Amid Climate Crisis, Big Business Keeps Eye on Prize: Profit
December 13, 2013 — SuzanFrom Common Dreams: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/12/05-0
Investors and fossil fuel companies are slowly coming to acknowledge the reality of planetary climate change, but don’t expect solutions from their quarter
Jon Queally
Published on Thursday, December 5, 2013 by Common Dreams
Though the politicians continue to deny its possibility, some of the world’s largest corporations (many of them also its biggest polluters) are already planning for the likelihood of a carbon tax or other financial penalty for industry-generated emissions that are leading the globe towards climate catastrophe.
As the New York Times reports on Thursday:
A new report by the environmental data company CDP has found that at least 29 companies, some with close ties to Republicans, including ExxonMobil, Walmart and American Electric Power, are incorporating a price on carbon into their long-term financial plans.
Both supporters and opponents of action to fight global warming say the development is significant because businesses that chart a financial course to make money in a carbon-constrained future could be more inclined to support policies that address climate change.
In a related but separate development, Inside Climate News reported earlier this week how Bloomberg financial services has introduced a new tool for professional analysts and traders who are already calculating how “companies might fare in the carbon-constrained economy” if and when some of the world’s largest energy companies are forced to leave untapped fossil fuels reserves in the ground.
As ICN’s Elizabeth Douglass reported:
In a move that underscores Wall Street’s growing unease over the business-as-usual strategy of the world’s fossil fuel companies, Bloomberg L.P. unveiled a tool last week that helps investors quantify for the first time how climate policies and related risks might batter the earnings and stock prices of individual oil, coal and natural gas companies.
The company’s new Carbon Risk Valuation Tool is available to more than 300,000 high-end traders, analysts and others who regularly pore over the stream of information that’s available through Bloomberg’s financial data and analysis service. The move significantly broadens and elevates the discussion of “stranded” or “unburnable” carbon reserves—expanding it beyond climate groups and sustainability investors to the desks of the world’s most active and influential investors and traders.
“It demonstrates that there’s demand for the information—more and more investors are interested in these issues,” said Ryan Salmon, senior manager of the oil and gas program at Ceres, a nonprofit that organizes businesses, investors and public interest groups interested in climate change and other issues.
Continue reading at: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/12/05-0
The Education of Bill McKibben: How the Unlikely Activist Learned to Break the Rules
December 13, 2013 — SuzanFrom Yes Magazine: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-to-eat-like-our-lives-depend-on-it/bill-mckibben-book-review
“Sometime in the course of the past decade I figured out that I needed to do more than write—if this fight was about power, then we who wanted change had to assemble some.”
posted Dec 11, 2013
The tasks Bill McKibben set for himself were monumental. Start a genuinely grassroots movement at a time when many big environmental groups focus on mouse-click petitions, fundraising, and lobbying done by professionals. Marshal enough political will to put a finger in the proverbial dike: to hold back climate change, the worst crisis to face society. It has been exhausting work, and to maintain his sense of perspective, he returns again and again to a plot of land he owns in rural Vermont, where a friend has set up a beekeeping business.McKibben’s latest book, Oil and Honey, chronicles his journey into ever-riskier and more confrontational activism over the past two years. The work has changed him: A former staff writer for The New Yorker, a thoughtful scholar, and a polite New Englander, he was never inclined to break the law or start political fights. After writing The End of Nature (1989), the first book to explain the hazards of climate change to a general audience, McKibben remained mostly a purveyor of ideas—and continued writing about everything from economics to genetic engineering.
“Sometime in the course of the past decade I figured out that I needed to do more than write—if this fight was about power, then we who wanted change had to assemble some,” he writes in Oil and Honey.
In 2007 and 2008, McKibben and a group of recent graduates from Middlebury College founded the organization 350.org. The name refers to scientist James Hansen’s quantification of the maximum concentration of carbon dioxide (350 parts per million, or ppm) the atmosphere can contain while still offering “a safe operating space for humanity.” (The planet is currently at 400 ppm, and rising.) The organization sparked what is arguably the most significant grassroots environmental movement in the world: It has coordinated dozens of campaigns and inspired tens of thousands of people to stage demonstrations in nearly every country, set up giant art projects visible from space, and hold community-based work parties in neighborhoods all over the planet.
Still, McKibben felt they needed stronger and more direct tactics. “Global warming was accelerating—2010 had just set the new record for the hottest year ever recorded. It was time to pick up the pace and move from engagement to resistance,” he writes. Oil and Honey begins in the summer of 2011, when he launched a campaign against the massive oil pipeline project, Keystone XL—as part of a larger strategy to diminish the impact and political power of big oil, coal, and gas. McKibben and James Hansen argued that the pipeline would lead the world to a point of no return for climate change, by ramping up extraction of Canadian tar sands oil—a dirty, carbon-intense source of fuel.
Continue reading at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-to-eat-like-our-lives-depend-on-it/bill-mckibben-book-review
Arctic 30 told they can’t leave Russia
December 13, 2013 — SuzanFrom Salon: http://www.salon.com/2013/12/13/arctic_30_told_they_cant_leave_russia/
The Greenpeace activists say they’re being held in the country in defiance of an international order
Lindsay Abrams
Friday, Dec 13, 2013
Despite an international court ruling and the best efforts of Paul McCartney, Russia won’t allow the foreign activists facing trial for boarding an Arctic oil drilling platform, Greenpeace said Friday.
The Arctic 30, consisting of 28 activists and two journalists, face up to seven years in prison on charges of hooliganism. They were released on bail by St. Petersburg courts last month, and on November 22, the U.N. maritime tribunal ruled that the 26 foreign activists must be allowed to leave Russia pending trial.
But the federal Investigative Committee rejected a request for one of the activists’ exit visa, and lawyers for Greenpeace expect that the rest of the non-Russian defendants will be treated similarly. The lawyers had also requested that the defendants be given one month’s notice before the Committee sought to interview them, so that they’d have time to get back to Russia without breaking their bail conditions — a request that was also denied.
Peter Willcox, captain of the ship that was seized during the protest, expressed his frustration in a statement released by Greenpeace:
