Category Archives: Fossil fuel divestment

Climate Change, Fossil fuel divestment, Sea level rise

Palo Alto passes fossil fuel divestment resolution

Press Release from Peninsula Interfaith Climate Action (PICA)

Interfaith Victory: Palo Alto Fossil Fuel Divestment Resolution Passed

PALO ALTO, CA — February 9, 2014.

The City of Palo Alto, responding to concerns from Peninsula Interfaith Climate Action (PICA), voted unanimously to send a message to CalPERS (California Statement Employee Retirement System), the national’s largest pension fund, to pull its investments out of fossil fuels.

Councilmembers Marc Berman, Patrick Burt, Karen Holman and Liz Kniss submitted the initial “Colleague’s Memo” in favor of divestment. “Climate change poses a top-tier threat to our future. Our obligation to address climate change through all avenues requires support from all sectors,” noted Council member Cory Wolbach. “I was inspired to see the passionate and effective work of these congregations collecting 152 signed letters on behalf of fossil fuel divestment.  Those letters, presented by a cross-denominational coalition, sent a very powerful moral statement.”

Eileen Altman is an associate minister at First Congregational Church in Palo Alto and a PICA member who spoke at the City Council meeting. “As Christians, we share a core set of values and concern for God’s gift of life, both human and all other life. Our investments should reflect our values.” said Rev. Altman. “This concern is not a liberal or conservative value, but is a Christian value. The US political system unproductively magnifies differences when Americans everywhere share 98% of the same values. Climate is about the future of our children and is especially about the people who are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Climate is the biggest social justice issue of our time. From the pews in Palo Alto and throughout the United Church of Christ, the first denomination to pass a resolution to move toward divestment from fossil fuels (in 2013), we welcome the opportunity to respectfully dialogue about climate with churches in all regions of the country and across all party affiliations.”

While the call for fossil fuel divestment may have its strongest impact as a symbolic statement, it also has practical implications for the economic value of employee pensions, explained Debbie Mytels, convener of PICA, which comprises a dozen local congregations that submitted signed letters to the Council in favor of the divestment resolution.

“While we believe it’s a moral obligation to stop using the fossil fuels that are causing sea level rise, extreme weather events and drought-related crop losses,” Mytels said, “it’s also important to question how long investments in these companies will be financially valuable.”

“If we want to protect our employees’ pensions, we need to get CalPERS to pull out of dirty fuels before they become ‘stranded assets’.” said Mytels, citing a recent statement by Deutsche Bank in Germany that said  “to meet climate change targets, over half of identified fossil fuel reserves will have to stay in the ground.”

“While we are pleased with Palo Alto’s progress in becoming a city that supplies ‘carbon free’ electricity to its utility customers,” Mytels said, “we feel it’s time for our city to demonstrate further leadership by joining the call for divestment.”

“Thankfully, Palo Alto itself does not own any investment in fossil fuels of any sort — that’s all the more reason for the Council to consider the long-term safety of our employees’ CalPERS retirement assets,” she added.

Reverend Will Scott, from California Interfaith Power & Light (CIPL), noted that “CIPL and our growing statewide network of more than 640 congregations are grateful for the inspiring work of the Peninsula Interfaith Climate Action group, now a CIPL Regional Working Group. Their regular, committed, and personal engagement on the local level as people of diverse faiths concerned about the climate crisis, is a strong model for other regional working groups in our network. Indeed, they are exemplifying the sincere, collaborative, practical, rooted and creative community resiliency needed throughout the world to meet the seriousness of this global challenge. California Interfaith Power & Light is learning much from PICA’s practices and shared wisdom.”

Palo Alto now joins a growing group of California cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Brisbane, Richmond, Fairfax, and Santa Monica in calling for dropping fossil fuels from employee pension funds. Sunnyvale may be the next city. Other regional agencies, including the Santa Clara Valley Water District, which is mandated to protect Silicon Valley citizens from floods, have also passed similar resolutions due to concerns about sea level rise.

In advance of Global Divestment Day, Feb. 13, 2015, Norway announced last week that it would drop coal and tar sands companies from its national investment portfolio. Similarly, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has made such a decision, along with 50 other philanthropic organizations. The divestment movement is also growing significantly among national faith-based groups, and nearby Stanford University has agreed to eliminate its holdings in coal companies. Today, California State Senate President Kevin de Leon introduced SB 185, directing CalPERs to divest coal fossil fuel investments.

For more information about PICA, see http://www.interfaithpower.org/pica and http://pica.nationbuilder.com/

City of Palo Alto Fossil Fuel Divestment Resolution.

