Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

University of Toronto divesting from fossil fuels

Checking through my routine administrative emails today, I was completely surprised to see a message from president Meric Gertler announcing that U of T will divest from fossil fuels:

The evidence of a climate crisis is now incontrovertible. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change adds further urgency to the need for individuals, businesses, institutions and governments to act swiftly to respond to this global threat, using every tool available to them. World leaders will begin gathering in Glasgow at the end of this month for the COP26 meeting, where progress in the fight against climate change will be assessed and new strategies to avert a climate catastrophe will be considered.

As owners of financial assets such as endowments and pension funds, universities have both an economic imperative and a moral obligation to manage these assets in ways that encourage carbon emission-reducing behaviour in the wider economy. With the increasing financial risks associated with fossil fuel production – as well as those downstream economic activities that rely heavily on fossil fuels as their energy source – there is a strong motivation for universities to shift their financial capital away from carbon-intensive sectors and firms, and towards those businesses that are leveraging the shift to green energy and carbon-conserving technologies.

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First, UTAM will divest from investments in fossil fuel companies in the endowment fund beginning immediately. Within the next 12 months, it will divest from all direct investments in fossil fuel companies. For those investments made indirectly, typically through pooled and commingled vehicles managed by third-party fund managers, UTAM will divest from its investments in fossil fuel companies by no later than 2030, and sooner if possible.

Second, UTAM will commit to achieving net zero carbon emissions associated with the endowment portfolio by no later than 2050. Moreover, UTAM has recently joined the UN-convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance, making the University of Toronto the first university in the world to join this group of institutional investors. Membership in the Alliance compels signatories to achieve progressively demanding targets every five years en route to net zero, ensuring achievement of this ambitious objective in a transparent and accountable way.

Third, UTAM will allocate 10 percent of the endowment portfolio to sustainable and low-carbon investments by 2025. Based on the current size of the endowment, this represents an initial commitment of $400 million to such investments.

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[I]n the last few years I have heard from many members of the U of T community who have urged me to deploy every means available to address the existential crisis we now face. None have been more eloquent or impassioned than our students, who have the most at stake. I want to thank them – and other members of our community – for their activism and commitment to this important cause. I would also like to acknowledge the important work of the President’s Advisory Committee on Divestment from Fossil Fuels, whose report marked a key milestone in the journey towards today’s announcement.

It will be fascinating to learn more about what prompted the decision. It certainly hasn’t been the result of a highly visible and escalated recent activist campaign. While the Toronto350.org campaign was ongoing, we would often remark that the most helpful thing for us would be if Harvard divested…

The campaign began on April 16th, 2013 when I went to the president’s office for information and ended up meeting with Tony Gray.

Hayhoe on zombie climate denier arguments

Every day I’m bombarded with objections to the evidence for human-caused climate change. Most of them sound respectably scientific, like “climate changes all the time; humans have nothing to do with it.” It’s “the Sun,” or “volcanoes,” or “cosmic rays” that are making it happen, or “it’s not even warming,” some argue.

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Scientists call these “zombie arguments.” They just won’t die, no matter how often or how thoroughly they’re debunked. And because they won’t die, it’s clear that, when it comes to climate change, you do have to be able to talk about some of the science. But what you don’t have to do is follow it down the rabbit hole. And you don’t have to become a climate scientist, either. The basics are extremely simple, the objections are very common and easily answered, and it makes sense to have a short response at hand.

Not only that, but as I mentioned before, most scientific-sounding objections are really just a thin smoke screen for the real problems. Climate denial originates in political polarization and identity, fueled by the mistaken belief that its impacts don’t matter to us and there’s nothing constructive or even tolerable we can do to fix it. Again, this isn’t only a U.S. problem: an analysis of people across fifty-six countries found that political affiliation and ideology was a much stronger indicator of their opinions on climate change than their education, their life experiences, or even their values.

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For hundreds of years, we’ve been living as if there’s no tomorrow, running through our resources, putting our entire civilization at risk. And climate scientists are like physicians who have identified a disease that is affecting every member of the human race, including themselves, and no one wants to listen to them.

Hayhoe, Katharine. Saving Us: A Climate Scientists’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. Simon & Schuster. 2021. p. 38–9, 64

Open thread: climate change relocation

Every community and all the infrastructure on Earth has been built with the expectation that past weather conditions will be broadly similar to future and present ones. Rapid climate change of the kind we are creating thus sets up a situation where what we have built in every place is less and less suited to the conditions that will exist there. In the most extreme cases, places where people have long inhabited will cease to be able to support a human population. An increased flow of individuals out of a territory as conditions worsen could give way to the need to relocate entire populations.

This is the starkest and most immediate concern for low-lying island states, such as the Marshall Islands:

The depressing long-term solution, as in Mr Tong’s last resort, may be to move. The Marshall Islands hopes to renegotiate its post-colonial ‘Compact of Free Association’ with America, which expires in 2023, to ensure a permanent right of residence in the United States for all Marshallese. Tuvalu has no such option. Maina Talia, a climate activist, thinks that the government should take Fiji up on its offer of a home where Tuvaluans could practise the same culture rather than ‘be dumped somewhere in Sydney.’

Vexingly, the same conservative political forces that champion fossil fuels and refuse to accept the dangerousness of climate change are perhaps most defined by a closed sense of nationalism and opposition to immigration. Among other motivations, they are going to need to learn that if you want the global human population to stay more or less where they are, you need to keep the climate within the bounds that have supported those societies.

