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.

Comments

10 myths about fossil fuel divestment

[mdsolar]

10 myths about fossil fuel divestment are put to the sword here: http://www.theguardian.com/env... Yours is #5. "To sell a stock you have to have a buyer. But the amounts being divested are too small to flood the market and cut share prices, so they won’t be going cheap. Also, the buyers of the stock are taking on the risk that the fossil fuel stocks may tank in the future, if the world’s nations fulfil their pledge to keep global warming below 2C by sharply cutting carbon emissions. If these stocks are risky, then the public and value-based institutions primarily targeted by the divestment movement should not be holding them. The argument that owning a stock gives you influence over a company leads us neatly into the next divestment myth."

Re:10 myths about fossil fuel divestment

[Firethorn]

Having read that, a central core of the divestment theory amounts to "to bankrupt them morally."

That assumes the corporation, like most corporations, wasn't already morally bankrupt to begin with. I mean, US tobacco companies are still plodding along, how more morally bankrupt can you get than them? Even the fossil fuel companies can at least point out all the positives their products bring - fuel for your vehicles so you can move around, energy to heat and cool your homes, keep your computers running, etc...

So, I have to ask, if the values being divested are too small to affect their stock price, are being readily bought by others, and they've already given up on changing said companies by actually buying enough stock to get on the board, how is it supposed to be effective? What's the goal?

When you acknowledge that they already don't have 'morals' to bankrupt. That you're not changing the stock price, you're not depriving them of capital or credit, you're not changing anything.

Putting money into renewable energy helps the renewable energy fields, but is currently, on average, a riskier investment than the traditional companies, many of which have put a lot of money into renewables themselves.