Divestment in Canadian Universities
Campus campaign targets fossil fuel energy industry /Feb 2013
/.../ the year was rounded out by Hurricane Sandy, which wrecked the Atlantic Coast from the Caribbean to New York City, and Typhoon Bopha, which pummeled the Philippines.
These events destroyed land, forests and crops. They flattened homes and devastated people's livelihoods. Profiting from this kind of destruction is immoral.
This is the crux of an emerging movement that is calling on universities and colleges to sell off their shares in fossil fuel companies. Students in Canada are gearing up to join more than 200 schools in the United States in a campaign that the Nation magazine says is "engaging more students than any similar campaign in the past 20 years," and it couldn't be coming at a better time.
Universities across Canada are rightly celebrated for their campus sustainability work, but as they've gone green over the past decades, CO2 emissions have risen by 40 per cent, and continue to rise. Building a sustainable campus that is bankrolling and profiting from climate change is a Pyrrhic victory at best.
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/2013/02/11/campus_campaign_targets_fossil_fuel_energy_industry.html
Fossil fuels are sub-prime assets, Bank of England governor warned (Jan 2012)
Concern over the long-term risk posed by high-carbon assets has also been raised in the US, where the Investor Network on Climate Risk, a group of 100 institutional investors with collective assets of $10 trillion/.../
David Nussbaum, chief executive of WWF-UK, noted that other assets held by investors could be damaged by climate change: "It's clear that we cannot burn all the fossil fuels currently listed on the world's financial markets without seriously impacting the value of other listed assets /.../
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jan/19/fossil-fuels-sub-prime-mervyn-king
An unpublished U.S. government study indicates that the world needs to prepare /.../ as food prices spiral and long-standing agricultural practices are disrupted by climate change.
(http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/04/20/world/climate-change-feared-to-create-global-food-crisis/#.UXWA2WjnBte)
"We should expect much more political destabilization of countries as it bites," said Richard Choularton, a policy officer in the U.N. World Food Program's climate change office. "What is different now from 20 years ago is that far more people are living in places with a higher climatic risk: 650 million people now live in arid or semiarid areas where floods and droughts and price shocks are expected to have the most impact.
(Ibidem)
In the Middle East and North Africa, declining yields of up to 30 percent are expected for rice, about 47 percent for corn and 20 percent for wheat.
Egypt expects to lose 15 percent of its wheat crops if temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius, and 36 percent if the increase is 4 degrees.
(Ibid.)
For fun, compare this news article: http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/04/20/world/climate-change-feared-to-create-global-food-crisis/#.UXWA2WjnBte
with the article from den Elzen, et al. (2013): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421513000426
Go on. Have fun with the implications. Buy popcorn and sit back. Or start doing stuff. Anything that will help.
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