Yes. It starts with measuring dollars moved. This is critical because, while account holders at the major banks may not realize it, most of those financial institutions are financing oil pipelines and other destructive fossil-fuel projects.
We refuse to finance destructive projects like pipelines and offshore drilling. We estimate that, for every dollar you pull out of a big bank and put into a place like Aspiration, you are eliminating up to five pounds of carbon that would have gone into the atmosphere.
Moreover, Aspiration’s Plant Your Change program allows consumers to plant a tree every time they swipe their card. Already, in less than a year’s time, we have funded the planting of five million trees, which has the impact of offsetting the carbon emissions of twenty-three thousand cars.
Between the fossil-fuel-free deposits and the trees planted by Aspiration members, we’ve had up to almost six billion pounds of carbon impact. That’s like taking every car in West Virginia off the road for a year.
And is this just a niche, or are there ways that these signals start to reach the giants at Chase and Citi and so on, who are funding the fossil-fuel industry?
Every time an account holder leaves them to come to us, or any of the small yet growing number of banks who have pledged never to loan one cent to Big Oil and Big Gas, they get that message. Every time the broader anti-fossil-fuel divestment movement we have all helped build announces a new major partner, pulling billions more out of circulation from them, they get that message.
Increasingly, they get that message from their richest customers, too, as more of them are demanding that their dollars be invested in companies that are actually good stewards of our planet. The message is this: the old economy is dying because it was unsustainable. A good economy is coming that will better sustain us all. Join us or be left behind.
It’s the same message my great-great-grandfather sent to his old owners, when he helped start that bank right after slavery ended.
Climate School
We are in a remarkable stretch for environmental journalism. Last week, Jonathan Foley, the executive director of Project Drawdown, listed seven reasons that artificially capturing carbon from the air will not make a major contribution in the climate fight. (The Swedish academics Andreas Malm and Wim Carton offered a European perspective on direct air capture.) Politico’s Michael Grunwald contributed what will likely be the definitive piece on the indefensible idea of burning trees to generate electricity. (“Biomass emits more carbon than coal at the smokestack, plus the carbon released by logging, processing logs into vitamin-sized pellets and transporting them overseas. And solar panels can produce 100 times as much power per acre as biomass.”) Look for a Pulitzer citation for the Tampa Bay Times, for a truly remarkable investigation of the lead poisoning of the workforce at a battery-recycling plant in Tampa. (“It’s not unusual for water to hit liquid lead, triggering violent explosions that send molten metal flying. Scars from lead splashes are so common workers refer to them as ‘tattoos’ and consider them a rite of passage.”) And the Wall Street Journal offered a compelling graphic analysis of how much better electric vehicles are for the climate, noting that “by the time we get to 200,000 miles, the lifespan of a typical car, the emissions comparison isn’t even close.”A Tesla, it turns out, produces less than half the carbon of a comparably sized internal-combustion car.
The United Nations Human Rights Commission has launched an investigation into government suppression of climate protest, inviting people to submit examples. “This repression has taken many forms, from protest bans and laws criminalizing legitimate acts of peaceful assembly, to attempts to paint climate defenders as ‘eco-terrorists,’ to online harassment and physical persecution,” according to the call for inputs. “The COVID-19 pandemic has only amplified the existent restrictions on climate and environmental defenders as states have been enacting emergency measures that further enhance their powers. There is a danger that such new powers and restrictions may outlast the pandemic and may become the new norm.”
A new report from the U.K.-based New Weather Institute, “Sweat Not Oil,” details the sponsorship links between the fossil-fuel industry and athletics. “Sport floats on a sea of sponsorship deals with the major polluters,” Andrew Simms, the report’s co-author, said. “It makes the crisis worse by normalising high-carbon, polluting lifestyles, and reducing the pressure for climate action.”
Visual artists and climate researchers have combined to form a new group, Scientists and Artists for Net Zero. They’re starting their efforts with a letter to John Kerry advocating for a six-month collaboration between scientists, policymakers, and artists to plan for rapid energy transitions—and with a logo employing a new font, Climate Crisis, designed by Finland’s leading newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, which is inspired by melting Arctic sea ice, and can be downloaded here.
Follow-ups: I wrote last year about the emerging Clean Creatives campaign to persuade ad agencies to stop working with the fossil-fuel industry. An article in the Times makes clear that the effort is gaining adherents, citing a major Swedish firm that has sworn off work for oil companies. “There will be a point when it won’t be culturally acceptable to work with these clients,” a principal at a Los Angeles communications firm said. Last week, environmental groups took out a full-page ad in the Financial Times in an effort to pressure the head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, to improve the agency’s annual World Energy Outlook report, which, as I have noted before, has routinely underestimated the power of renewables.
Scoreboard
Last week, Ireland, which has some of the most remarkable climate activists in the world, adopted a plan that calls for a fifty-one-per-cent reduction in emissions from 2018 levels by 2030. That’s one of the most ambitious targets in the world—a decade’s worth of seven-per-cent annual cuts. That legal spur to action is as necessary there as it is in countries around the world, because, as Sadhbh O’Neill writes, in the Irish Times, “We have an impressive record in Ireland of using distant targets as an excuse to postpone action and in the hope that a magical technology will appear, or better still, a different government with fewer financial constraints on public expenditure.”
Source link : https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/there-are-no-borders-in-a-climate-crisis
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Publish date : 2021-03-31 03:00:00
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