful statement that attempting to profit off the destruction of the planet is plainly and simply immoral and unethical.”

Webinar — Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)

SPEAKER — Mary Evelyn TUCKER, Senior Lecturer, Senior Research Scholar, and Codirector of the Forum of Religion and Ecology, Yale University

HOST — Irina A. FASKIANOS, Vice President for National Program and Outreach, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)

FASKIANOS: Hello and welcome to you all. I am Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at the Council on Foreign Relations. We’ve been convening these calls for a long time, but this is our first one with video. So it will be a new experience for all of us.

As a reminder, today’s call is on the record. The video and transcript are available as well as on our podcast channel, Religion and Foreign Policy.

We are delighted to have Mary Evelyn Tucker with us today. Mary Evelyn Tucker is co-director, with John Grim, of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University, where they teach. This week, they have just released a new website for the Forum after a year of preparation. It has a comprehensive section on religion and climate change. You can find the website at Fore.Yale.edu. And they also announced a new partnership of the Forum with the U.N. Environment Programme’s Faith for Earth. So we will circulate the website at the conclusion of this event.

Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim have organized ten conferences and books on world religions and ecology at Harvard, and they convened the first conference on religion and climate change in 2000. As you all know, she’s co-author of Journey of the Universe, a book and an Emmy Award-winning film that aired on PBS. And this week, she, John Grim, and Sam Mickey have also released an online open-source book called Living Earth Community.

TUCKER: Well, thank you very much, Irina, and thanks to all who are on this call. And I also want to say from the very beginning that we recognize religions have their problems and they have their promise. We need not go into the problems historically or even at present, but we’re trying to concentrate, what is the moral force of religions, and how can we draw on that for climate change action and thinking and writing?

I also want to just say that for almost fifty years the field of interreligious dialogue has been hugely helpful for this coalition of religion and climate change. And there’s a number of people on this call — the Parliament of the World’s Religions’ Kusumita Pedersen; and Azza Karam from Religions for Peace; and people who have been working in Christian-Muslim dialogue and Jewish-Christian dialogue, John Polakowski and so on; and the Temple of Understanding, Grove Harris — so there’s been a lot of people working on interreligious dialogue and then trying to bring the religions forward towards the environment and climate change. And we thank them for this effort and just say that there’s many, many others, some of whom I’ll mention during this talk today, this little gathering.

I wanted to then go historically to say that probably one of the first conferences on religion and climate change came after we did the Harvard conferences in the ’90s, and this was in 2000 at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences which resulted in a book in 2001 in the journal Daedalus: Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change? And George Rupp was there. He was president of Columbia at the time. I think he’s on this call. We had a scientist, Mike McElroy, from Harvard. We had an ethicist, Baird Callicott. We had someone from law, Don Brown. And we had Bill McKibben as an activist and writer. And then folded into that context of other disciplines and other perspectives we had people from the different world religions speaking to what they offer to transition to climate change adaptation and so on.

And that’s the spirit that I want to just bring forward in this little moment of discussion, that dialogue is key. Religions in some ways are late to these various issues. Science and policy have been working on them for a long time, but religions are absolutely necessary. And more and more, science and policy are realizing that.

And I want to then just move to some leadership that has happened over the last twenty years, and to say that I’m going to concentrate here a little bit on the Christian churches, but much has been happening in the various world religions. But the World Council of Churches, with the work of Wesley Granberg-Michaelson, who’s also on this call, has helped to move the Protestant churches forward, and even towards divestment.

Two great leaders that we should note of the Orthodox Church. Bartholomew, who leads eight hundred million Greek Orthodox, and he has been one of the earliest spokespersons on the theology and the practice of climate change and so on, calling even what we’ve been doing ecological sin and crimes against creation. John Chryssavgis has been one of his great champions and writers and so on to bring this message forward. And he, the patriarch had conferences on climate change in Greenland, in the Amazon, in the Mississippi.

I want to move then to Pope Francis, who is a good friend of the patriarch, and they’ve worked together on many things. And we know that we’re coming up on the fifth year anniversary of Laudato Si’, which means “praise be.” So this was an encyclical address to the Christian churches, but to all peoples around the world, and this encyclical has been able to, when it was launched, illustrate this importance of dialogue, because the pope wasn’t there at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences but there were three key people who were. One was the key Orthodox theologian, John of Pergamon, indicating we need ecumenical and interreligious dialogue. Secondly, there was John Schellnhuber, who was a German scientist, head of the Potsdam Climate Research Institute, the largest in the world, over two hundred scientists, and he helped with the encyclical. And third, Cardinal Turkson, who’s originally from Ghana, to indicate the developing world, issues of equity, and so on need to be synergized. So that was very, very symbolic.

