ANALYSIS
The writing is on the wall for fossil fuels, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor in New York
The most significant development in New York this week, apart from the massive People’s Climate March on Sunday, was an announcement by the Rockefellers — heirs to the Esso fortune — that their philantropic foundation is to divest from fossil fuels.
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which controls $860 million (€671 million) in assets, is joining a coalition of investors that includes cities, churches, universities and healthcare groups to pull a total of $50 billion (€39 billion) out of fossil fuels over the next five years.
What would oil tycoon John D Rockefeller have made of it? “We are quite convinced that if he were alive today, as an astute businessman looking out to the future, he would be moving out of fossil fuels and investing in clean, renewable energy,” the fund’s statement said.
The announcement was timed to coincide with UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon’s summit on climate change, which concluded on Tuesday with a gala dinner for more than 120 world leaders at the Waldorf Astoria hotel, hosted by President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle.
That the heirs of John D. Rockefeller — whose vast wealth built Rockelfeller Center in midtown Manhattan and provided the site where the United Nations headquarters is located — are getting out of oil, coal and gas is seen as a tipping point in the divestment campaign.
The World Council of Churches, with nearly 600 million adherents, is planning to do the same — to the delight of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “We can no longer continue feeding our addiction to fossil fuels as if there is no tomorrow, for there will be no tomorrow,” he said.
Stanford University in California announced that it won’t invest any of its $18 billion (€14 billion) endowment in coal mining companies. And while Harvard University in Boston, has resisted pressure from students and staff to divest, it’s regarded as only a matter of time.
“Momentum for action took a massive leap forward in the last three days – with cities, companies from many sectors, and governments announcing new actions to shift away from fossil fuels to a low-carbon, climate-resilient economy,” said the World Resources Institute (WRI).
The Washington-based institute hailed the New York Declaration on Forests, which pledges to cut the rate of forest loss in half by 2020 and eliminate it altogether by 2030 — as well as restoring 150 million ha of degraded landscapes and planting another 200 million ha by 2030.
It also noted that more than 1,000 companies had subscribed to a World Bank initiative to put a price on carbon emissions. Such corporate giants as Nestlé, Philips and Unilever are planning to go even further by accelerating investments to cut their own emissions.
The We Mean Business coalition, which is working with thousands of businesses and investors, called for “establishing a clear, long-term global goal that provides the necessary direction to decision makers, such as (net) zero emissions well before the end of the century.”
IKEA and a dozen other companies, for example, made the ambitious pledge to source 100 per cent of their power from clean energy, as the WRI noted. “The effort, though, is designed to recruit a total of 100 companies to make similar commitments by 2020.”
Similarly, both Google and Facebook followed the example of Microsoft by ending their affiliation with the climate change sceptical American Legislative Exchange Council — after recognising that its lobbying on climate policy was inconsistent with the companies’ own views.
Éamonn Meehan, executive director of TrÓcaire, said the private sector had made many significant pledges amounting to $200 billion in low- carbon and climate-resilient investments. “If acted on, these pledges could play a major role in shifting markets towards de-carbonisation.”