The Palo Alto City Council voted unanimously in favor of divestment:  https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B9dpI7FCQAAfghe.jpg

PICA members celebrate: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B9dpI7JCIAAsuEF.jpg

For more information about the international fossil fuel divestment movement, see http://gofossilfree.org/

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Fossil fuel divestment

Exxon: Destroying Planet Necessary to Relieve Global Poverty

Repost from EcoWatch

Exxon: Destroying Planet Necessary to Relieve Global Poverty

Michael Brune | October 21, 2014
exxonmobil600
An ExxonMobil chemical plant along Cancer Alley in Baton Rouge and New Orleans in Louisiana.

The fossil-fuel divestment movement has been on a roll lately to the tune of $50 billion, but one of its biggest successes happened last month: The world’s most profitable oil company squirmed. ExxonMobil’s vice president of public and government affairs published a critique of divestment that concluded by saying that destroying our planet’s climate by recklessly extracting and burning fossil fuel reserves is necessary to relieve global poverty.

This sudden concern is interesting from a company that holds the record for the highest corporate profits ever posted in the U.S. and whose CEO made more than $100,000 a day in 2012 (including Sundays). ExxonMobil hasn’t earned those kinds of profits by worrying overmuch about the poor of the world. As the Sierra Student Coalition‘s Anastasia Schemkes put it: “This is the oil industry saying ‘please don’t be mean to me’ after bullying vulnerable communities around the globe for decades.”

The real message of ExxonMobil’s blog post was unintentional. The fossil fuel divestment movement, which started on college campuses but has since spread to foundation boardrooms and beyond, is achieving its principal goal, which is to raise awareness of how morally indefensible the actions of companies like ExxonMobil really are. I’m not just talking about its core business of extracting as much oil as it can, wherever it can, while it can. This is a company that pretends to care about climate disruption (with lots of talk about “mitigation,” which is code for “do whatever it takes to keep burning fossil fuels”), while simultaneously funding the climate-denial industry and lavishing its largesse on obstructionist legislators.

How can we begin to get companies like this to change? It’s tough to beat such a Goliath through financial pressure alone. Even the most wildly successful divestment campaign is unlikely to dent this mega-corporation’s profits in the near term. But let’s not forget that even the hugest corporation is made up of real people. And real people start to get uncomfortable when it’s clear that not only is what they are doing terribly wrong—but that other people are taking note.

That’s when they start to get defensive—and we can see that divestment really is making a difference.

Fossil fuel divestment

Exxon Blasts Movement to Divest From Fossil Fuels

Repost from The National Journal

Exxon Blasts Movement to Divest From Fossil Fuels

The oil giant seeks to counter the campaign that urges investors to dump stock in petroleum and coal companies.
By Ben Geman, October 13, 2014

Exxon Mobil is wielding its public relations might against the fossil-fuel divestment movement, signaling that climate-change activists have struck a nerve at the world’s biggest publicly traded oil and gas company.

Exxon Mobil’s blog, titled “Perspectives,” posted a lengthy attack Friday about the divestment movement, which urges universities, churches, pension funds, and other big institutional investors to dump their shares of oil and coal companies as part of the fight against global warming.

But the blog post calls the movement “out of step with reality,” saying it’s at odds with the need for poor nations to gain better access to energy, as well as the need for fossil fuels to meet global energy demand for decades to come.

So far, the climate advocates’ progress at getting a growing number of institutions to shed holdings in fossil fuel companies remains pretty small compared with the scale of the industry they’re battling.

Consider that the roughly 1,700 oil-and-gas and coal companies listed on stock exchanges are worth nearly $5 trillion, notes the research company Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

But the divestment movement has been growing– just last week the University of Glasgow became the first European university to announce divestment plans. And the movement also has a number of high-profile adherents, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African Nobel Prize-winning anti-apartheid leader. (The fossil fuel divestment movement takes its cues from the 1970s and 1980s movement urging divestment from apartheid South Africa.)

Another supporter is Christiana Figueres, the United Nations official shepherding international negotiations aimed at reaching a new global climate pact in late 2015.

But Exxon calls divestment a misplaced solution to climate change.

“Divestment represents a diversion from the real search for technological solutions to managing climate risks that energy companies like ours are pursuing,” writes Ken Cohen, Exxon’s VP for public and government affairs.

Cohen’s post argues that the movement ignores the scale of global energy demand for power, transportation, and other needs, as well as “the inability of current renewable technologies to meet it.”