Related:

Biden and the Democrats on climate

Facing total obstruction from Republicans, Democrats themselves are notably divided on whether and how to act on climate change:

However, these measures will have to garner the vote of every Democrat in the Senate to pass, with Joe Manchin, a centrist from West Virginia, skeptical of the size and scope of the $3.5tn spending proposal. Manchin, a major recipient of donations from the coal industry, has said it “makes no sense” to pay utilities to phase in solar and wind power.

Manchin is reportedly set to block the clean electricity program, which forms the main muscle of the climate package. This could prove a hugely consequential blow to the effort to constrain dangerous global heating. “This is high on the list of most consequential actions ever taken by an individual senator,” tweeted the climate campaigner Bill McKibben. “You’ll be able to see the impact of this vain man in the geologic record.”

This internecine fight is just one manifestation of the persistent divide about how climate change might be tackled politically, with progressives taking it as a demonstration of how seeking the political middle ground is pointless and centrists drawing the opposite lesson that only climate policies with broad support will succeed.

Hayhoe on climate change and differing morals

“How do I talk about this … to my mother, brother-in-law, friend, colleague, elected official?” I’m asked this question nearly everywhere I go.

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Usually, they’ve already given conversation a try. They’ve boned up on a few alarming scientific facts. They’ve tried to explain how fast the Arctic is melting, or how bees are disappearing, or how carbon dioxide levels are rising. But their attempts have fallen flat. Why? Because the biggest challenge we face isn’t science denial. It’s a combination of tribalism, complacency, and fear. Most don’t think climate change is going to affect them personally, or that we can do anything reasonable to fix it; and why would they, if we never talk about it?

It’s important to understand what’s happening to our world and how it affects us. But bombarding someone with more data, facts, and science only engages their defenses, pushes them into self-justification, and leaves us more divided than when we began. On climate change and other issues with moral implications, we tend to believe that everyone should care for the same self-evident reasons we do. If they don’t, we all too often assume they lack morals. But most people do have morals and are acting according to them; they’re just different from ours. And if we are aware of these differences, we can speak to them.

Hayhoe, Katharine. Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. 2021. p. xi-ii

Related:

Climate anxiety is widespread among young people

Back in 2008, I wrote about the Future Leaders Survey and the gloomy views it uncovered among young people about the future of the planet.

Recently, The Lancet published a study based on a survey of 10,000 people aged 16–25 in 10 countries. It demonstrates that apocalyptic psychology is a broad-based phenomenon, not exclusively concentrated among climate change or environmental activists.

83% of those surveyed said people have failed to care for the planet; 75% that the future is frightening; 65% that governments are failing young people; and that just 31% think governments can be trusted.

See also:

Canada’s election 2021 climate change platforms

UBC professor Kathryn Harrison was interviewed by the CBC’s Front Burner: Where the major parties stand on climate change

See also:

Canada’s two kinds of environment ministers

Based on my experience of Canadian environment ministers (whatever the department is called at a given time), there are essentially two types. The rarer type is the genuine environmentalist who thinks they can get things done through the compromises of government. They’re true believers on climate change but rarely have much support from cabinet or the prime minister because what they want to do is not actually popular. Set in the abstract, people want to keep the climate stable and protect the planet. Give them the choice between that and something concrete, however, and you have the recipe for delay and misdirection which has been ongoing in Canada for 30+ years. I would say Stéphane Dion and Catherine McKenna are the clearest example of the genuine environmentalist set, and demonstrate how people with those priorities get sidelined. When you have no natural allies in cabinet because most of the other departments are pro-fossil (industry, transport, finance, natural resources, etc) the constraints of cabinet solidarity put ministers of this type in the position of unsuccessfully demanding the bare minimum behind closed doors, before defending inadequate plans to the public.

The other type of Canadian environment minister is the public relations spinmaster whose behaviour does not demonstrate any sincere concern about climate change, but simply the need to manage it as a PR issue. This is a much easier approach to the job since you can always just say nice things, avoid hard decisions, and cut dirty deals in the background. I feel like John Baird, Jim Prentice, Peter Kent, and Jonathan Wilkinson fall in this category. My father recently collected a set of letters on climate change for Minister Wilkinson (mine is here) and the experience illustrates how Wilkinson is a PR man for a government which in practice largely serves the same interests as the Harper Conservatives, but who work to maintain a false public and media narrative that they are bold environmental champions.

Part of the problem, surely, is that politicians have a hopelessly distorted understanding of the scale against which they should be judged. They give themselves kudos for being better than some of their electoral competitors, rather than comparing the scale of the efforts they propose against the scale of what needs to be done. The consequences are that the future becomes more dire for everyone, and that Canada will have an infrastructure and economic base poorly matched to what success in a post-fossil world will require.

Forgone fossil fuels

Back in 2012, Justin Trudeau said that “there’s not a country in the world that would find 170 billion barrels of oil under the ground and leave them there.”

At an event in June organized by Bank of America, Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman supposedly said: “We are still going to be the last man standing, and every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.”

Since avoiding catastrophic climate change is chiefly a problem of prompt global fossil fuel abolition, such sentiments are positively frightening. Trudeau’s cynicism may not be entirely justified, however, as there are examples of government choosing not to develop fossil energy, either out of innate concern about climate change or because they expect such industries to be in decline as the world decarbonizes.

For example, Greenland has banned oil exploration and Quebec’s government rejected a $14 billion LNG export project.

A few examples don’t make a trend, and enormous investments in fossil fuels continue to be made. At the same time, every noble example provides a case that can be raised with politicians who say action is impossible or that nobody will do it. If countries like Canada which have become rich on a high-carbon trajectory and which maintain excessively high per capita emissions continue to refuse to decarbonize we perpetuate a global suicide pact in which we all end up with ruin because each jurisdiction scrambled to pull in as much fossil cash as possible beforehand.