A huge victory for our fellow Kossack Bill McKibben and planet Earth:
From Financial Times:
A move to turn fossil fuels into the “new apartheid” has gathered pace as a further nine US cities join a push to sell any investments held in the coal, oil and gas industry blamed for climate change.
San Francisco; Boulder, Colorado; and Madison, Wisconsin, are three of the nine cities following Seattle, whose $2bn city employee pension fund this year started looking at selling its fossil fuel holdings following a request from the city’s mayor, Mike McGinn.
The move is the latest step in a campaign spearheaded by Bill McKibben, the US environmental activist, based on the 1980s disinvestment movement that pushed South Africa to end its apartheid system of racial segregation.
http://www.ft.com/...
(free registration required to view article)
The six other cities are:
Berkeley, CA
Richmond, CA
Ithaca, NY
Rochester, Minn.
Eugene, OR
Bayfield, WI
Get your city or town or shire to join the campaign! It's only the beginning... More information here: http://www.mayorsinnovation.org/
Update 1:
From Mogolori in the comments:
Richmond, CA is a big win, as it is home to Chevron. Good government trending there.
Update 2:
A 6:30pm ET email from 350.org tells me the number of participating cities has increased to eleven (11) total. And the latest addition is no slouch...
Santa Fe, NM
Here's a stirring excerpt from the email:
When we started this effort, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in helping end apartheid in South Africa, told us this:
“The divestment movement played a key role in helping liberate South Africa. The corporations understood the logics of money even when they weren’t swayed by the dictates of morality. Climate change is a deeply moral issue too, of course...Once again, we can join together as a world and put pressure where it counts.”
Get involved here:
http://www.gofossilfree.org/