Stop investing in carbon intense industries
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Broadcast: 23/05/2013
Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben, who is about to tour Australia, discusses his campaign to get organisations to stop investing in companies that make money from industries that have high carbon emissions.
Transcript
TONY JONES, PRESENTER: Joining us from our Washington studio is Bill McKibben, the co-founder and chairman of the board at 350.org, an international climate campaign that works in 188 countries around the world. He's an author and environmental activist. In 1988 he wrote The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience about global warming.Bill McKibben, thanks for being there.
BILL MCKIBBEN, ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST & AUTHOR: Well, what a pleasure to be with ya.
TONY JONES: Let's start with the statement most frequently used by climate change sceptics: the planet has stopped warming since 1998 and started to cool, actually cool, since 2003. True or false?
BILL MCKIBBEN: Completely false. The data is unfortunately abundantly clear here. Not only is the air temperature continuing to go up, but a whole slew of studies in recent months have shown that in fact the rate of warming in the oceans is accelerating and of course that heat will eventually make its way back out into the atmosphere. As the scientist was quoted in your lead-in there I think very correctly saying even the kind of two-degree targets that governments have set for climate change, including the Australian Government, are much too high. We've barely - we're not even quite raised the temperature a degree so far and look what we've done. I mean, 80 per cent of the summer sea ice in the Arctic is now missing, the oceans are 30 per cent more acidic than they were 40 years ago, and because warm air holds more water vapour than cold, we've loaded the dice for drought and for flood which y'all in Australia have seen more than your share of in recent years.
TONY JONES: Let's just look at that figure though. 1998 was pretty much the planet's hottest year, at least some argue that it was, since accurate temperature recordings were done. It appears there was a spike in that year, a spike in the temperature and since then temperatures have actually gone down?
BILL MCKIBBEN: No, temperatures haven't gone down. The last decade was the warmest by far on record. 1998 was a very strong El Nino year and so it set a new record, a record we've now broken twice by small margins, but in general the pace of climate change continues unabated. Were that it were otherwise, we continue to hope that we're gonna catch a break from physics at some point along the way, but so far all ya have to do is look to the Arctic to get some sense of just how out of control things are.
TONY JONES: Is the clear picture that you're painting, was that muddied somewhat by the new research from the team of Global Change researchers published this week in Nature Geoscience that the rate of global warming is actually slowing and that could have a dramatic impact on how hot the planet actually gets in the next 50 to 100 years?
BILL MCKIBBEN: It's hopeful news in that they say the odds of warming at the very upper end of the scale are less than some had feared. Let's hope that's true. It really would be one of the first breaks we've caught from physics, but as they say in the thing - in their paper, it makes no difference to the plight of the planet. Two degrees where we're going to clearly go well past on our current path is utter catastrophe. Really one degree is utter catastrophe. How many more summers do you really want like the one you just had?
TONY JONES: Yeah, I suppose if you say "caught a break from science", does that actually give us more time to get our acts together as a planet and for the countries around the world to actually seek some sort of unified action?
BILL MCKIBBEN: No, it doesn't give us any more time. We're still under the gun. What it does do I think is allow those who are working on these issues some reason for a little bitta hope. Frankly, the level of despair has been enormous and correctly so; we're losing this fight. It's very hopeful to be able to think if we do everything we possibly can then we're not going to avert huge problems, but maybe, maybe, maybe, if we work absolutely all out, we might be able to stay this side of complete civilisation-scale chaos.
TONY JONES: Yeah, I mean, I guess the point is you say yourself "Do the math" and the question arise out this new research is: has the math changed?
BILL MCKIBBEN: No, I don't think the math's really changed at all. What we were saying when we did that - and this is math that's been validated by the World Bank and the International Energy Agency and lots of others - what we were saying was that the fossil fuel companies have in their reserves five times as much carbon as would be necessary to take us past two degrees. So it's not even close. It's not like we're in some place, as we would say in this country, in the same ballpark. These companies, their business plan is by any measure not compatible with a working future for this planet. Once you know that math, and it comes from a team of financial analysts in the UK about a year ago - once you know it then you know that if we don't make big changes soon, the end of this story is essentially written. Our job is to rewrite it, and, you know, we're beginning to build that movement in Australia and around the world that can stand up to the richest industry we've ever seen.
