New Yorkers Celebrate as NYC Mayor announces Divestment from Fossil Fuels, Files Climate Lawsuit

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#DivestNY victory reverberates around the world as New Yorkers vow to keep up the fight for bold climate action


 January 10, 2018  |  350.org

New York, NY — Today, following over five years of persistent campaigning from New Yorkers, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the City is moving forward with full fossil fuel divestment. The city’s five pension funds, a combined $191 billion, will divest $5 billion in securities from over 100 fossil fuel reserve owners.

New York’s announcement brings the total number of global divestment commitments to 810 institutions representing more than $6 trillion in assets.

“New York City today becomes a capital of the fight against climate change on this planet. With its communities exceptionally vulnerable to a rising sea, the city is showing the spirit for which it’s famous: it’s not pretending that working with the fossil fuel companies will somehow save the day, but instead standing up to them, in the financial markets and in court,” said Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org. “Ever since Sandy, New Yorkers understand the risk, especially for the poorest and most vulnerable. Now, thanks to Mayor de Blasio and his team, the city is fighting back, and in ways that will actually matter.”

In addition to this multi-billion-dollar hard-won divestment, Mayor de Blasio announced the City is launching a lawsuit against five major oil companies, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, Shell, and ConocoPhillips for climate damages. With New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman investigating ExxonMobil, and seven municipalities across California fighting similar damage lawsuits, this announcement adds significant momentum to the #ExxonKnew campaign to hold fossil fuel corporations accountable for the role in climate destruction.

“New York City is standing up for future generations by becoming the first major city to divest our pension funds from fossil fuels,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio. “At the same time, we’re bringing the fight against climate change straight to the fossil fuel companies that knew about its effects and intentionally misled the public to protect their profits. As climate change continues to worsen, it’s up to the fossil fuel companies whose greed put us in this position to shoulder the cost of making New York safer and more resilient.”

Naomi Klein, author and activist, said, “Emanating from the financial capital of the world, the message of today’s historic announcement is unmistakable: investing in fossil fuel companies is a high-risk, bad bet. New York City is now leading cities and states to not only divest from fossil fuel companies but also insist that the corporations that profit from destabilizing our shared planet pay for the mess they knowingly created. As of today, the entire fossil fuel sector finds itself under a cloud of huge potential court-imposed costs, as well as the growing global momentum of investor flight. That means no matter how many oil and coal leases the Trump Administration hands out, the economics of new drilling will make less and less sense. This is very good news.”

“Today is a momentous day in the fight against corporate greed exploiting our communities and fueling climate chaos,” said Betámia Coronel, US Reinvestment Coordinator, 350.org. “While the oil-washed White House rolls back protections, New York City has leapt forward in modeling climate leadership. Divesting our city’s pensions from the dirtiest companies is an enormous hard-won first step; holding companies like Exxon accountable for their role in climate deception is next. Today’s announcement is a rallying signal to cities all over the world that the dawn of a fossil free world has arrived.”

This New York City announcement is sending ripples around the world, reinvigorating divestment fights from California to Japan and beyond. The San Francisco pension board is scheduled for a long-awaited divestment vote on January 24.

On January 31, the day after the State of the Union, 350.org is launching Fossil Free US, with leaders including Senator Bernie Sanders, Bill McKibben, Varshini Prakash, and Rev. Lennox Yearwood speaking at a livestreamed event in Washington D.C. to lay out the plan for the climate resistance in 2018 and beyond.

350.org is building the global grassroots climate movement that can hold our leaders accountable to science and justice. Our network extends to 188 countries. 350 uses online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions to oppose new coal, oil and gas projects, take money out of the companies that are heating up the planet, and build 100% clean energy solutions that work for all. 

New York State is Leading the Way on Climate Change

By Lynda Schneekloth

In December over 190 nations signed the U.N. Paris Climate Agreement. Imagine. The nations of the Earth came together and agreed that all are threatened by global warming caused mostly by the burning of fossil fuels. Each country made a commitment to set goals and policies, to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and move to renewable energy.

But how is that going to happen here in the United States, where the federal government seems incapable of action and the fossil fuel corporations have so much power? It is going to happen state by state, and New York is leading the way.

In January, Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the goal of 50 percent renewable energy by 2030, a reduction of 45 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and a rapid program for energy efficiency. At the same time, a coalition, New York Renews, was formed to move on the climate crisis.