And the encyclical has helped bring together in remarkable ways a sense of climate justice, of ecojustice, and that’s because the pope in this encyclical was able to really synergize people and planet, especially in this phrase “cry of the Earth, cry of the poor,” which came from Leonardo Boff, a liberation theologian from Brazil. And that was a book published in 1997 in a series we’ve been working on from Orbis called Ecology and Justice. And that phrase, that the vulnerable are going to be most affected certainly by climate change, and so are ecosystems — as we know, they’re unraveling, their fragmented qualities, and the increase of weather-related—hurricanes and so on. So this synergy of climate justice and ecojustice has been so important from the encyclical and from this blending of humans and earth.

Now, that statement — that encyclical got statements and response from all the world’s religions, which is on our Forum website. But even prior to that, there have been statements of climate change, climate justice, and so on from the world’s religions. So this has been going on for at least twelve to fifteen years.

Now, broadly speaking, the Baha’is, the Sikhs, the Asian traditions, the Abrahamic traditions, and certainly indigenous traditions, have been more and more active, and that’s what I just want to highlight a little bit here. Even in 1990, the Catholic bishops had a statement on global warming. The Evangelical Environmental Network and Mitch Hescox, who has a book on this, has been very active for more than twenty years. Katharine Hayhoe has been speaking out on climate change, especially for Evangelical groups.

Now, we can say, then, going forward we have theology moving forward, all kinds of books, and books that also illustrate people’s transformations. One I just want to mention is Rooted and Rising, which are case studies of people who have this ecological conversion that the pope is talking about. And Leah Schade and Margaret Bullitt-Jonas did that book. Jim Antal did one of the best books, I think, on Climate Church, Climate World.

And next week — I want to give a special shout-out because sermons by these people and Nancy Wright as well are up on the website. Next week there’s going to be a whole festival of homilies. Eleven thousand people signed up to hear homilies on climate change. This is a watershed moment, and a lot of people have been involved in creating that.

Greening of seminaries have been going on for fifteen years. We’ve got a lot of people working on that, Laurel Kearns and so on. And that means both changing practices of carbon footprint as well as curriculum.

Now, again, let’s move to action, and then I’ll finish up so we have time for questions. But let me say some of the early movements here— Interfaith Power and Light, these interreligious groups, the Green Faith movement, Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, Blessed Tomorrow, and so on, in the Climate March in 2014, at Union Theological Seminary, Karenna Gore with Earth Ethics Center there brought together a huge number of religious leaders, and into the march ten thousand religious leaders were very much part of it. Fletcher Harper helped to organize that as well.

But what I want to say is we’re moving from theological statements and so on, from protest movements, to action. We have still a long, long way to go. But I want to highlight one movement that I think is very, very important, and that’s the financial leverage of religious institutions and so on. Now, the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility in New York has been working for almost fifty years on this issue, and Seamus Finn is here, and they’re trying to do shareholder engagement with corporations on climate change and a variety of issues. And that’s because religious communities helped to start CSR, corporate social responsibility, when they said, how are we going to invest our pension funds? So they’ve been spurring this movement for a long, long time. There are three hundred members of this organization.

And then I want to suggest that the divest-invest movement — there’s $14 trillion now committed to this area, started ten years ago, spurred by Bill McKibben and many, many others. But religious communities have been central. The Unitarians, the United Church of Christ with Jim Antal’s help, the Shalom Center, the World Council of Churches, the Church of England, all of these have divested. And the religious communities have a very high percentage in this number that I’ve just mentioned. Religious institutions—Union Theological Seminary, Georgetown University, Dayton University, Seattle University—150 Catholic institutions and foundations have pledged to divest.

So to divest is also to invest, of course, in green technology, alternative technologies, and so on, and the religious communities have been helping in this movement, like Stop the Money Pipeline, right? Now JPMorgan Chase is being pressured to stop investing in oil and pipeline. BlackRock, the investment firm, tremendous pressure. And Liberty Mutual, the insurance company. So Bill McKibben just did an article in the New York Times, as well; between the moral force of divestment and the economics of oil prices collapsing, we’re seeing some very significant changes.

And finally, I want to give a huge shout-out to the youth movement, again, supported by the moral force of religious and spiritual and ethical people around the planet: the Sunrise Movement, Fridays for Future, certainly Greta Thunberg—what a moral force she is—and this broad coalition of Extinction Rebellion.