TONY JONES: Let's move on because you - and really it's on that topic - you've been campaigning hard for educational and religious institutions, for city and state governments and other institutions that, as you say, serve the public good, to stop investing in fossil fuel companies. Stop. To disinvest. Take their money out if they are investing in them. How many companies have actually done that, have taken your advice?
BILL MCKIBBEN: Well, we have a list of 200 companies that we'd like people to divest from, the biggest carbon reserves in the world. So far, early days, but a wide variety of American institutions have begun to divest. Five colleges and universities so far, 10 city governments including Seattle and San Francisco. Yesterday came news that the cemetery of the City of Santa Monica in California had decided to divest its holdings, so even the dead are getting in on this act. In Australia, I was remarkably cheered to see that the Uniting Church in a big part of the country had decided to sell its coal stocks. I think that's a brave move in a country where coal barons are as powerful as they are there.
TONY JONES: What about superannuation funds? I mean, they control vastly greater sums of investment dollars ...
BILL MCKIBBEN: Yes.
TONY JONES: ... than the kind of institutions you're talking about. I mean, you're coming here. We've got a massive superannuation fund investment in Australia. Are you gonna try and convince superannuation funds, amongst others, to divest?
BILL MCKIBBEN: Absolutely. Absolutely, and for two reasons. One is it makes no sense to pay for your retirement by investing in companies that guarantee you won't have a planet worth retiring on. And two, as we're increasingly finding out, this is a bad bet economically, this industry. Just yesterday, the Associated Press, the world's biggest news-gathering organisation, commissioned an independent study. What it showed was that if 10 years ago with a billion-dollar endowment you'd divested from the 200 companies we're recommending, you would have made $119 million more - these are US figures - $119 million more in the last 10 years. A bet on the fossil fuel industry, an investment in the fossil fuel industry is a bet that the world will do nothing about climate change, that it'll stand idly by and watch events like the summer you've just come through and not take any serious action. If you're comfortable with that bet, both practically and morally, then by all means invest in fossil fuel. But if it makes you queasy, either financially or from the point of view that you're betting on the destruction of the planet, then I think a lot of people are gonna start to move their money.
TONY JONES: The new boss of the Australian Coal Association, Nikki Williams, gave a speech in Sydney last night in which he bitterly complained that some of the country's most successful and profitable businesses, particularly their own coal industry, were being targeted by activists like yourself and that the climate change debate has spawned, as she called it, a new morality of industrial sabotage, extremism hiding behind laudable green goals. Do you think she might have had you in mind?
BILL MCKIBBEN: Perhaps, although I'm afraid I'm not a very confident saboteur. Our only monkey wrench we want to throw in the works is this mathematical one, this scientific one. We want people to understand that, say, if the Australian coal industry goes through with its current expansion plans, the coal that it digs up and burns will fill about a third of the space between us and two degrees. That's not OK. We can't let it happen any more than we can let the huge tar sands of Canada or the coal mines of the United States or in China or all the other places that we work. We simply have to keep that underground.
TONY JONES: OK, but - Bill McKibben, we're nearly out of time. Sorry about this. But you realise you're coming to Australia where the mining industry and the huge boom of exports to China actually kept Australia out of the Global Financial Crisis, kept our economy going for such a long time and what you're basically gonna be arguing is stop investing in those industries which actually saved you during the Global Financial Crisis?
BILL MCKIBBEN: Well, what I'm gonna be arguing is there is a hell of a lot bigger crisis on the horizon even than the financial one and you got a taste of it this summer and it's a question about how many more tastes of it you want and how much more of it you want to inflict on the rest of the world. Australia's not alone in causing this problem, but it's punching above its weight because of its coal mining industry, so hopefully we can figure out how to keep it from expanding in those ways.
TONY JONES: Bill McKibben, we'll have to leave you there. We thank you very much for taking the time to come and join us on Lateline tonight.
BILL MCKIBBEN: Alright. My pleasure. Take care.
For this article PLUS video, please go here:
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2013/s3766303.htm
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