COP21: Haiyang Wang and Alex Wang

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Published on Dec 4, 2015

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A Dozen Mayors Call for Cities to Divest from Fossil Fuels | December 04, 2015

Here in Paris, a group of mayors from around the world have issued an open letter calling on cities to divest from fossil fuels. The mayors represent a dozen cities, from Portland, Oregon to Oslo, Norway to Moreland City, Australia. All of the mayors who have signed the letter have already committed to either fully or partially divesting the city’s investments and pension funds from fossil fuels. They are part of a global movement in which more than 500 institutions with $3.4 trillion in assets have committed to fossil fuel divestment.

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Democracy Now – COP21 – Day 5 – Six Stories

A Dozen Mayors Call for Cities to Divest from Fossil Fuels

Here in Paris, a group of mayors from around the world have issued an open letter calling on cities to divest from fossil fuels. The mayors represent a dozen cities, from Portland, Oregon to Oslo, Norway to Moreland City, Australia. All of the mayors who have signed the letter have already committed to either fully or partially divesting the city’s investments and pension funds from fossil fuels. They are part of a global movement in which more than 500 institutions with $3.4 trillion in assets have committed to fossil fuel divestment.

Democracy Now!

Published on Dec 4, 2015

On Monday, President Obama praised fellow world leaders for submitting voluntary pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions. “Already, prior to Paris, more than 180 countries representing nearly 95 percent of global emissions have put forward their own climate targets,” Obama said. “That is progress. But a handful of nations are refusing to make pledges.” We speak to Nicaragua’s chief climate negotiator, Paul Oquist, about why his country refused to submit a pledge.

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U.N. Delegates Confront The Cost Of Stopping Climate Change

Updated December 4, 20157:23 PM ET

Christopher Joyce  

All Things Considered 3:51

Climate conferences over the past decade have foundered on finance, especially on who’s going to pay for the huge cost of shifting away from fossil fuels. Most difficult is the disconnect between developing countries, who want money from the rich countries, and the reluctance by those rich countries to agree to open-ended commitments. Moreover, getting risk averse private investors into the new green energy market is turning into a big obstacle in Paris.

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Is Oil & Gas the New Tobacco? Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement Reaches New Milestone

Democracy Now!

Published on Dec 2, 2015

The growing campaign for divestment from the gas, oil and coal companies reached a new milestone today. 350.org Executive Director Mary Boeve announced more than 500 institutions representing over $3.4 trillion in assets have now made at least a partial commitment to divest from fossil fuels. In France, 19 cities have just endorsed divestment, including Lille, Bordeaux, Dijon, Saint-Denis and Île-de-France. Last week, the French National Assembly adopted a resolution encouraging companies and local authorities not to invest in fossil fuels. Over the past few months, the global fossil fuel divestment movement has claimed a number of victories; Uppsala, Sweden and Munster, Germany divested from fossil fuels and the London School of Economics abandoned its holdings in coal and tar sands.

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Climate Change and Inequality Are Driving War and Catastrophic Conflicts from Syria to Africa

Democracy Now!

Published on Dec 4, 2015

As Democracy Now! broadcasts from the U.N. Climate Summit in Paris, France, we examine the connection between a warming planet and increasing conflicts around the globe. “If we want to deal with the issues of conflict, go to the root cause: inequality and climate change,” says Asad Rehman, former national organizer of the Stop the War Coalition in the UK, who now serves as Head of International Climate for Friends of the Earth. He notes that from 2006 to 2011, Syria suffered from five years of the worst drought ever in the country’s history. Nearly two million people moved from rural to urban areas, and 80 percent of livestock died. Asad compares this to the Arab Spring, which was driven in part by an agricultural collapse that prompted food prices to triple and generated mass social unrest.

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Paris and Beyond: GDAE Climate Policy Briefs

From the Tufts University GDAE program:

Land, Energy, and Climate

GDAE’s program in Land, Energy, and Climate, under the direction of GDAE Co-Director Dr. William Moomaw, seeks to apply tools of scientific and economic analysis to pressing problems of the biosphere. These include global atmospheric change that threatens to destabilize the planet’s climate, as well as changes to land and water ecosystems that can undermine the basis for a sustainable human economy. A major research focus is on Sustainable Development Diplomacy to create solutions to these problems through innovative technologies, policies and practices to provide required services by less environmentally damaging means, and implementation of restorative development actions to restore lost ecosystem functions.

The series of articles and reports below deals with issues concerning climate change, fisheries, agriculture, and the development of renewable energy systems. Dr. Moomaw has served as a lead author on several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports, also available below.

The research program builds on earlier work on climate change and cost-benefit analysis by GDAE Research Fellows Frank Ackerman and Liz Stanton. See Dr. Ackerman’s website for additional publications.

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COP21 Live: Updates on Paris climate summit – BBC News

Key Points

1. In Paris, there was a mood of cautious optimism after more than 150 world leaders spoke on Monday
2. President Obama highlighted the plight of small island states, saying “I’m an island boy.”
3. The BBC ran a live video Q&A from Vanuatu on this page on Tuesday evening
4. Analysis suggests that if the world builds all the coal power stations that are planned, a 2 degree limit on warming will be impossible.
5. Negotiators are now working on cutting down a draft text to be ready for ministers next week
6. Long-standing divisions between rich and poor countries remain, which may hamper progress

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COP21 by the numbers – FRANCE 24

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Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us – IPS

This report exposes the extreme wealth concentrated within the fortunes of the 400 wealthiest Americans and compares this wealth to the much more meager assets of several different segments of American society.

The report proposes several solutions to close the growing gap between the ultra wealthy and the rest of the country. These policies include closing offshore tax havens and billionaire loopholes in the tax code that the wealthy exploit to hide their wealth.

The report also proposes a direct tax on wealth to break up the concentration of wealth and generate trillions of dollars in new revenue to invest in wealth building opportunities for working families.

See shareable graphics below.

KEY FINDINGS:

• America’s 20 wealthiest people — a group that could fit comfortably in one single Gulfstream G650 luxury jet –­ now own more wealth than the bottom half of the American population combined, a total of 152 million people in 57 million households.
• The Forbes 400 now own about as much wealth as the nation’s entire African-American population ­– plus more than a third of the Latino population ­– combined.
• The wealthiest 100 households now own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the United States. Among the Forbes 400, just 2 individuals are African American –­ Oprah Winfrey and Robert Smith.
• The wealthiest 186 members of the Forbes 400 own as much wealth as the entire Latino population. Just five members of the Forbes 400 are Latino including Jorge Perez, Arturo Moreno, and three members of the Santo Domingo family.
• With a combined worth of $2.34 trillion, the Forbes 400 own more wealth than the bottom 61 percent of the country combined, a staggering 194 million people.
• The median American family has a net worth of $81,000. The Forbes 400 own more wealth than 36 million of these typical American families. That’s as many households in the United States that own cats.

We believe that these statistics actually underestimate our current national levels of wealth concentration. The growing use of offshore tax havens and legal trusts has made the concealing of assets much more widespread than ever before.

Two types of policy interventions can reduce extreme wealth inequality in the United States. 


…(read more).

See also:

 

• The Global Poor vs. the 10%: How Climate Inequality Hurts the Most Vulnerable and Least Responsible December 4, 2015

 

Global Climate Change
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