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Category: Climate Change

How much of Harvard’s $40 billion endowment is invested in fossil fuels?

How much of Harvard’s $40 billion endowment is invested in fossil fuels?

Devi Lockwood writes: Figuring out exactly how much of Harvard’s endowment is invested in oil, gas and coal companies is a near-impossible task. Harvard is required to disclose only direct investments in which the university owns shares of a specific company. Harvard says its direct investments amounted to $394 million as of May 2019, or roughly 1 percent of the endowment total. Divest Harvard, a student group, determined that of that approximate amount, $5.6 million was invested in companies that…

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Amazon employees defy ban on speaking out on company’s role in climate crisis

Amazon employees defy ban on speaking out on company’s role in climate crisis

The Washington Post reports: More than 350 Amazon employees violated the e-commerce giant’s communications policy Sunday, in an unprecedented public display of support for colleagues who were warned they could be fired for speaking out to criticize the company’s climate practices. Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of workers concerned about the company’s business with the oil and gas industry as well as its carbon footprint, published quotes from 357 workers in a post on Medium. The comments, all…

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Investing in humanity: British Medical Journal launches campaign for fossil fuel divestment

Investing in humanity: British Medical Journal launches campaign for fossil fuel divestment

A BMJ editorial says: How do we restore hope for humanity? Many of us feel despair at a disintegrating political consensus to save our planet from fire, flood, disease, and conflict. We feel trapped in our high carbon lives and disempowered by commercial influence of companies whose products damage the planet and people’s wellbeing. Evidence for the effects of the politico-commercial complex is clear and alarming. On our current trajectory we will miss carbon emission targets and sustainable development goals,…

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How does a nation adapt to its own murder?

How does a nation adapt to its own murder?

Richard Flanagan writes: The name of the future is Australia. These words come from it, and they may be your tomorrow: P2 masks, evacuation orders, climate refugees, ocher skies, warning sirens, ember storms, blood suns, fear, air purifiers and communities reduced to third-world camps. Billions of dead animals and birds bloating and rotting. Hundreds of Indigenous cultural and spiritual sites damaged or destroyed by bush fires, so many black Notre Dames — the physical expression of Indigenous Australians’ spiritual connection…

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The climate crisis is reshaping the world of finance

The climate crisis is reshaping the world of finance

Bill McKibben, Alec Connon and Elana Sulakshana write: Historians should mark the date. On Jan 14, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, with more than $7.4 trillion under management, announced that the climate crisis has now grown so severe that it has become a force that will “fundamentally reshape” the world of finance. In his annual letter to CEOs, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock and one of the most powerful corporate executives in America, warned that BlackRock now expects to…

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Inequality makes climate crisis much harder to tackle

Inequality makes climate crisis much harder to tackle

Larry Elliot writes: Almost 15 years ago, Nick Stern, then head of the Government Economic Service, produced a report on the economics of climate change in which he called the failure to deal with a heating planet the greatest market failure of all time, and argued that the benefits of early action outweighed the costs. Last week, Professor Stern, now chair of both the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change…

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Doomsday Clock is now 100 seconds from midnight

Doomsday Clock is now 100 seconds from midnight

Live Science reports: Humanity’s headlong dash toward our own destruction is marked in minutes and seconds in the ticking of the hypothetical Doomsday Clock. How close we are to destroying ourselves registers in the nearness of the clock’s hands to midnight — the hour of absolute extinction. In 2019, the clock’s “timekeepers” with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS) fixed the hands at 2 minutes to midnight; that time, set in 2018, is the closest the clock’s hands have…

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When will Australia’s prime minister accept the reality of the climate crisis?

When will Australia’s prime minister accept the reality of the climate crisis?

