Slashdot Mirror
Fossil Fuel Divestment Has Doubled In the Last 15 Months (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A little over a year ago, it was big news that thousands of people and hundreds of institutions controlling more than $2.6 trillion in total assets had pledged to remove their investments from stocks, mutual funds, and bonds that invest in fossil fuel companies. A year later, that number has doubled. According to a report by DivestInvest, a philanthropy helping to lead the movement, more than 688 institutions and 60,000 individual investors worth $5.2 trillion have pulled their investments from fossil fuel companies and have reinvested a portion of their assets into clean energy companies. In September 2015, 436 institutions and 2,040 individuals worth $2.6 trillion had divested. For comparison, the total net worth of investors who had pulled out of the fossil fuel market was just $52 billion in September 2014. Divestment is increasingly seen as one of the stronger moves that private citizens and companies can take to support the move to clean energy. The movement started in earnest in 2011 when college students began petitioning their institutions to remove their assets from stocks, bonds, and mutual funds that invest in fossil fuel companies. What was seen as a gimmick at the time appears to be gaining real momentum a year after the Paris Climate Treaty was signed.
The only way Trump is going to get coal miners back to work is to use taxpayer money to give every American a sack of coal for Christmas.
By this metric, I "divested" myself last year of a substantial amount of energy sector stocks and reallocated to "green" electric utilities.
What actually happened is the price of oil tanked, there's no limit on supply, the floor went out on the returns and there is no sign of a rise in price in the futures markets.
I'll be more impressed if this trend continues when oil goes on the upswing after growth in consumption rebalances with supply glut. I've got $0.02cdn on this "trend" fast reversing if that's the case - and my $0.02 isn't worth what it was a few years ago for the same reason.
..don't panic
The article isn't clear but it implies that most of the divestment comes from removing fossil fuel companies from stock portfolios.
If so then the companies aren't buying those stocks back, somebody else is buying them. It doesn't effect the company one bit, other than maybe drive the price down minutely while it's a sellers market. All that really does is minutely help the buyers who are now taking on the risk and the reward of owning that stock.
Either I'm confused about what they're doing or they are.
This means my investment in oil, shale, and natural gas should reap even larger returns
Not true. They sell their investments to other investors. That by itself has zero effect on your investment. But if this happens enough, it signals the market that these investments may not be as worthwhile, and new investors may offer lower prices as a result. Down goes your portfolio.
Freedom to fear. Freedom from thought. Freedom to kill.
I guess the War on Terror really is about freedom!
By divesting in these companies, you decrease demand for their stock. That drives the stock price down. Which allows the company to buy back its stock at a lower price. When it pays dividends, it gets to keep more of those dividends instead of having to distribute them to shareholders, because it owns more of its own shares. So by divesting from these companies, you're allowing the people running them who are gung-ho about fossil fuels to keep a larger percentage of their profits to reinvest into more future fossil fuel production.
OTOH if you buy up as many shares of the stock as you can, you gain voting power at annual shareholder meetings. Usually this means you get more votes for who gets elected to the board of directors who oversee the top officer of the company. Most of these companies aren't fossil fuel companies; they're energy companies. They dabble in renewables and nuclear power, it's just that most of their operations are in fossil fuels. If you can get enough shares to elect anti-fossil fuel people to the board of directors, they would have the influence to get the corporate officers to decrease future fossil fuel operations and invest more heavily in renewables.
I guess the hope is that instead of investing in fossil fuel companies, you can invest the money in renewable energy companies. And that eventually the renewable energy companies will drive the fossil fuel companies out of business. But as I said, most of these fossil fuel companies are actually energy companies. Unlike pro-renewables people who are mostly anti-fossil fuels, the pro-fossil fuels people are not anti-renewables. They simply prefer fossil fuels because they're cheaper. If renewables become cheaper than fossil fuels (whether naturally or after government subsidies), they will simply shift their operations more towards renewables. So I'm really skeptical the "drive them out of business" plan would work.
So the best course of action would seem to be to invest heavily into fossil fuels companies, elect directors sympathetic to your cause, and have them exert pressure on the corporate officers to steer these companies away from fossil fuels and towards renewables.
Assuming he reinvests as the share price goes down, the per-share dividends will increase (all else being equal).
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
An that answer would be none.
I certainly hope so.
You know if you little snowflakes stopped worrying so much over what Trump might do and start telling him what you want done, well this might all work out after all.
I want Trump to either divest from all his business interests or resign from the presidency. Plus release his tax returns like every presidential candidate have done for the last 40 years, and like all his cabinet nominees will be doing for their Senate confirmation hearings.
The share price dropping gives the corporation the ability to buy back shares at a lower price. This improves the ability of the company to do things like go private or otherwise defend itself from troublemakers in the general public.
A well established company with ongoing profits needs stockholders like a boat needs a hole.
The only harm that such divestitures cause a company are that some employees who have been rewarded with stock options will see the value of those options fall for a few years until the divestiture fad falls off.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Exxon shares probably went up already, Trump wants the CEO as Secretary of State
"If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem."
Yeah, no. You can be not part of the solution and not part of the problem.
Ooh, ooh! I can answer that one! Absolutely nothing whatsoever, because it's a charitable foundation and doesn't have business contracts with countries in the Middle East.