Finally, let me say that the voices of indigenous peoples, especially through the Indigenous Environmental Network, have been persistent, relentless, and courageous, because they have understood that the deepest sensibilities of human-Earth relations comes from the voice of the Earth, from the magnificent water systems, ecosystems, mountains, forests, and so on that speak to us, and that’s part of this Living Earth Community book that we’re talking about. But across North America and around the world, we can look at Standing Rock in the Dakotas with the Hunkpapa Sioux saying water is sacred — water is sacred. That was the dimension and the basis of their protest. We’ve got Anishinaabe people in Minnesota, across British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest these protest movements linked with indigenous peoples and other groups.

Finally, the statement that came out of Bolivia, Cochabamba, thirty thousand indigenous peoples who gathered there and released the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth in 2015. Such a magnificent and powerful statement. And now we have an interfaith rainforest initiative sponsored by United Nations Environment Programme, the Norwegian government, and many religious groups, like the Forum on Religion and Ecology, to say: These are the caretakers of our forests. These are the people that we must unite with and support. Other religious communities, Christians and others, must give the voice of indigenous peoples their due.

So let me end with this note. There’s so many things we could have mentioned, and we’ll get to some of them in the discussion. But thank you all for being here.

Divestment March at University of Toronto

Essay by Carl Bucholt, Manchester Journal, May 31, 2019

The word “divestment” appears frequently in the news, often in the context of climate change. I’d like to explain what divestment means and make a case for why it’s important.

To “divest” is to get rid of something. The current global divestment movement is trying to convince universities, hospitals, governments, and churches to eliminate fossil fuel stocks from their endowment portfolios and (state government) pension plan funds.

Why should a school, or an individual, sell off their fossil fuel stocks?

Reason 1: To make a public statement and take a moral stand: that they no longer want to be associated with an industry that habitually lies to the public and which puts short-term profits above the long-term health of our planet and the people who live on it. (Case in point: EXXON’s own scientists knew in 1987 that burning oil would result in global warming, but the executives not only failed to make that knowledge public, they began a systematic campaign to confuse the public as to the cause of global warming.)

Reason 2: It is financially responsible to sell off fossil fuel stocks now because they will plummet in value as the world transitions to cheaper and cleaner renewable energy sources, and as electric cars replace vehicles with internal combustion engines. (Case in point: Xcel supplies electricity to people in 10 states in the middle of the US; they announced earlier this year that in the near future the electricity they supply to their customers will come 100 percent from renewables because it is cheaper than buying from existing coal and gas plants.

The major oil companies’ monetary worth is predicated on extracting all of their known oil reserves. However, if you do the math (as Bill McKibben did), you discover that to burn that amount of fossil fuel would result in the warming of the planet by 6 degrees Celsius – four times as much as scientists tell us is safe to sustain life as we know it on Earth. Logic dictates that we simply can not extract and burn all the oil and gas reserves that are carried on the books as Assets. When those reserves become “stranded assets”, there will be a rapid decline in the value of fossil fuel stocks.

Reason 3: Selling off fossil fuel stocks frees up money to be re-invested in the green economy. Jobs in the renewable energy sector are growing much faster than the fossil fuel sector and many of those jobs pay better and reinvigorate the local economy, as opposed to the profits leaving the region/state.

Reason 4: Divestment works to erode the enormous political power that the fossil fuel industry has on Congress and state governments. The oil, gas, and coal industries donate millions of dollars in campaign contributions and assault Congress critters with hoards of lobbyists, thereby ensuring favorable legislation. (Case in point: We have no idea what chemicals are poisoning our land and water through fracking because the industry got Congress to grant them an exemption from reporting that information. Also, we the people are subsidizing the fossil fuel industry by giving them billions of dollars in tax breaks and by granting leases to our public lands at well-below market value.)

Ask your financial advisor or portfolio manager how you can join governments, universities and individuals all around the world who have divested from fossil fuel stocks. It’s easy, you’ll feel good about helping the planet and your grandchildren, and your stock portfolio will ultimately be safer and more profitable.

>>> Carl Bucholt of Manchester is a member of Transition Town Manchester and Earth Matters, two local environmental groups dedicated to fostering resilience, weaning ourselves off fossil fuels and pesticides, and improving the quality of life for all of Earth’s inhabitants.

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Commentary by Tom Bond, June 5, 2019

Climate change is the inevitable result of adding gases to the atmosphere connected with burning fossil fuels. It is reasonable to expect improvements with renewable technology and electrical storage, such as the recent announcement by China of a better, cheaper way to recover the critical mineral, lithium. The conventional energy industry has no incentive to reduce it’s money flow, so it must be done by others. Starving it of investment funds is easier to accomplish, because it is disperse and away from the enabling legislation fossil fuels command.

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See Also: Oil And Gas Giants Spend Millions Lobbying To Block Climate Change Policies [Infographic]

Banking with Aspiration makes good dollars and sense!

From an Article by Sami Grover, Treehugger Blog, December 19, 2018

It’s been amazing to watch how the fossil fuels divestment movement has grown in a few short years. When Harvard students voted to divest back in 2012, for example, the conversation was mostly about undermining Big Energy’s social license to operate. A year later, when Bill McKibben made the case for divestment he focused mostly on the idea of churches, universities and other symbolic institutions making these companies ‘pariahs’.

Now, in honor of the 1,000th institution signing up to divest (bringing the total value to nearly $8 trillion), Bill McKibben has an excellent update on the state of the movement over at The Guardian. While the symbolism of all this still matters, says the maestro, it’s also becoming clear that divestment has become a very real financial force in and of itself:

Peabody, the world’s biggest coal company, announced plans for bankruptcy in 2016; on the list of reasons for its problems, it counted the divestment movement, which was making it hard to raise capital. Indeed, just a few weeks ago analysts at that radical collective Goldman Sachs said the “divestment movement has been a key driver of the coal sector’s 60% de-rating over the past five years”. [...] Now the contagion seems to be spreading to the oil and gas sector, where Shell announced earlier this year that divestment should be considered a “material risk” to its business.

Indeed, no sooner does McKibben write this piece than Cleantechnica reports that Westmoreland, the 6th largest coal company in the US, is filing for bankruptcy too.

True, divestment is hardly the only reason certain fossil fuel companies are in trouble. 42% of coal plants are losing money already, and that figure is only going to get worse as renewables get cheaper and polluting gets more expensive. Similarly, Big Oil may not be sweating the Tesla Model 3 just yet, but there’s a growing list of diverse threats that could soon converge to put a dent in demand.

And that’s the thing: Incumbents seem invincible until one day they are not. And anyone who knows anything about climate change is beginning to realize that there is no sane, sustainable or morally justifiable version of the future in which we continue to burn fossil fuels any longer than we have to. As Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, has said: Most fossil fuels are unburnable. And that makes them basically worthless.

Investors would do well to take note.

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Big Banks Control Earth's Destiny

Big banks fail to clear climate test

From an Article by Soumya Sarkar, Economic Times (India), July 4, 2017

The world’s biggest banks are continuing to fuel climate change through the financing of “extreme” fossil fuels at a rate that will push the planet beyond the climate change limit agreed upon at the Paris Climate Change Conference in 2015, a new report has found.

In the three years ending December 31, 2016, as many as 37 international banks financed 158 companies $290 billion for their “extreme” fossil fuel activities, said the Banking on Climate Change: Fossil Fuel Finance Report Card 2017 released by Rainforest Action Network, BankTrack, Sierra Club and Oil Change International in partnership with another 28 organisations around the world.

The report ranks bank policies and practices around financing of the most carbon-intensive, financially risky, and environmentally destructive sectors of the fossil fuel industry that includes extreme oil (tar sands, Arctic, and ultra-deep water oil), coal mining, coal power and liquefied natural gas (LNG) export.

The analysis found that global banks funnelled $92 billion to extreme fossil fuels in 2014. The number rose to $111 billion in 2015 and fell to $87 billion in 2016. “While this 22% drop over the last year is a move in the right direction, the $290 billion of direct and indirect financing for extreme fossil fuels over the last three years represents new investment in the exact sub-sectors whose expansion is most at odds with reaching climate targets, respecting human rights, and preserving ecosystems,” the report said.

“While the drop-off is a move in the right direction, it is vital that this becomes an accelerating trend and not a blip.”

The recent fall in funding for extreme fossil fuels has run parallel to growing public pressure on banks to stay away from these projects and companies. It is also testimony to the fact that clean technologies are becoming increasingly cheaper and are increasing their market share. Solar and wind power are now the cheapest sources of new electricity supply in many parts of the world. Emerging markets are leapfrogging the developed world, thanks to cheap solar panels, according to a Bloomberg report.

Although investments declined in 2016, 12 of the 37 banks tracked in the report increased their financing to the top extreme fossil fuel companies from 2015 to 2016, after the Paris Agreement was inked. These include Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, Bank of America, Bank of Montreal, Barclays, China Construction Bank, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Mizuho Financial Group, Santander, Toronto-Dominion Bank, UBS and UniCredit.