NY Renews is made up of environmental organizations, labor, social/economic justice groups, the Working Families Party and other groups that have drafted legislation: the New York State Climate and Community Protection Act. This bill, which has already passed two committees, mandates climate goals, creates a process to ensure that resources are equitably allocated toward vulnerable communities and works to ensure clean energy jobs with binding labor standards. It also requires all state agencies to evaluate their climate and equity impacts.

Another action is the investigation of ExxonMobil by Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman to determine whether the company lied to the public and investors about the risks of climate change. It has been documented that Exxon has known and researched climate change since the 1970s and has used data from various climate models in the design of infrastructure and future planning.

At the same time, Exxon sent millions of dollars to climate denier groups working to manufacture doubt about the reality of global warming to protect its interests. Critics of Schneiderman and the 16 other attorneys general working on this investigation are claiming a violation of the First Amendment, saying the corporation is protected as a “person.” While lying is not illegal under U.S. law, fraud is. The First Amendment does not protect fraud, which is lying to or misleading investors to make a profit or influence business decisions.

We stand with the attorney general, the governor, Legislature and NY Renews. New York State is moving on climate justice. We need to raise our voices in support of climate action to protect our families, our livelihoods, future generations and, indeed, life on this planet by mandating the economically and sustainably sound energy transformation to renewables.

Lynda Schneekloth is chairwoman of the Sierra Club’s Niagara chapter.

This article first appeared at BuffaloNews.com

Note, this article was submitted to the Buffalo News before the NYS Assembly passed the bill: The Climate and Community Protection Act. See: Important Climate Bill Passed by NY State Assembly - Fueled by People Power

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NY Renews: Statewide Action is Proving the Best Route to Effective Climate Policy

Can This New York State Campaign Finish What the Paris Climate Talks Started?

The COP21 agreement is filled with holes—this diverse, statewide coalition aims to fill them.

By Rebecca Nathanson  | January 11, 2016 |  The Nation

Several weeks ago, as climate-justice activists dispersed from Paris after the United Nations climate-change summit, a couple hundred people sat cheering in a Harlem church, its walls adorned with posters reading, “There can be no environmental justice without social justice.” Community leaders, directors of national environmental organizations, union members, a Hurricane Sandy survivor, the church’s pastor, the state attorney general—one at a time, each took the mic to rally the audience and attest to the urgent need for the evening’s gathering. Down in the pews, the crowd responded in agreement, applause interspersed with chants of “Sí se puede!”

Just days earlier, in Paris, 195 countries had reached a climate deal that was at once historic in its broad, multinational scope and modest in its purely voluntary aspirations. In its wake, Hans Schellnhuber, one of the world’s most renowned climate scientists and a top adviser to Pope Francis, had declared, “It will be the job of civil society…to finish the job that national governments have begun here in Paris.”

Now, part of civil society had gathered together to meet that challenge. Its vehicle of choice was NY Renews, a new statewide campaign that will attempt to make tangible what Paris made aspirational. Standing on the church stage, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman received the loudest ovation of the night when he pledged his support for the initiative, exclaiming, “I’ve never seen an event like this.”

While NY Renews has been in the works for months, the timing of its launch placed the campaign’s demands in direct comparison to the agreement reached at the Paris summit on December 12. What could be the agreement’s best parts, such as naming 1.5 degrees Celsius as a goal for the eventual maximum temperature rise, amount to loose aims with no enforcement—and still fall short of what science demands. If every country kept its promises, the earth would still warm by 3.5 degrees Celsius, putting the temperature far above preindustrial levels.

“Think of it as a starting gun in a race,” said Aaron Mair, president of the Sierra Club, at the NY Renews launch event.

NY Renews aims to build off the Paris agreement and fill in its gaps. The campaign comes from a coalition of at least 45 organizations throughout New York State that helped organize last fall’s People’s Climate March. It targets the state legislature in Albany with numerous demands: to create clean-energy jobs, make the state’s climate commitments legally enforceable, ensure accountability for meeting those commitments, and establish a just energy policy. More specifically, the campaign calls for the state to use 100 percent clean energy by 2050, with benchmark goals in the interim and every state agency oriented to helping meet those goals.                 

As Eddie Bautista, the executive director of the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, a member of the NY Renews coalition, explained before the event, “This will be an exciting and unprecedented moment for us to grapple with the policy at the state level, seeing as how we know how the Paris agreement is not going to protect the most vulnerable communities in the world.” In the wake of the agreement, he continued, “it becomes even more important for local action to drive how policy and how resiliency and adaptation get advanced.”

