Humans Fighting Back Against Climate Change

At some point it will be too late. Earth may become uninhabitable. I can imagine Koch grandchildren firing up their spaceships and taking off for the next planet they'll destroy. Maybe they'll take along the conservative legislators and political entrepreneurs who aided and abetted them along for the ride. I mean, even when they get to Planet X, someone has to wash the dishes and dig the ditches. The rest of us? We'll curse our grandparents for not having saved us when they could of. I keep a list of Koch products handy and go out of my way to avoid them when I shop. It's not enough; it's not even near enough.

A couple weeks ago, Desmond Tutu, writing for The Guardian called for an apartheid-style boycott to save the planet. "Twenty-five years ago," he wrote, "people could be excused for not knowing much, or doing much, about climate change. Today we have no excuse. No more can it be dismissed as science fiction; we are already feeling the effects." And he knows exactly who to blame.

This is why, no matter where you live, it is appalling that the US is debating whether to approve a massive pipeline transporting 830,000 barrels of the world's dirtiest oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Producing and transporting this quantity of oil, via the Keystone XL pipeline, could increase Canada's carbon emissions by over 30%.

If the negative impacts of the pipeline would affect only Canada and the US, we could say good luck to them. But it will affect the whole world, our shared world, the only world we have. We don't have much time.

This week in Berlin, scientists and public representatives have been weighing up radical options for curbing emissions contained in the third report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The bottom line is that we have 15 years to take the necessary steps. The horse may not have bolted, but it's well on its way through the stable door.

Who can stop it? Well, we can, you and I. And it is not just that we can stop it, we have a responsibility to do so. It is a responsibility that begins with God commanding the first human inhabitants of the garden of Eden "to till it and keep it." To keep it; not to abuse it, not to destroy it.

The taste of "success" in our world gone mad is measured in dollars and francs and rupees and yen. Our desire to consume any and everything of perceivable value-- to extract every precious stone, every ounce of metal, every drop of oil, every tuna in the ocean, every rhinoceros in the bush-- knows no bounds. We live in a world dominated by greed. We have allowed the interests of capital to outweigh the interests of human beings and our Earth.

Throughout my life I have believed that the only just response to injustice is what Mahatma Gandhi termed "passive resistance." During the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, using boycotts, divestment and sanctions, and supported by our friends overseas, we were not only able to apply economic pressure on the unjust state, but also serious moral pressure.

It is clear that those countries and companies primarily responsible for emitting carbon and accelerating climate change are not simply going to give up; they stand to make too much money. They need a whole lot of gentle persuasion from the likes of us. And it need not necessarily involve trading in our cars and buying bicycles!

There are many ways that all of us can fight against climate change: by not wasting energy, for instance. But these individual measures will not make a big enough difference in the available time.

People of conscience need to break their ties with corporations financing the injustice of climate change. We can, for instance, boycott events, sports teams and media programming sponsored by fossil-fuel energy companies. We can demand that the advertisements of energy companies carry health warnings. We can encourage more of our universities and municipalities and cultural institutions to cut their ties to the fossil-fuel industry. We can organise car-free days and build broader societal awareness. We can ask our religious communities to speak out.

We can actively encourage energy companies to spend more of their resources on the development of sustainable energy products, and we can reward those companies that do so by using their products. We can press our governments to invest in renewable energy and stop subsidising fossil fuels. Where possible, we can install our own solar panels and water heaters.

We cannot necessarily bankrupt the fossil fuel industry. But we can take steps to reduce its political clout, and hold those who rake in the profits accountable for cleaning up the mess.

And the good news is that we don't have to start from scratch. Young people across the world have already begun to do something about it. The fossil fuel divestment campaign is the fastest growing corporate campaign of its kind in history.

Last month, the General Synod of the Church of England voted overwhelmingly to review its investment policy in respect of fossil fuel companies, with one bishop referring to climate change as "the great demon of our day." Already some colleges and pension funds have declared they want their investments to be congruent with their beliefs.

It makes no sense to invest in companies that undermine our future. To serve as custodians of creation is not an empty title; it requires that we act, and with all the urgency this dire situation demands.

Inspired, Bill Moyers invited Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund and a catalyst in the coalition of 17 foundations known as Divest-Invest Philanthropy and Thomas Van Dyck, Senior Vice President/Financial Advisor at RBC Wealth Management, and founder of As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy foundation to be his guests this week. The two of them are urging foundations, faith groups, pension funds, municipalities and universities to sell their shares in polluting industries and reinvest in companies committed to climate change solutions.

In his introduction, Moyers noted that although there are ups and downs in this kind of approach, "divestment has worked once before-- and in a big way. Three decades ago, students, religious communities, and unions sustained a campaign against U.S. companies doing business with South Africa and helped put an end to apartheid. Only four months after his release from prison, Nelson Mandela came to California to say 'thank you' to Americans who kept up the economic pressure." Moyers pointed out that a foundation executive told him last week that it's virtually impossible for anyone's hands to be completely clean in a society as capitalist as ours.