“Right now, the biggest Wall Street funder of extreme fossil fuels is JPMorgan Chase. In 2016 alone they poured $6.9 billion into the dirtiest fossil fuels on the planet,” Lindsey Allen, executive director of Rainforest Action Network, said in a statement. “For a company that issues statements in favour of the Paris Climate Accord, they are failing to meet their publicly stated ambitions.”

Amid the gloom and doom, the dramatic decline in coal power capacity under construction offers some hope. This decrease has been driven largely by severe restrictions imposed by the Chinese government and by rapidly shifting policies and economics in India, showed a survey by the Global Coal Plant Tracker. This construction slowdown is accompanied by a fast rate of coal plant retirements in wealthier nations, according to Boom and Bust 2017, a March 2017 report by CoalSwarm, Sierra Club and Greenpeace.

The shift means that the goals set in the Paris Agreement — keeping global temperatures well below a 2°C increase and aiming for 1.5°C — could now be possible, but only if thermal power plants are retired much faster and if on-hold construction are not restarted, said the latest Fossil Fuel Finance Report.

“Because of the plummeting cost of renewables, the growing reluctance of governments to pollute cities, and the continued international push to limit climate change, banks must take notice that financing companies that develop coal power anywhere is both risky and harmful,” the report said.

World coal consumption peaked in 2013, according to a 2016 report of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, but by 2016, it had fallen for the third straight year. The chief driver of this trend is China, where the 13th Five-Year development plan for the country’s coal industry stated that no new coal mining projects would be approved from 2016 to 2018. China also plans to spend more than $360 billion by 2020 on renewable energy. This is in part driven by public alarm about the heavy pollution inflicted on many major cities by the burning of coal, according to a 2016 study.

In India, concerns over the public health impacts of coal have led to dozens of coal plants being switched off, coal stockpiles rising, and a reality check for aggressive government plans to triple domestic coal mining by 2020. Currently about one-third of India’s 211 GW of installed thermal power capacity, mostly coal plants, is lying idle. “Falling capacity utilisation translates into losses and inability of new power plants to service interest costs, leading to non-performing assets at banks,” an anonymous analyst told the Economic Times newspaper.

There are now at least 14 major international banks that have ruled out direct financing for new coal mines. This is perhaps seen in the financing of the controversial Carmichael coal mine project in in Queensland’s Galilee Basin in Australia proposed by India’s Adani Group. Over a dozen banks have refused to bankroll the project. Another dozen have introduced coal mining policies that by default rule out support for the mine, the latest being the Australian bank Westpac, according to a report in the Guardian newspaper.

This is a significant indication of advancing bank policies on coal mining, the sector where the greatest number of such restrictions on financing are now in place, said the banking finance report.

>>> Soumya Sarkar is Managing Editor, India Climate Dialogue.

U.S. Bank Becomes First Major Bank to Stop Financing Pipeline Construction

From an Article by EcoWatch.com, May 17, 2017

U.S. Bank has become the first major bank in the U.S. to formally exclude gas and oil pipelines from their project financing. This groundbreaking change to their Environmental Responsibility Policy was publicly announced at the annual shareholders meeting in Nashville in April.

In addition to no longer providing “project financing for the construction of oil or natural gas pipelines,” the bank has stated that relationships with their clients in the oil and gas industries will be subject to “enhanced due diligence processes.”

As recently as March 2017, U.S. Bank has renewed commitments with Energy Transfer Partners, the company constructing the Dakota Access Pipeline, and with Enbridge Energy, whose pipelines operate within Minnesota. However, advocates are hopeful that the bank’s newly released policy will limit other kinds of financing relationships with these industries.

“U.S. Bank’s new policy is an important step in protecting the environment and moving towards a fossil free future,” said Wichahpi Otto, a volunteer with the climate justice group MN350, who travelled to Nashville for the shareholders meeting. “We applaud them for responding to the community and contributing to worldwide efforts to address climate change.”

This move comes after ongoing pressure on U.S. Bank locally from MN350 and from the Minnesotans for a Fair Economy coalition, and on banks nationally from indigenous groups including Honor the Earth, the Indigenous Environmental Network and the Dakota Access resistance movement.

Beginning in 2015, a regional partnership of climate, labor and indigenous rights advocates has urged that U.S. Bank divest from fossil fuels, in particular from Enbridge Energy, and move its financing into the clean energy economy. Local actions have included letter-writing, account closures and social media campaigns. In response, in May 2016 the bank made changes to their Environmental Policy restricting lending to coal.