Governor Cuomo has already announced a goal of using 50 percent renewable energy by 2030 and committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by that same year. By 2050, he aims for emissions to be 80 percent below their 1990 level. The campaign hopes not only to push Cuomo further but also to codify the existing initiatives into laws, ensuring that future governors adhere to their mandates. “While there have been some good initiatives under this governor, we believe that our campaign pushes the state more broadly and more aggressively and more transparently in a direction where we need to go in terms of reducing our carbon footprint,” Bautista told The Nation.

With climate change a non-starter in Congress, statewide action is proving the best route to effective policy. “A lot of the reason why the US was even able to go to Paris and negotiate anything was because states have started to adopt more aggressive climate policy, and that’s no accident. That’s because people really built impressive political power in states,” explained May Boeve, the executive director of 350.org, which has a New York City affiliate that is active in the coalition.

Still, what’s most interesting about NY Renews may be the way it’s using this newfound political power. Whereas the Paris agreement failed to include a legally binding commitment from rich countries to appropriate sufficient funds to help developing nations mitigate the impact of climate change, NY Renews is making the inclusion of the most vulnerable central to its mission. In focusing on the needs of low-income communities, communities of color, and the communities that were most ravaged by Hurricane Sandy three years ago, it adds social, racial, and economic-justice components to its organizing—an acknowledgement that, although climate change affects everyone, it does not affect everyone equally.

“This is increasingly the direction the movement is moving,” Boeve observed. “We’re seeing across different movements and sectors the need for transformational change in the way decisions are made about the climate and the environment, about workers, about immigration, about healthcare, and increasingly recognizing that we need each other in order to be successful.”       

Beyond taking the Paris agreement as a jumping-off point, NY Renews is harnessing the momentum of the September 2014 People’s Climate March, where more than 300,000 people marched through Manhattan. Like this campaign, that event brought together people from a diversity of movements and organizations, highlighting the front-line communities that are already combating the impact of climate change. Now that coalition hopes to channel the march’s explosive energy into concrete policy change.

The reality of NY Renews remains to be seen—its own aims are still aspirational, after all. How it will channel the discussions and mobilizations around Paris into concrete support, how it will balance the needs of the variety of groups and movements it incorporates, and how it will transform its ideas into tangible political power—these are questions to which the answers can only be guessed right now. But these challenges are also what lend it the potential for success.

As Schneiderman said to the cheering crowd in that Harlem church on December 16, “NY Renews is how you keep the Climate March marching.”

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State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli helped launch the NY Renews campaign in Buffalo:

He told the crowd of more than 100 activists and leaders from a variety of local church, environmental, labor and community organizations about the creation of a $2 billion Low Emissions Index for the state’s pension fund that will reduce or eliminate investments in polluting companies and encourage others to reduce their carbon footprints.

An additional $1.5 billion in promote green investments, he said, will bring the fund’s total environmentally friendly commitment to $5 billion. Echoing an earlier speaker, Jim Anderson of Citizen Action, he added, “We all have skin in the game. We all need to contribute.”

The NY Renews campaign will contribute by pushing for laws that will enforce the state’s climate goals, create jobs in clean energy and set up a fair energy policy that includes people at all economic levels.

See the full report: State comptroller’s Buffalo visit after Paris climate summit encourages push for environmental legislation at BuffaloNews.com
 

Fossil Fuel Industry is in for Dramatic Changes

Did ExxonMobil Lie to Investors About Climate Change?
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is pursuing an investigation—one of many signs that momentum is on the side of climate-justice activists.

By Mark Hertsgaard | The Nation

The dawn of 2016 is not a happy time to be an executive in the fossil-fuel industry. Like Gulliver, who awakens to find his limbs and trunk tied down by the tiny but industrious Lilliputians, the industry is under assault on many fronts at once, and it’s not clear whether it can free itself.

Economically, the prices for oil, coal, and natural gas have been falling, even as production costs remain high. Industry stocks are tumbling, and small and large companies alike are going out of business. Arch Coal, one of the largest coal companies in the United States, declared bankruptcy on January 11. Outside investors are wary or fleeing. Many are embracing solar and wind energy, drawn by plummeting costs that have driven stratospheric growth and market penetration worldwide.