“Almost every place on the planet where there is grinding poverty, there is also energy poverty. Wherever there is subsistence living, it is usually because there is little or no access to modern, reliable forms of energy,” Cohen writes.

Divestment advocates will find plenty of material to argue about in Exxon’s post. In one case, Exxon cites estimates that renewable energy’s share of the total global mix will be about 15 percent in 2040.

But the activists pushing for divestment, such as Bill McKibben’s 350.org, advocate for more aggressive policies that promote low-carbon energy, and analysts say that would change the global mix a lot more and a lot faster.

While the International Energy Agency has forecast that without policy changes, renewables will meet about 15 percent of total energy needs in 2035, IEA and other agencies have also modeled various other scenarios in which low-carbon energy takes a far larger share.

For instance, in late September, IEA released a “roadmap” of policies explaining how solar power alone could become the world’s biggest source of electricity by 2050 or even earlier.

Divestment advocates have already criticized Exxon’s post.

“This is the oil industry saying ‘please don’t be mean to me’ after bullying vulnerable communities around the globe for decades,” said Anastasia Schemkes, a campaign representative with the Sierra Student Coalition.

Reverend Fletcher Harper, executive director of the pro-divestment group GreenFaith, took issue with Exxon’s assertions that the divestment movement is out of touch. “Divestment advocates have been clear from the start that the divestment campaign is about calling into question the industry’s ‘social license’ to operate. In this regard, divestment is a highly appropriate debate, and highly reality-based,” he said in an email.

Harper also said that advocates agree with the imperative of bringing energy to nations where access is now lacking. “I believe that these energy needs must be met, to the greatest degree possible, with clean, renewable energy. The [Exxon] blog post does not reckon with the fact that coal, oil, and gas combustion are responsible for a large number of deaths annually worldwide,” Harper said.

It’s not the first time Exxon has tussled with divestment advocates.

In response to shareholder activists, Exxon released a report in late March that rebuts advocates’ claims that its fossil fuel reserves are at risk of becoming “stranded assets” in a carbon-constrained world.

 

 

Bakken Crude, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Fossil fuel divestment, Local Regulation, Phillips 66, Santa Maria Refinery

Oakland City Council votes to oppose coal, crude oil trains

Repost from Reuters
[Editor: See also “Oakland City Council Votes to Divest from Fossil Fuel Companies”  – RS]

Oakland City Council votes to oppose coal, crude oil trains

By Rory Carroll, San Francisco, June 18, 2014

(Reuters) – The Oakland City Council has unanimously backed a resolution opposing the use of the city’s rail lines to transport crude oil and coal, a move that supporters hope will call attention to proposed projects that would sharply increase the amount of such cargo rolling through the densely populated city.

The resolution will not halt crude oil trains from entering Oakland since U.S. railroads are federally regulated, but backers hope it will stoke debate about plans for export facilities that would boost demand.

Backers of the resolution are particularly concerned about a proposed upgrade to Phillips 66’s Santa Maria refinery that would allow it to take in more crude oil from North Dakota on trains that would pass by rail through Oakland.

They are also worried about the redevelopment of the Oakland Army Base, which includes the building of a commodities facility that they believe will be used to export coal. The coal would also be moved through the city by rail.

“These proposed export facilities are a serious threat to Oakland and the East Bay communities,” said Jess Dervin-Ackerman of the San Francisco Bay Chapter of the Sierra Club.

“If oil and coal companies have their way, the Bay Area will become the biggest fossil fuel export hub on the West Coast,” she said.

The fuels will not be consumed in the Bay Area, she added, but would just pass through the area on their way to overseas markets.

California has in recent years seen a surge in crude oil arriving by rail on the back of an oil boom in North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation and in Canada, prompting safety and environmental concerns.

Crude oil-by-rail shipments into California increased from about 70 rail tanker carloads in 2009 to nearly 9,500 carloads in 2013, according to state regulators. They are projected to soar in the next few years.

Last July, 47 people were killed in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, when a freight train carrying Bakken crude oil derailed and exploded. Since then, there have been a number of fiery derailments in the United States that have caused environmental damage, but no fatalities.

Separately, the Oakland City Council on Tuesday night unanimously passed a resolution to divest money from city employees from fossil fuel companies, although none of that money is currently invested in those types of businesses.

The move is intended to put pressure on the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), which does hold such investments, to follow suit.

CalPERS is one of the country’s largest managers of public pensions, with $288 billion in retiree assets under management. (Reporting by Rory Carroll, editing by G Crosse)