THOMAS VAN DYCK: I think that's a fair question. I mean, society's addicted to oil. And we need to get off of it. And we need to start moving aggressively in that way.

ELLEN DORSEY: There is nothing that would stop the fossil fuel industry from using the capital expenditures that it's currently-- the amounts of capital being expended for new fossil fuel energy. There’s nothing that would stop them from instead shifting that to clean and safe energy sources. There's nothing stopping them from doing that. However, they're not. That says that we need to take action.

THOMAS VAN DYCK: Fossil fuel companies receive $1.9 trillion in subsidies globally on an annual basis. So here's this very, very profitable industry being funded by governments around the world to the tune of $1.9 trillion to basically drill more oil. So they're saying, nothing's going to stop us. We have the regulators in our pocket. They're not going to make us change.

BILL MOYERS: The scientific community says that to avoid possible catastrophe, we have to stay below two degrees celsius of warming, right?

THOMAS VAN DYCK: Correct.

BILL MOYERS: And to stay at that level, we cannot release more than 565 gigatons of carbon dioxide in the future. But the fossil fuel companies have nearly five times that amount of coal, oil, and gas reserves of which they would have to leave 80 percent in the ground if they didn't take us-- if we don't go over the edge to catastrophe. Are you asking them to walk away from billions of billions, maybe trillions of dollars that are stored in the earth?

THOMAS VAN DYCK: And that's the risk to investors. It's because they can't burn that without having huge cost to society, to other businesses, to the way of our life, to people all around the planet. So that's why we're saying, look it, investors, there's a huge risk here. Because the governments aren't going to tolerate allowing the fossil fuel companies to wreak this type of havoc on civilization.

BILL MOYERS: But you don't leave that much money in the ground. You wouldn't bury it in your backyard, which in effect is what you're asking them to do.

ELLEN DORSEY: We don't have a choice. We don't have a choice. And it's not really a question of what the fossil fuel industry is going to do with their reserves. It's a question of what we as a global society are going to do to orchestrate the energy transition that we need. If they burn those reserves, we cook the planet irreparably. That can't happen.

And what is so powerful about this movement is that it is a true alignment between ethical and financial interests. Because not only must we act to stop the worst excesses of climate change, but financially, it's the smart thing to do. We have to deflate that bubble before it bursts.

BILL MOYERS: I saw research recently from the University of Oxford, that studied divestment movements, earlier divestment movements, against the arms industry, the pornography industry, the gambling industry, and concluded that their direct financial impact on price shares was small. What makes you think this time is different? And how many billions of dollars would it take for you to nuke the energy business? I mean, to really make them hurt?

THOMAS VAN DYCK: Making them and making society realize that we have to get off of our addiction to oil is really the key. That we have to remove oil or limit oil or use it much more responsibly than we do today. As we-- it can be measured in billions of dollars. But really what it is is say look, take your capital expenditures and invest them in something in clean technology, broadly defined.

Now I don't want to just think-- not just solar and wind, very broadly across the entire economy. If the oil companies took their excess capital and did it, that would be a good thing. If the governments would take their subsidies, $1.9 trillion dollars and move it from fossil fuels and give it to clean technology, energy efficiency, buildings, LED lighting, promoting that, you could get catalytic change, significant innovation, job creation, and you wouldn't be affecting, you know, people who are generally economically disadvantaged.

So I think that it's not just about measuring how much the company drops its access to capital. These are very, very wealthy companies, which is one of the reasons why we're trying to turn them into a moral pariah. Because yes, we all do use oil for now. But we need to start using it much more wisely. And we're going to have to make some choices. And we need to spur that type of innovation, like we did under Kennedy to go to the Moon, we need to spur the same innovation to create a sustainable economy that's based on the energy of the future, not on the energy of the past.

ELLEN DORSEY: And Bill, that same Oxford study that said that there was not always an immediate economic impact from the divestment activity ultimately concluded that there was powerful political impact in many of these campaigns, including the apartheid campaign. And that's ultimately what we need is to put a price on carbon. And we need to have a policy process that can be successful and is not captured by the influence of the fossil fuel industry. And that's, I think, the big play, at stake.

The video below is the whole show. But before you watch it, let me mention one other important way to fight back against those who would destroy our planet to make themselves and their masters wealthier. Just do not vote for any conservatives-- not ever. That means no Republicans and no Blue Dogs and no New Dems. Just swear them all off-- before it's too late. The Blue America candidates are all committed to-- imagine-- taking the extraordinary means it requires to prevent the destruction of the planet. No one can call themselves a progressive otherwise.