"This is not a fight about reasoned data and science. It's a fight about power and money," says 350.org head
By Laurie Goering
LONDON, Nov 4 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The vast financial and political influence of the coal, oil and gas industry is a major reason increasing evidence of the risks of climate change produces little action to reduce those risks, a leading proponent of fossil fuel divestment said Tuesday.
"This is not a fight about reasoned data and science. It's a fight about power and money," said Bill McKibben, president of 350.org, a climate activism organisation, during a conference on building ambition to act on climate change at Chatham House, a London-based international affairs think tank.
Right now, "the fossil fuel industry has most of that power and virtually all of that money" said McKibben, whose organisation backs an emerging divestment campaign aimed at persuading universities, pension funds and a range of other investors to pull their money out of fossil fuels.
Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founding director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, called the divestment campaign "the most important action that ever happened on climate change".
With carbon emissions continuing to rise despite years of efforts to reduce them, "we are catapulting the planet out of the habitable zone," Schellnhuber warned.
TRANSLATING RISKS INTO DOLLARS
Conference speakers said another challenge is that risks associated with climate change are difficult to translate into financial terms that business and governments can comprehend and factor into their plans.
Loss of infrastructure to storms, for instance, has a price tag - Hurricane Sandy in 2012 cost the U.S. $60 billion - but putting a value on climate change-related loss of a species or a UNESCO World Heritage site is a much more subjective matter.
Effective climate action also requires not only genuine policy and technological options for change but economic and political interests willing to adopt them and pressure political leaders to make such changes possible, the experts said.
In much of the world, the options are now in place but the political and economic interest in driving change is not. This is in no small part due to powerful lobbying by fossil fuel interests and the income from fossil fuels that underpins such things as government tax income and pension funds, they said.
McKibben on Tuesday criticised oil and gas company Shell, one of the sponsors of the Chatham House conference, for its "Jekyll and Hyde" behavior in simultaneously backing such events while racing to open up the fast-melting Arctic ocean for oil exploration to find and exploit new fossil fuel reserves.
Shell representatives were offered a chance by the moderator to respond at the conference, but did not.
"Shell and its brethren have been able to behave this way for a long time because there's been little effective resistance to them," McKibben said.
CLIMATE MARCH
In September, his organisation 350.org helped put together a 400,000-person march in New York City, as well as marches in other cities around the world, aiming to build a popular movement for climate action as a political counterbalance to the fossil fuel industry's influence.
The quickening pace of climate-related damage also means overburdened governments will have an increasingly harder time focusing on longer-term planning for climate impacts as they struggle to deal with more frequent disasters, said Nick Mabey, chief executive of E3G, a UK organisation pushing for a more rapid transition to sustainable development.
Already, efforts to "build back better" after disasters are failing in places like flood-hit Pakistan, he said, as authorities rush to replace destroyed infrastructure and services rather than considering how to make such replacements more resilient. (Reporting By Laurie Goering, Editing by Lisa Anderson)
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