The Clinton Foundation has raised $50m or less from Middle Eastern countries since inception, out of a total of $2bn.
I hope that clears things up for you.
Yeah... calling people who are worried about what a fascist tyrant may do "little snowflakes" would be more impressive if the conservatives in America were not the most censorious little snowflakes in the country.
Seriously - there is nobody more easily offended than a conservative. They may rail against political correctness but they have their own brand of it. The major difference is that theirs is not polite and isn't done out of concern for anybody but themselves. Liberal PC tries to keep you from harming vulnerable people. Conservative PC tries to keep you from being appropriately critical of government policy.
Liberals complain if you use the n-word. Conservatives complain if you burn a flag. Liberals just want trans people to be able to pee where they feel most comfortable, conservatives can't stand that but will defend a politician who enjoyed walking in on nude, underage girls in their dressing rooms.
Liberals say "maybe we should stop shooting unarmed people for walking while black", conservatives call them racist for just daring to be critical about police behaviour. Conservatives consider all unionized public workers to be arrogant thieves more interested in their own power than making things better for members... EXCEPT of course when it's police or border patrol - then they are dutyful public servants who risk their lives and deserve nothing but uncritical respect. And if you dare question that narative it's job-loss and ostracising time.
There is nothing more hypocritical than a conservative complaining about "PC" ness. They are pointing long fingers at a behaviour they themselves engage in more frequently, more passionately and with far more power to call upon.
They complain about liberals who defend traumatized students right to be forewarned if the material they are about to cover relates to the source of their trauma in order to let these students properly mentally prepare themselves to confront this material and so be able to actually participate in the debate. But then they do a name-and-shame campaign of "professors who teach from a liberal perspective" because conservative students can't stand the idea of being confronted by non-conservative ideas in class. At least one professor on the list, who happens to be female, was written up for "teaching from a female perspective".
https://www.cato.org/publicati...
You don't get to complain about political correctness until patriotic correctness no longer exists.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Every other country where a leader like him became a tyrant had similar separations of power, they all had constitutions, they all had equivalents to the supreme court. That structure only works if the president plays by the rules. It assumes a measure of sanity.
It assumes he won't drag every democrat in congress from their beds one night and shoot them.
It assumes the same about supreme court judges.
A sufficiently determined leader, with sufficient public support, can dismantle the entire system in a week. It's happened over and over - including at least 6 times in the 20th century. It happened in Italy, in Germany, in Spain.
All the times it happened it followed the same pattern - and the first step was always a campaign like Trumps, always the EXACT same rhetoric as his, always the exact same campaign promises.
Americans are rightfully afraid of the fascist who comes with a smile. But most of them don't. Most fascists come as screaming and shouting orators, bombastic demagogues who rile people up and say things others would consider beyond the pale (and then convince their spectators that the other people believe hte same things but are just too scared to say it).
They all promise to be the one person who can fix whatever ails the nation. It's never "us" it's always "I".
They always sell the contradictory tale of the enemy who is both easy to defeat and an existential threat all at once. These two things cannot both be true - but they always claim it. Trump has followed this one to the letter. Half his speeches described ISIS as if they are far more dangerous to America than they actually are, the other half he spoke of how he will destroy them in a week.
And, in a grand irony, like every fascist before him - he is doomed to lose every war, because fascists NEVER win the war -they can't as they are constitutionally incapable of accurately assessing the strength of their enemies. It's what happens when you believe them a powerful force intent and capable of your destruction - and a weak enemy that's easily defeated all at the same time.
This is your Musolini. This is your Franco.
He is risen, and like many others - he did so through the electoral process.
Your argument is basically that we should pretend his campaign never happened, nothing he said was said. We should let him start with a clean slate, and only act after he's been in government a while... no. That's bullshit. The campaign DID happen. He DID make those speeches. He DID make those promises. He DID promise to violate EVERY amendment in the constitution except perhaps the second (his immigration policy alone would violate everything from the due process clauses to the 4th amendment).
Assume he meant what he said - and realize that this makes him a Tyrant right now. And right now - he is still reasonably easy to defeat.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Your absolutely irrational. His real estate empire is big enough that it can't be divested in a meaningful time frame, and to attempt so would seriously damage that part of the real estate market.
Of course he could get rid of his empire - he could sell it for 10 cents on the dollar to some non-profit, which slowly sells of the assets. If he is really worth 10 billion, that would leave him one billion - or, assuming he retires in 2020, and manages to stay alive another 50 years ("the greatest age ever seen"), 20 million a year just from the capital, without any profits from investment. If he gets a return of 2 percent, that's 20 million a year forever - or more per year than a typical well-educated, well-employed software-engineer makes in a lifetime.
If he doesn't sell, either he's greedy, or he know it's not worth remotely what he claims.
Stephan
Similarly, we shouldn't lock murderers up, we should join in them in their murder sprees, while trying to convince them to stop murdering, or at least murder a little bit more nicely.
Yeah... the unsubstantiated claim of possibly buying ... an appointment.
That is an atrocity.
Of course the president elect actually having used his foundation to bribe TWO different state attorney generals not to criminally charge him - is entirely acceptable right ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *