Green groups and development charities are targeting fossil fuel firms and the politicians who support them
By Megan Rowling
BARCELONA, Oct 17 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - As hundreds of protesters joined environmental activists from South Pacific nations trying to blockade ships at the world's largest coal export terminal in Australia on Friday, Marshall Islands poet Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner appealed to world leaders "to put an end to the era of fossil fuels once and for all".
At last month's U.N. climate summit in New York, she won a standing ovation from leaders for her moving performance of a poem on fighting climate change, written for her baby daughter. Now Jetnil-Kijiner, like a growing number of other activists, is training her sights on coal, oil and gas companies.
"The biggest threat to our homes is the fossil fuel industry and we will not rest until our very existence is no longer threatened by their greed and endless extraction," the young Pacific islander said in a statement.
As the impacts of climate change - including more extreme weather and rising seas - start to bite around the world, environmental groups and development charities are stepping up efforts to put pressure on what they see as the root cause of planet-warming emissions: fossil fuel businesses and the politicians who support them.
On Friday, aid agency Oxfam blamed what it called a "toxic triangle made up of short-term financial investors, timid governments and fossil fuel companies" for trapping the world on a path of high carbon emissions, and blocking a shift to renewable energy sources.
Such a path could put 400 million people at risk of severe food and water shortages by 2060, the charity warned in a report.
"This is all about big profits for the few with little care for the rest of us - particularly the world's poorest people who are already being made hungry by climate change," said Oxfam Executive Director Winnie Byanyima.
Julie-Anne Richards, the group's head of food and climate policy, said individuals concerned about the issue could urge their governments to stop using taxpayers' money to subsidise polluting industries and ask questions about what their own investments are financing.
'COSY RELATIONSHIPS'
Charlie Kronick, a senior campaigner for Greenpeace, noted a recent surge of interest in targeting the shareholders and creditors of fossil fuel companies, as well as their corporate and social partners.
On Oct. 9, LEGO said it would not renew a promotional contract with oil giant Shell. The decision came after a three-month campaign by Greenpeace that pushed more than 1 million people to sign a petition urging the toy maker to cut ties with Shell over its plans to drill for oil in the Arctic.
Kronick said the main aim was not to cause financial damage, but to disrupt "cosy relationships" and stop Shell's brand benefiting from LEGO's endorsement.
"Where (fossil fuel businesses) are embedded economically, politically and culturally, it makes it very hard to imagine a different life - a future where these companies are not so influential," he said.
In the same week, Scotland's University of Glasgow became the first university in Britain to commit to withdrawing all its investments from the fossil fuel industry, after students pressed it to do so.
The university said it would reallocate around 18 million pounds ($29 million) over 10 years if the cost of doing so was "acceptable".
Similar campaigns are underway at universities in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Norway, said groups behind the growing divestment movement, which echoes campaigns opposing apartheid and tobacco in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the United States, 13 universities and colleges have pledged to divest from fossil fuels, and in Britain, more than 50 "Fossil Free" university campaigns have been launched in the past year, the organisers said.
One renowned university now in the process of considering its investments is Oxford, according to Ben Caldecott, programme director at the university's Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
STIGMA
Caldecott's team investigated the impact of the expanding fossil fuel divestment movement, and concluded that the direct financial effect on companies of selling their shares was likely to be "minimal", given their huge capitalisations. Instead, divestment works through stigma, he said.
"Stigma makes it harder for companies to raise capital, recruit and retain staff, maintain supplier relationships, and sustain high levels of political impact and influence," the financial markets expert explained.
He predicted that most big institutional investors, such as pension funds, will have to think in the next few years about how to tackle risks linked to climate change.
A 2013 report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the London School of Economics said that if current spending trends continue the next decade would see over $6 trillion allocated to developing fossil fuels.
But if the world hopes to keep global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, "much of this risks being wasted on unburnable assets", it warned.
"All this money that's been spent on expanding the fossil fuel industry and further entrenching it is basically creating a giant carbon bubble...(and) when that bursts, it will have a big impact on our economy," said Oxfam's Richards.
($1 = 0.6207 British Pounds)
(Reporting by Megan Rowling; editing by Laurie Goering)
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