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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.
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
You seem to have made a mistake about solar energy payback times, which are about a year. http://cleantechnica.com/2013/...
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.
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."
"There have been a handful of successful divestment campaigns in recent history, including those targeting violence in Darfur, tobacco advertising, and others, but the largest and most impactful one came to a head around the issue of South African Apartheid. By the mid-1980s, 155 campuses – including some of the most famous in the country – had divested from companies doing business in South Africa. 26 state governments, 22 counties, and 90 cities, including some of the nation’s biggest, took their money from multinationals that did business in the country. The South African divestment campaign helped break the back of the Apartheid government and usher in an era of democracy and equality." http://gofossilfree.org/what-i...
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. When things are going south, as they now are for the fossil fuels industry, its always best to be out the door before the other guy figures out what is happening. By the time the negative outflows reach about 5% it will probably be too late for most to divest.
With the price of crude set to fall, some like CITI Bank say into the $30/barrel range, as current inventories increase to maximum capacity in about 3-6 months forcing excess supply onto the open market, alternative energy stocks will also take a hit, but unlike fossil fuel stocks, it will be an excellent opportunity to buy them as they will increase at a relatively more rapid pace than fossil fuels will recover, if they ever recover. At the current rate of increases in efficiency in production and operation of solar and wind, look for 2017-2019 to be the time when it solar and wind to be be cheaper than fossil fuels, no matter how much crude is on the market.
Get out of fossil fuel stocks while you still have a profit and leave others holding the bag.
Might want to pay your bills first.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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.
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
>. 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
To be a bit more specific, the journal Nature has called Nanosolar "the poster child for Silicon Valley's interest in solar power". That sounds like an interesting stock. You might want to consider putting some of your money in that company.
Six years after Nature started pumping Nanosolar, in 2012 they announced they planned to actually start making solar panels pretty soon. I understand their stock is _real_ cheap right now.
Also, I heard Obama is backing two other promising companies, Fisker and Solyndra. He says they'll do great, so you might scoop up some of their stock.
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.
All of the fossil fuels run on science. There is geology and chemistry and pollution control and how to make oil flow in a pipeline. If you school won't invest in fossil fuels, there is a chance you won't consider working for them either. The engineering and science may not get done as quickly and the industry may slow as a result of moral objections.
Of course it must be lie. It can't be getting hotter, which explains why all the world's glaciers are simultaneously melting faster than at any time previously recorded.
Makes one wonder, if its not getting hotter, why is all that ice melting? Why are sea levels rising? Surely those who believe that catastrophic man-made global warming is just a big lie, must have some explanation. One that has a shred of credibility to it. Of course, that would be asking too much.
The reality is global climate change is very much an energy issue and one that will fundamentally change how humans use and produce energy or it will end humanity for sure, primarily by making the environment they take for granted disappear before their eyes.
Of course, as all these firms divest themselves of the oil industry and demand drops, the price for oil will drop as well, making it even more attractive to those needing to save a buck.
-Styopa
I think now that we may be on the verge of major breakthroughs in battery technology, we could soon see the beginning of the end of using gasoline and diesel fuel for motor vehicles anyway.
Around 2010, Volkswagen Chairman Martin Winterkorn predicted that by 2020, a vehicle about the size of today's VW Golf model--with similar carrying capacity in terms of passengers and cargo--could travel 800 km (497 miles) on a single full charge of the car's electric battery pack. Thanks to new forms of lithium-ion batteries that use dry electrodes and graphene sheets and carbon nanotube supercapacitors, such a goal may not be such a far-fetched idea; if Winterkorn's prediction proves true, that will truly start the transition from away from using internal combustion engines fueled by gasoline or diesel fuel for personal vehicles.
However, gasoline and diesel fuel will be around longer until the change I mention above is complete, thanks to new industrial catalysts ("cat crackers") that can convert natural gas into very clean-burning forms of gasoline and diesel fuel--and it will be cheap to make, too. This will provide a "bridge" of fuel technology until long-range electric cars I described earlier become common.
Wikipedia cite FAIL. If you did this in a paper, you'd fail the class.
This isn't academia. This is Slashdot. Wikipedia is an acceptable citation here. If you think there is inaccurate information on the cited page, then point it out. But whining about other people's citations, while presenting none of your own, is childish.
The major holders of these stocks are holding them because its believed to be better than the alternatives, based on what is (for good reason) believed to be relevant reasoning.
Investors have found that its "unlucky" to be superstitious... in other words arbitrary reasoning increases the likelihood of negative outcomes.
The U.N. here is proposing the use of arbitrary reasoning ("oil is bad, mmmkay!") to make investment decisions. I recommend that you follow their advice. The sooner you are broke the better.
"His name was James Damore."
This is something that nuclear power has demonstrated, even when faced with extra costs of lawsuits that are placed on them by the environmental and nimby movements
The 2005 Energy act specifically put measures in place that prevents ordinary people from intefering with the placement of a nuclear reactor. It is impossible for a normal person, or a local community, under the law, to prevent the placement of a nuclear reactor in their community.
Nuclear power has too many establishment, operational and ongoing costs to be an attractive investment anymore. The existence of the Price-Anderson act shows investors that Nuclear power is an investment oxymoron. If it waa safe and profitable, then there would be no need for the P-A act.
Do I believe that solar can become cost competitive, sure... eventually. My money is on nuclear for the next hundred years, assume we do not decide to choke ourselves out by sticking to fossil fuels
I think it should be the other way around. We haven't invested enough in solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power sources yet and we should develop them to derive maximum energy yeild from them.
Nuclear was scaled to quickly in the first place - jumping from 100Mw to 1Gw too quickly to understand the proper safety systems required and coming to terms with the surrounding factors that were not well understood when the plants were first conceptualized. Simply put like coal, nuclear power has consequences that weren't well understood.
I think there is a place for Nuclear power, just not in our generation. If you really support nuclear power and want to see it done properly stepping back now and building the foundational infrastructure whilst developing reactor technology means designing and building for 100 years to support a proper nuclear infrastructure that can last 1000-5000 years.
It is an ambitious long term goal that would change the very nature of the world economy to achieve that could guarantee the future of humanity instead of condeming it to reduced birth rates and transgenic disease the way the shortsighted vision the current nuclear industry does. People talk about Nuclear power, but if you engage in the cognitive effort of what is *really* required to make it work you find it is nothing like the nuclear industry we have now.
All of the current accidents show that humans are not mature enough to have the long terms vision required to deal with nuclear power right now.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Military Intelligence, Virgin Birth...
The truth can be determined with FIVE MINUTES of looking, and invariably the people who are trotting out this "solar panels use more energy than you get" BULLSHIT aren't interested in facts. Its an outright lie that someone has perpetrated on the public and the people who continue to circulate it are either VERY ignorant, like they haven't read Wikipedia, or they're actively dishonest. There's no legitimate skepticism involved at this point. If someone had brought this up 20 years ago we'd have all scratched our heads and thought "well, that's a good question, sounds wrong, but we'll get back to you." Today, in 2015? Its just a scurrilous lie.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson