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UN Backs Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign

mdsolar sends this report from The Guardian: The UN organization in charge of global climate change negotiations is backing the fast-growing campaign persuading investors to sell off their fossil fuel assets. It said it was lending its "moral authority" to the divestment campaign because it shared the ambition to get a strong deal to tackle global warming at a crunch UN summit in Paris in December.

The move is likely to be controversial as the economies of many nations at the negotiating table heavily rely on coal, oil and gas. In 2013, coal-reliant Poland hosted the UNFCCC summit and was castigated for arranging a global coal industry summit alongside. Now, the World Coal Association has criticized the UNFCCC's decision to back divestment, saying it threatened investment in cleaner coal technologies.

5 of 190 comments (clear)

  1. Re: How about more solar education? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You are not even close to correct with regards to energy payback for photovoltaics. They recover their energy inputs in 1-4 years

    http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_energy_gain

  2. Mistake by mdsolar · · Score: 4, Informative

    You seem to have made a mistake about solar energy payback times, which are about a year. http://cleantechnica.com/2013/...

  3. Re:Fossil fuel divestment makes for smart money by Harlequin80 · · Score: 5, Informative

    You are joking right???

    World wide coal consumption has increased EVERY year for the past 30 years and is predicted to continuing increasing for the next 30. In the last decade coal consumption has sky rocketed. The reason the price is low at the moment is because too many supplies came on tap at the same time.

    As for the oil price, again you are seeing a battle for market share. Irrespective of that oil is rarely used for electricity generation and is predominately used for transport. As it stands electricity, no matter how it is generated, is incapable to replacing oil for transport.

  4. Re:United Nations Headquarters by sumdumass · · Score: 2, Informative

    They could save a lot more money by going home and phoning it in which is basically what it appears they do anyways. I mean they sat on their hands watching genocide, they largely didn't raise an eyebrow when Russia invaded the Ukraine. Sure, they have the charters and declarations and public statements like that sound grand, but even in their most recent peace keeping mission, they picked up and left when bullets started flying their way. I guess keeping the peace was not the real objective? And don't get me started on the peace keepers raping and pillaging

    Yeah, it doesn't seem like there is much they do well that cannot be done over the phone or in a video conference with modern technology.

  5. Re: How about more solar education? by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 5, Informative

    There is every reason to consider the cost of the power inputs that are required to produce green energy.

    Overly optimistic calculations made ethanol from corn look like a great thing because they did not consider the energy that is spent creating the farm equipment, sowing and harvesting the corn etc

    Anybody coming to the table with a 'new' power source that seems to ignore these costs should be sent packing to do their homework

    --
    Wherever You Go, There You Are