Fossil fuels divestment campaign is gathering momentum

[n2doc]

Bill McKibben


The world has a choice when dealing with climate change. One is to decide it's a problem like any other, which can be dealt with slowly and over time. The other is to recognise it as a crisis, perhaps the unique crisis in human history, which will take rapid, urgent action to overcome.

Science is in the second, scared camp – that's the meaning of the IPCC report issued last month, which showed that our planet is already undergoing climatic shifts far greater than any experienced in human civilisation, with far worse to come.

And those of us urging divestment from fossil fuel stocks are in the second camp too – we recognise that business as usual is quite simply impossible.

In fact, the most important feature of the IPCC report is probably that it adopted the analysis put forward by Carbon Tracker analysts in the UK and divestment activists who started their campaign a year ago in the US. The scientists' report quite explicitly said that most of the coal and oil and gas that the fossil fuel industry has identified and plans to mine or drill must remain in the ground to avoid climate catastrophe.

That in turn is why the fossil fuel industry, when it isn't in outright denial about climate change, falls into the first camp: slow, measured change would be nice. Because then we could pump up all the carbon we've told our shareholders and our banks about. Because then our stock prices will stay nice and high. Because then we won't have to confront reality – otherwise known as physics – for a while longer.

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http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/29/fossil-fuels-divestment-campaign-gather-momentum

[Jim Lane]

1. The linked article is weak on explaining any practical impact.

McKibben's main point is essentially a moral one: If you see climate change as a problem then you shouldn't be profiting from helping to cause it.

Whether divestment would actually reduce carbon emissions is another matter. Major fossil-fuel companies aren't going to modify their conduct because of this. It would affect only a company that mostly does other stuff but has a minor fossil-fuel involvement, and decides to end that involvement to bolster its stock price. Even then, if it owns one oil field and sells it, the result is merely that a different company will be drilling that oil.

The article makes a glancing reference to the impact of divestment from companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa. I question the analogy, though. Many companies were in the position of having business interests in South Africa that were a comparatively small part of their overall operation. The BP's of this world simply won't pull out of fossil fuels the way some companies pulled out of South Africa.