Do the Math
McKibben’s message is simple, direct and powerful; we only have so much carbon we can burn, and the fossil fuel industry has more than five times that much on the table right now. The solution: take away their money.
Nick Abraham, Business Partnership Intern
By Nick Abraham
Climate Solutions
Bill McKibben’s Do the Math Tour kicked off in Seattle last night and will
travel across the country to talk about changing our investment strategies and
pulling our finances from the fossil fuel industry. The sold out crowd of
1,900 in Benaroya Hall listened to speakers like Van Jones, Namoi Klein, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, via video broadcast, discuss
how our investments are funding a carbon-based economy.
McKibben’s message is
simple, direct and powerful; we only have so much carbon we can burn, and the
fossil fuel industry has more than five times that much on the table right now.
The solution: take away their money.
Our pensions, mutual funds,
and 401k’s are far too often tied to the fossil fuel industry. To switch ourselves away from
carbon, we need to cut off our fossil fuel addiction at the source. He
points out the irony of “investing our retirement accounts in an industry that
assures we won't have a world to retire in.”
Increased disasters, hunger, and disease, due to climate change, is a human rights issue, and ought to treated
as such. The world has responded to human rights crises with this same
divestment strategy before. In protest to the Apartheid, citizens all across the world urged their schools, banks, and companies to stop
investment in South Africa until the abuses stopped. Embargoes and
sanctions are continuously used to show that blatant disregard for people’s lives
is something the world is not willing to tolerate. Bill McKibben is
calling for the same model to be applied to the current climate crisis, but put
towards an industry, rather than governments.
The clean energy economy is
on the rise and here to stay. People all across the globe are finding
innovative ways to try and shift away from our fossil fuel based society.
Renewable energy is flourishing, corporate sustainability has become a badge of honor, and alternative
transportation is cool again. But, the message of this tour is that while we build this new
economy, we also need to divorce ourselves financially from the major culprits
and address the money trail that finances global climate change.
Our window for stemming the
climate change tide (pun intended) is closing, and the numbers are too
terrifying to ignore. McKibben’s Rolling Stone article brought to light the sobering reality that with
the amount of carbon the fossil fuel industry has on the books, we will be at a
6 degree, unrecognizable planet, level of global temperature rise. At that
level, global climate change becomes more than just an environmental
disaster. Droughts, famine, disappearing islands – these impacts are not part
of some arbitrary distant future scenario, it’s happening now.
A carbon-based economy is something we simply can no longer afford.