“We applaud this progressive decision from U.S. Bank,” said Tara Houska, national campaigns director of Honor the Earth. “A strong message is being sent to the fossil fuel industry: We are consumers, we have agency and the right to know how our money is being invested. Move to a green economy and a future that does not profit off the destruction of Mother Earth and our communities.”

A national and international campaign pressuring banks to divest has been highly successful, pulling nearly $4.5 billion from financiers, and a newly launched coalition effort called Mazaska Talks has expanded this effort.

Organizations and community members say they are eager to see how U.S. Bank’s unprecedented stance can encourage movement in financing from fossil fuels to a clean energy economy.

“Confronting the climate crisis requires boldness, urgency and innovation,” said Dr. Emily Swanson, a member of MN350. “While there is more to be done, we are hopeful U.S. Bank can continue to act as an industry leader and as an ally for creating a more sustainable economy.”

See also: “The Global Fossil Fuel Divestment and Clean Energy Investment”

Green Century Investing Avoids Fossil Fuels

The global movement to divest from fossil fuels has taken off, growing from a campaign on a few college campuses in 2012 to more than 500 institutions representing over $3.4 trillion in assets under management.

If you are considering joining the movement, the first questions you might ask are, What does it mean to invest fossil fuel free? And how do I get started?

There are lots of people trying to answer this question right now. Some investors begin by eliminating coal plants, or fracking companies from their portfolios. 350.org asks for divestment from the top 200 fossil fuel companies by carbon reserves.*

As environmentally responsible investors with a deep commitment to a fossil fuel free future, Green Century has been engaged with the conversation around defining divestment for a long time. We have come to believe that, for moral, political, and financial reasons, fossil free investing should mean cutting financial ties with all fossil fuel companies.

For our funds, investing fossil fuel free means excluding all companies that extract, explore, refine, or process coal, oil, or natural gas, as well as fossil fired utilities. 

When you invest with the Green Century Funds, you know your investments are supporting a fossil fuel free future, no matter the definition you use.

If you are already invested in the Green Century Funds, thank you for helping to grow the fossil fuel free movement. If you are considering going fossil fuel free, download our free personal guide to learn how to get started today.

*The list of 200 companies used by 350.org is known as the Carbon Underground 200. It includes the top 100 public coal and the top 100 public oil and gas companies globally, based on the potential carbon emissions contained in their reserves.

To obtain a Prospectus that contains information about the Funds, please click here for more information, email info@greencentury

Stocks will fluctuate in response to factors that may affect a single company, industry, sector, or the market as a whole and may perform worse than the market. Bonds are subject to risks including interest rate, credit, and inflation. The Funds’ environmental criteria limit the investments available to the Funds compared to mutual funds that do not use environmental criteria.

The Green Century Funds are distributed by UMB Distribution Services, LLC. 235 W Galena Street, Milwaukee, WI 53212.

Inside the free Guide:

• Learn the moral and financial reasons to divest.
• See the different ways you can reinvest.
• Read a special introduction written by Bill McKibben of 350.org
• Published by Green Century, 350.org, and Trillium Asset Management

Learn more about investing Fossil Fuel Free on our updated resources page.

About Green Century

Green Century manages two fossil fuel free mutual funds that keep your money out of environmental polluters and seek competitive returns.

>>  The Green Century Equity Fund invests in the longest-running socially responsible stock index, minus the fossil fuel companies in that index. Read more …

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See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

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

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Now At 400 ppm

Divestment efforts starting to hit coal and oil & gas firms

From an Article by Shawn McCarthy, The Toronto Globe and Mail, Canada, September 25, 2015

Pension funds and other institutional investors are growing wary of an increasing “carbon risk” faced by coal and oil companies which confront a divestment movement that has gone mainstream and an uncertain future of climate-related regulations.

Investors managing some $2.6-trillion (U.S.) in assets have signalled their intention to shift focus away from fossil fuels, a report released at a United Nations climate session this week states. And resource companies will likely face more bad news later this fall when the international Financial Stability Board, under the leadership of Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, releases a seminal report on the risk that “stranded assets” – long-term investments that are rendered uneconomic – would pose to the global banking and pension system.

While oil companies have bigger, more immediate problems given the collapse in crude prices, changing investor attitudes are starting to hit coal-related firms across the globe, including Calgary-based utility TransAlta Corp. And oil sands producers in particular face similar pressure.

