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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.
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.
Now there's a textbook oxymoron.
They should mandate that all UN organizations stop all live meetings and switch to video conferencing only. The amount of jet fuel currently burned from these meetings and conferences would be immense. If not, then they're a bunch of hypocritical SOBs.
Wow.. If using fucktarded repeatedly didn't show how fucking stupid you are, using USian as if it was an actual word most certainly does.
Here is a hint, the accepted term- even internationally is American. It is because the country is the United States of America and is the only country in north or south America that ends it's country name with America. Other countries have America in their official names, but they do not end it with America in neither their official language or the English version of the name so no other country has claim to the usage.
But it is not just the US who doesn't do anything about AGW concerning coal, natural gas, or oil (which it actually is, per capita GHG emissions in the US was 19.1 metric tons and in 2010, it was 17.6 which is a greater per capita drop than Canada, Japan, China, Italy, Australia, and only 2 tenths of a metric ton less than France). China, India (who both have surpassed the US in raw emissions), almost all third world countries, simply do not give a shit as much as you think they should either. In fact, Most of Europe who put arbitrary limitations on themselves ended up moving production over seas (off shoring) to eliminate accounting of carbon more than eliminating the carbon emissions itself. And Germany, they plateaued and seem to be increasing their emissions now, but they had the added benefit of combining two separate systems (East and West Germany) and doing away with redundant pollution sources with news more efficient sources which explains most of their reductions.
Here is another hint. Perhaps you wouldn't be afraid to post real posts and even use a real moniker if you actually paid attention and knew what was going on rather than jerk your knee so hard that you hit yourself in the head and can only speak from emotion.
The reality is that the smart money is now with those who divest in fossil fuels first and put their earnings in alternative energy stocks will be the big winners and those who are left holding fossil fuel stocks until they finally collapse the big losers, which rather than a complete collapse will be like a leaky tire, loosing its value steadily over time, while production costs continue to climb. State investment funds, universities, and trusts in progressive states are already lightening up on fossil fuels, so their shareholders will come out ahead.
Yeah, nothing kills an industry like low prices and near ubiquity.
You guys actually believe this stuff, don't you?
Whenever an economic or scientific question becomes politicized, a pandora's box of unintended consequences is just waiting to jump out. The only saving grace to the UN pushing for divesting fossil fuel investments is that they are completely incompetent, and even more lacking in 'teeth'.
I'm not a huge fan of coal, but you know what I like even less? Squeezing poor countries (and by extension, poor people) -- the developed world can afford to pay more per KW/h, as well as put money into the R&D for alternatives; but assuming that a poorer country should waste capital on this green-washed lunacy, is akin to kicking the ladder out from underneath the developing world.
We don't need "cleaner coal technologies." We need coal to be GONE. The same goes for pretty much *all* carbon-intensive fossil-fuel industries.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.