divestment – Enviro Updates

Shelly Browning and Philip Beard, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

In December 2019, following a spirited discussion by supervisors and citizen commentators, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors adopted unanimously a remarkable resolution. Making note of the manifest connection between burning fossil fuels and the appalling frequency of catastrophic wildfires, they directed Treasurer-Tax Collector Erick Roeser in part as follows:

“… Investment in the fossil fuel industry is inconsistent with (environmental/social/governance) investment principles. (The supervisors) request that the County Treasurer make no new or renewed investments in fossil fuel development corporations to the extent that other, more socially responsible investments achieve substantially equivalent safety, liquidity, and yield.”

The Sonoma County treasurer manages money on behalf of scores of public agencies. They entrust surplus resources to the Sonoma County Pooled Investment Fund to guarantee secure, responsible management of public money. To name just a few: Animal Welfare, the Office of Education, Health Services, Homeless Emergency Aid, Public Health and virtually all fire and school districts.

As the fund’s manager, Roeser enjoys considerable latitude and bears fiduciary responsibility in deciding where and how to invest these funds.

Since December 2019, however, Roeser has contravened the spirit of the supervisors’ resolution by maintaining and adding to the county’s deposits in several large banks that appear prominently in the Fossil Fuel Finance Report 2020. The report, published by the Rainforest Action Network, lists the major banks financing fossil fuels globally. Roeser’s new or renewed certificates of deposit in these banks amount to $236 million of Sonoma County pooled investment funds in the third quarter of 2020 alone.
Continue reading “Op-Ed: Divest public funds from fossil fuels”

Bill McKibben, THE GUARDIAN

On 15 October, the European Investment Bank meets to decide its policy on fossil fuels. The hand of history is on its shoulder.

Millions of people marched against climate crisis over the past two weeks, in some of the largest demonstrations of the millennium. Most people cheered the students who led the rallies – call them the Greta Generation. But now we’ll start to find out if all their earnest protest actually matters.

Perhaps the first real test will come on 15 October, when the board of the EU’s European Investment Bank – the largest public bank in the world – meets to decide whether the time has finally come to stop expanding the fossil fuel sector. This should be a no-brainer decision: the bank’s staff has put forward a cogent proposal, supported by campaigners across the continent, that would end loans to new fossil fuel projects by 2020.

That plan fits with the facts: when the world’s climate scientists declared last autumn that we would need to have fundamentally transformed our energy sector within a decade, it was clear that the first job was to stop building any new infrastructure. The first rule of holes is, when you’re in one, stop digging.

In this case that means no more digging for gas pipelines or ports or anything else that will help lock in carbon emissions for decades to come. In the past week of Guardian reporting we’ve learned that the biggest oil companies plan to increase production as much as 35% in the next decade. It’s going to be hard enough to phase out the vast existing fossil fuel infrastructure in the years ahead: adding new projects at this point is insane.

Environmental Center of Sonoma County

Tag: divestment

Op-Ed: Divest public funds from fossil fuels

Divestment works – and one huge bank can lead the way