Deidre Fulton at Common Dreams writes
New 'Divest for Paris' Challenge Amplifies Global Pressure Before COP21:
Channeling the momentum of an ever-growing movement, climate leaders launched the "Divest for Paris" challenge on Tuesday, calling on institutions, individuals, and governments to align their investments with their values by divesting from fossil fuels ahead of this fall's COP21 climate summit in Paris.
"If you say you want action in Paris, then you have a responsibility to divest from fossil fuels," said May Boeve, executive director of 350.org, which is co-hosting Tuesday's Paris Divestment Conference along with the European Green Party. The conference is timed to coincide with the second day of the latest round of climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany this week, where officials are working to streamline the negotiating text world leaders are expected to finalize in Paris in December.
"By shifting resources from the dirty energy of the past to the 100 percent renewable energy of the future, institutions can model the type of action we need from countries at COP21," Boeve said. "With our climate in crisis, divestment is a moral necessity."
More than 350 institutions around the world have already committed to divest, including the World Council of Churches, the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, and the Park Foundation. Other divestment supporters include the United Nations, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, and UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres. Former EU climate chief Connie Hedegaard recently said divesting from coal, oil, and gas would make "a very important contribution" to the Paris negotiations.
"But the power of the fossil fuel industry threatens to derail these negotiations," 350.org warns. "Fossil fuel companies have 5 times more oil and coal and gas in known reserves than climate scientists think is safe to burn. By divesting we are taking the fossil fuel industry to task for its culpability in the climate crisis. By naming this industry’s singularly destructive influence we are helping to break the hold that the fossil fuel industry has on our economy and our governments."
Tuesday's conference and the "Divest for Paris" challenge are meant to amplify that pressure while offering a practical road map for those entities that do wish to cut ties with dirty energy sources.
"We are hopeful that Paris 2015 will be remembered in years to come as a date at which the international community began getting serious about fighting climate change," wrote Boeve and European Green Party leaders Reinhard Bütikofer and Yannick Jadot in the conference program. "And we are convinced that the divestment movement will be a most relevant factor in that change."
As Bütikofer put it: "There is no future for fossil fuels—or there is no future."
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Joe Klein Unplugged:
Last week I went to a cookout on the beach here ... and for years I've known that one of their guests was Joe Klein. ... I was standing at the cookout minding my own business when Klein started pontificating for the rubes on how "surprising" and "shocking" it was that Grassley, of all people, should have come out and endorsed the "death panels" lie. |
Apparently, Klein doesn't handle real world criticism well, which is a nice way to say he reportedly began shrieking and lying after being pinned down at the cookout by someone who was informed. Plausible? This is a man who after all managed to conjure up the one wrong reason to criticize neocon Charles Krauthammer -- don't trust him because he's handicapped -- despite a rather target rich environment in that respect, got busted cold by Glenn Greenwald for lying about FISA and then ran away saying of his own damn story "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right," and repeatedly sucked up to George Bush for being wrong about basically everything and sticking with it anyway as if that were anything other than a deadly tragic character flaw. This is the Jim Kramer of the neo-liberal pundit world, the journalistic equivalent of the guy who confidently predicts a stock will go up one day and down the next, and then points to the eventual trend no matter which way it goes and pronounces himself prescient and oh-so-very valuable.
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