“The [climate-change] dialogue is scaring investors away from Canada and away from Alberta,” Dawn Farrell, TransAlta chief executive officer, told an energy conference in Ottawa on Thursday. “If your stock price drops by 50 per cent, where do you get the equity to invest in new technology?” Since the New Democratic Party came to power in Alberta in early May with a promise of aggressive climate policy, TransAlta’s share price has fallen from nearly $12 (Canadian) to close at $6.02 on Thursday.

Launched by U.S. environmental group 350.org, and patterned after anti-apartheid efforts, the divestment movement has become a force on North American campuses and among church leaders. Its impact has been seen as largely political as it sought to create opposition to the fossil fuel industry and support for investment in clean technology firms.

But the movement has grown into something much larger and more threatening to producers, as pension fund managers and other institutional investors are now questioning the long-term returns offered by coal and oil companies.

In a report released in New York this week, U.S.-based Arabella Advisors – which tracks institutional money managers – said some 436 institutions in 43 countries representing $2.6-trillion (U.S.) in assets have committed to divest from fossil fuel companies. That’s up from 181 institutions representing just $50-billion in assets who had made that commitment last year.

“We’re seeing more and more mainstream institutions citing climate risk as a factor” in investment decisions, said Arabella manager Ryan Strode. Those include the University of California endowment fund and the state’s employee pension funds. Earlier this month, the chief investment officer for the University of California system announced it had sold $200-million in holdings in coal and oil sands companies, citing increasing risk from regulation and, in the case of coal, declining demand.

Pension adviser Keith Ambachtsheer hosted a discussion on carbon risk with some key institutional investors in Toronto this week. He said pension managers are increasingly determined to break out of short-term thinking and anticipate longer-term risks.

“As soon as you start articulating what you’re doing as being a long-horizon investor, then climate change immediately kicks in as an issue,” Mr. Ambachtsheer said. “Then you get into a different mode. Rather than it being an ethical thing, it now becomes a question of long-term income streams and cash flows. And if you put a $50 [per tonne] price on carbon, there are a whole bunch of cash flows that just stop.”

Jane Ambachtsheer – Keith’s daughter – is global head for responsible investing at Mercer LLC, a financial services company which released a report this summer on managing carbon risk in long-term investment. Mercer forecast which industries would win and which would lose under aggressive climate policies, and found coal and oil companies would see significant reductions in their annual rates of return over the long term.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Is your money doing good things?

The Hydrocarbon Rap Sheet:  Fossil Fuels Have Been Indicted & Found Guilty

From S. Tom Bond, Retired Professor of Chemistry & Resident Farmer, Lewis County, WV

A “rap sheet” is a police list of a person’s convictions. Coal, oil (petroleum) and natural gas, are powerful figures in today’s world. But they have been “indicted” of some pretty serious stuff by science and common sense. The jury is now back and the verdict is “guilty as charged.”

One of the biggest advantages of petroleum propelled vehicles was – no deposits in the street. Horse drawn carriages are rarely seen anymore. Instead a hot gas came out the exhaust of mechanical vehicles, disappearing magically in the atmosphere. Voila! No problems.

That is, until after World War II. Then it was discovered that the atmosphere, which had been considered an infinite sink, if thought of at all, contained a considerable amount of carbon dioxide. It had been known that the temperature of the earth depended on the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere for decades, and it was rising as a result of burning carbon buried in the earth for hundreds of millions of years, both petroleum and coal. A friend tells me he studied this in an environmental science course in the 1960′s.

It was inevitable that the temperature of the earth would rise also, because removal of the carbon dioxide by plants on earth is slow, hundreds of years. Had world development not happened, it might have taken many decades, but world development and increase in population did occur, and we are now experiencing serious effects of this way of getting energy.

Coal produces many other pollutants as well as carbon dioxide, because it is solid and carries many other elements that form pollutants in gas or suspended in air when it burns. There are too many to list here. Oil contains fewer polluting elements because it is liquid and they have settled out. The energy from burning hydrocarbons comes almost entirely from oxidation of carbon and hydrogen, producing carbon dioxide and water vapor.

Natural gas, a gas because its molecules are smaller, has still fewer pollutant elements, but low and behold, it is a pollutant itself! It warms the earth far more than carbon dioxide. There is a considerable dispute between those who claim higher efficiency in production of energy with gas and those who say gas is even more serious a pollutant than carbon dioxide, and how much of it goes into the atmosphere. Coal contributes to the methane budget, because some methane is trapped in the coal seams that must be removed from active coal mines to avoid explosions. Also, methane is generated in garbage dumps (landfills), from the earth’s herbivorous animals, sewage and many other sources.

There is plenty of hydrocarbon energy to raise greenhouse gases above levels where it would seriously damage the earth even using conventional extraction methods, but fracking with a whole battery of new technologies results in several other kinds of pollution in addition to the escaped methane and the resulting carbon dioxide. Toxic chemicals are used and radioactive drill cuttings are freed up.

Fracking is ideal for financial return to the investor when pollution, health damages, property devaluation and esthetics can be ignored or externalized onto other people. So, it started with a bang in the early 2000′s, but now is in the doldrums. The answer, according to the industry, is to export gas to other places, and continue to disregard the consequences here. The result would be even more environmental destruction.

The major obvious effect of carbon dioxide from burning hydrocarbons is heating the air, raising ambient temperatures. However, air is in contact with the surface of the earth, which is warmed, and with the ocean, which absorbs over 90% of the heat originally present in the air, because it has far more heat capacity (the heat absorbed per degree temperature change). This is circulated, over time, to deeper layers in the ocean and replaced with cool water. It also goes into melting ice, which requires much heat. Melting ice with no temperature change takes enough heat to warm an equal weight of water by 144 Fahrenheit degrees. You can follow the melting of the Arctic Ice here.

The Antarctic ice is cut off from sea surface water circulation by a current in the ocean that goes all the way around it, and by a wind belt. Most of it is also very high above the surface, as much as two miles, so the cooling effect of being high in the atmosphere makes the surface colder, and Antarctic ice continues to grow, because of falling snow. However, the West Antarctic glacier is melting from the bottom up, due to warm currents which come up from the deep.

There are many pictures available of the melting glaciers of Greenland, all of which takes place above sea level.

Melting glaciers are causing the level of the oceans to rise. As the waters warm they expand slightly, but the ocean is miles deep, so the expansion of the water causes the ocean level to rise, too. Since much of the shore line is densely inhabited, millions will be forced to move. Whole island chains will be submerged, along with parts or all of most port cities, such as New York, London, New Orleans, Shanghai, Singapore, Rotterdam and many, many more. This means trillions of dollars of infrastructure will become unusuable as well. Huge land areas would be put under water – including much of Florida, Bangladesh, Holland and adjacent areas.

Only a fraction of the carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere. Most is dissolved in the oceans. Carbon dioxide combines with water to make carbonic acid. Thus the ocean is acidified. In other words the pH is lowered. This affects the ability of animals to make the calcium carbonate shells that protect so many of them. The acidity also affects other shellfish like crab and shrimp, and coral bleaches. The flora and fauna of the earth’s oceans will be altered. Much of it will become extinct.

Another effect of warming is the movement of plants and animals north of their usual range. This effect is observed both on land and at sea. Some organisms are able to make the move, many cannot adapt. There are familiar pictures of polar bears on land, and claims that many have drowned at sea, because ice is reduced in the Far North in some places where they live. They can’t go further north.

Another use of petroleum is to make plastics. The ethane and propane of natural gas are better fuels (higher energy content) than methane, but these chemicals are extracted from “wet” gas for the chemical industry to make ethylene and propylene, and from them plastics are made. That’s what makes “wet” gas more valuable. Do polyethylene (the common black or clear plastic we use so much) sound familiar? Polyvinylchloride? Polystyrene? Polypropylene? Most common plastics come from this source.

The problem with them is that they don’t decompose! They fill our landfills, they wind up along the roadside, and I even find them in my hay and pasture fields, far from the road! A huge amount of them goes into the sea, where they float. Eventually they get ground up into smaller and smaller pieces, where they get eaten by the wildlife, often killing this wildlife indiscriminately. They are ground up smaller and smaller, so even the very tiny creatures get some. When small enough, they have no tendency to settle, and all layers of the ocean are polluted in this way.

Another problem with plastics in the environment is that plastics have other ingredients, plasticizers, and stabilizers (or destabilizers, to make them break up in the sunlight) and so forth, which are not chemicals from the biological realm. Many are endocrine disrupters, having adverse effects in very small amounts on living things. Advanced agriculture is a very large user of plastic.

The answer would be to make biodegradable plastics from naturally occurring raw materials. There is work being done on that right now. A very good article on the contamination problem and the state of research to solve it is here.

As you can see, the Rap Sheet on fossil fuels is long. Fossil fuels stand “indicted” and have been found “guilty.” They have served the human population well, but we have outgrown them. The time is short when the problems will overwhelm us, but we must move on and let fossil fuels rest in peace. The solution comes from the same source as recognition of the problem: science and technology. We MUST adopt new technology provided by science, or the human race will surely perish.