Carolyn Kormann writes: When Prime Minister Scott Morrison took Australia’s top office, in August, 2018, the leadership of his predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, had been in question for months, if not years, by his coalition of right-leaning National and Liberal parties. But the final blow came after Turnbull supported a national energy plan that would have moderately reduced the power sector’s reliance on fossil fuels, thereby cutting greenhouse-gas emissions and mitigating global climate change. In an attempt to save himself, at…

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BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: Climate crisis will reshape finance

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: Climate crisis will reshape finance

The New York Times reports: Laurence D. Fink, the founder and chief executive of BlackRock, announced Tuesday that his firm would make investment decisions with environmental sustainability as a core goal. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager with nearly $7 trillion in investments, and this move will fundamentally shift its investing policy — and could reshape how corporate America does business and put pressure on other large money managers to follow suit. Mr. Fink’s annual letter to the chief…

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The bleak future of Australian wildlife

The bleak future of Australian wildlife

Ed Yong writes: As temperatures rise, Australia becomes more monochrome. In the ocean, the reefs have been whitening. On land, the forests have been blackening. Successive heat waves have forced corals to expel their colorful, nutrient-providing algae; half of the Great Barrier Reef has died. A near-unprecedented drought and exceptional temperatures—December saw Australia’s two hottest days on record—triggered the unusually intense bushfires that have incinerated almost 18 million acres of land. These disasters are vivid testaments to the consequences of…

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James Murdoch slams Fox News and News Corp over climate-change denial

James Murdoch slams Fox News and News Corp over climate-change denial

The Daily Beast reports: In a long-simmering rift between factions of the Murdoch family over climate change, Rupert’s younger son, James, and his activist wife, Kathryn, are attacking the climate denialism promoted by News Corporation, the global media group, and also by the Fox News Channel overseen by James’ older brother, Lachlan. “Kathryn and James’ views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage of the topic is also well known,”…

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Ocean temperatures hit record high as rate of heating accelerates

Ocean temperatures hit record high as rate of heating accelerates

The Guardian reports: The heat in the world’s oceans reached a new record level in 2019, showing “irrefutable and accelerating” heating of the planet. The world’s oceans are the clearest measure of the climate emergency because they absorb more than 90% of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases emitted by fossil fuel burning, forest destruction and other human activities. The new analysis shows the past five years are the top five warmest years recorded in the ocean and the…

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Want to do something about climate change? Follow the money

Want to do something about climate change? Follow the money

Lennox Yearwood Jr. and Bill McKibben write: If you asked us why a dozen people sat on the floor next to the A.T.M. in a Chase Bank branch on Friday, waiting for the police to arrest us for this small act of civil disobedience, we would come up with the same answer as the famous robber Willie Sutton: “Because that’s where the money is.” We don’t want to empty the vaults. Instead, we want people to understand that the money…

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At Davos we will tell world leaders to abandon the fossil fuel economy

At Davos we will tell world leaders to abandon the fossil fuel economy

Greta Thunberg and others write: We have just entered a new decade, a decade where every month and every day will be absolutely crucial in deciding what the future will look like. Towards the end of January, chief executives, investors and policymakers will gather in Davos for the 50th anniversary of the World Economic Forum. Young climate activists and school strikers from around the world will be present to put pressure on these leaders. We demand that at this year’s…

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In Australia’s burning forests, signs we’ve passed a global warming tipping point

In Australia’s burning forests, signs we’ve passed a global warming tipping point

InsideClimate News reports: As extreme wildfires burn across large swaths of Australia, scientists say we’re witnessing how global warming can push forest ecosystems past a point of no return. Some of those forests won’t recover in today’s warmer climate, scientists say. They expect the same in other regions scarred by flames in recent years; in semi-arid areas like parts of the American West, the Mediterranean Basin and Australia, some post-fire forest landscapes will shift to brush or grassland. More than…

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Those financing climate disaster need to learn from indigenous wisdom

Those financing climate disaster need to learn from indigenous wisdom

Tara Houska writes: “This way of life is not primitive, it is not uncivilised,” I gestured to the image on the screen just above my head. It showed my longtime teacher, Dennis Jones, knocking manoomin (wild rice), the grain sacred to Anishinaabe people, into a canoe. I snapped that photo of us harvesting wild rice years back, before a new pipeline called Line 3 threatened to carry a million barrels of tar sands per day from Alberta through some of…

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