The political terrain is no more favorable. At the United Nations climate summit in Paris last December, virtually every nation on earth promised to all but eliminate the use of fossil fuels after 2050—to abandon oil, gas, and coal in favor of renewable energy. In the United States, one of the nation’s most powerful legal authorities, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, is investigating whether ExxonMobil, the industry’s alpha leader, committed fraud by lying to investors and the public for decades about climate change. Schneiderman’s investigation and the Paris Agreement in turn exemplify a third threat: an increasingly aroused civil society, spearheaded by a climate-justice movement that continues to grow in size, impact, and global reach.

The fossil-fuel industry remains an immensely rich and politically powerful enterprise, and volatility has been a theme throughout its history. This particular episode may yet prove to be a passing storm. Depressed oil prices can also discourage investment in renewable energy and conservation alternatives. But ExxonMobil, Peabody Energy, and their fossil-fuel brethren at home and abroad appear to be in a fight for their lives. And for the moment, at least, the momentum is against them.

On January 15, US Interior Secretary Sally Jewell announced a three-year moratorium on new coal-mining leases on publicly owned land, as well as a comprehensive review of the “environmental and public health impacts” of coal mining. This ranks as perhaps the strongest climate action the Obama administration has taken to date; publicly owned coal in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin alone accounts for 10 percent of the country’s annual greenhouse-gas emissions.

The world’s other climate-change superpower did much the same, two weeks before Obama did. China will halt new coal-mine approvals for three years and close roughly 1,000 existing mines, the head of its National Energy Administration, Nur Bekri, announced on December 29. Together, China and the United States are responsible for about 60 percent of global coal consumption. Their rejection of coal is fresh evidence that the industry is “a dead man walkin’,” as Kevin Parker, former head of global-asset management at Deutsche Bank, first noted back in 2011.

Momentum begets momentum. Pressure from civil society—from grassroots activists, state and local government leaders, educational and faith institutions, and enlightened business and financial leaders—was essential to reaching the rhetorically ambitious though functionally nonbinding Paris Agreement. Now that accord is giving fresh ammunition to civil society’s efforts to keep most remaining fossil fuels in the ground, as scientists say is required to honor the Paris target of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial level.

“The Paris Agreement, which has the support of virtually every nation on earth, is a clear and undeniable sign that the fossil-fuel industry is about to experience dramatic changes,” Schneiderman told The Nation. “During this time of rapid transition in the energy economy, it’s crucial that fossil-fuel companies tell the truth to the public and customers about the impacts of climate change on their business.”

Telling the truth is not only crucial; it’s the law. American firms must regularly disclose to investors and the public all material risks that could affect corporate operations and profitability. That will be a challenging if not self-defeating exercise for fossil-fuel companies in the post-Paris era. Telling the truth about Paris only figures to further spook already-nervous investors.

Schneiderman Wants to Know Climate Change Impacts of Pipeline

AG to feds: Assess climate impacts of Keystone XL 

Posted by Casey Seiler, Capitol bureau chief

(AP)

CapCon intern Shivani Gonzalez reports:

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman wants the U.S. State Department to hold off on a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline project until there is a full analysis on potential pollution and climate change consequences.

The proposed 875-mile pipeline would run between Alberta and Nebraska, and transport crude oil extracted from the Canadian sand tars. From there, the oil would be sent to the Gulf of Mexico for sale and refining.

The project is awaiting permits and other federal approvals — including a determination of whether it would serve national interest. The federal government has yet to make a decision because of the absence of a complete assessment of the climate change impacts — the same sort of study Schneiderman is seeking.

According to a release, the Attorney General’s office estimates that the pipeline would emit 605 to 3,740 million metric tons of additional climate change pollution over the pipelines anticipated 50-year lifespan. That would be two to 14 times New York’s total climate and emission pollution, and almost equal to the nation’s total pollution emissions for 2011.

Peter Iwanowicz, executive director of Environmental Advocates of New York, said “it is smart to make it hard” to build the pipeline because of the climate change concerns.

Schneiderman believes the State Department’s final environmental impact statement for the Keystone XL — issued Jan. 31 — failed to acknowledge the amount of climate change pollution that would be emitted. The AG’s office called that EIS “arbitrary and capricious” in comments it submitted for the review.

The AG’s office, like those in many states downwind of midwestern air pollution, has taken an active and frequently litigious role in emission issues.

The original report is at Capitol Confidential.