We are continuing our series on the 7 Aspects of Divestment from Fossil Fuels, a powerful tool to combat global warming. Name and Shame The Carbon Underground 200 is a list of the 200 worst offenders – the top 100 public coal companies globally and the top 100 public oil and gas companies globally, ranked by the potential carbon emissions content of their reported reserves.
Bank of America, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase rank as the top-three financiers of mountaintop-removal coal mining and coal-fired power plants in the US, according to a report by the Sierra Club, Rainforest Action Network, and BankTrack. If your organization banks with one of these corporate mega-banks, its money is supporting fossil fuels.(i)
The process of divesting from fossil fuels follows a certain timeline. (What is Divestment from Fossil Fuels? It’s basically un-investing from oil, gas and coal.) And where an organization is on this timeline determines the type of action, talking points, and answers that activists need to use. I break the timeline down into the Consideration phase, the Declaration, and the Implementation phase.
Divestment is the opposite of investment: you can think of it like “uninvesting.” To divest from fossil fuels means to sell all the oil and gas company stocks in your investment portfolio (or your university’s portfolio, or your faith community’s portfolio, or your city’s portfolio…). Every day, the fossil fuel industry moves steadily closer to killing the planet and rendering humanity extinct. It has already begun: People are dying from climate-change-driven storms and diseases. From farmland to fisheries, people’s livelihoods…
What is “divestment”? You can think of it like “un-investment.” Or more significantly, investing your money in something else. In this case, we’re talking about divestment from fossil fuels. Coupled with reinvestment in clean energy and post-carbon infrastructure.