4 iMagazine / April, 2013
Do the math,
fossil fuel investments add up to
climate chaos
If it's wrong to wreck the planet, then it's wrong to profit from that wreckage.
We are facing a planetary emergency: climate change threatens the world and our collective future. Business and political leaders know this yet they do nothing. Instead they continue to bet on our future and deepen our addiction to fossil fuels. They abdicate responsibility and allow the deadly fossil fuel giants of the last two centuries to continue to stoke the boilers of global warming.
Now more than ever people need to demand that all financial institutions that we have entrusted with our money and welfare remove their money - our money - from investments in the fossil fuel industry.
Make no mistake we are in a battle for the future with the past, the centuries old fossil fuel industries have roots deep within our governments and other institutions, they know their days are numbered, they know their power is waning, but they will not go silently into the night, they will not give up their power without a fight.
If governments will not bite the hand that feeds, if they will not free themselves from corporate sponsorship then we, the citizens, the concerned and morally driven individuals will have to take a stand, we will have to make sacrifices to challenge the deadly status quo, this is what history teaches us.
IF GOVERNMENTS
will not bite the hand that feeds, if they will not free themselves from corporate sponsorship then we, the citizens, the concerned and morally driven individuals will have to take a stand, we will have to make sacrifices to challenge the deadly status quo, this is what history teaches us.
There are new ways to meet our needs, to lift people out of poverty and limit climate change, but the path to a brighter future is being blocked by the past, by the vested and invested coal and oil barons.
We know they want to continue to burn more and more carbon, which will lead to irreparable damage to our health, our lives and our environment. If we want to prevent runaway climate change from getting worse we need to leave the carbon reserves we know about — and the ones we do not yet know about — in the ground.
so how can we stop the fossil fuel industry
from destroying our future on
this planet?
The divestment movement is part of the answer. Modeled on the successful campaign in the 1980s to divest from apartheid South Africa, this new fossil fuel divestment campaign revolves around one central moral reasoning: if it's wrong to wreck the planet, then it's wrong to profit from that wreckage.
by Kumi Naidoo,
Executive Director of Greenpeace International
Perreault Magazine / January, 2014 26