May, 26 2015, 11:45am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Kirsty Haigh (Student campaigner and NUS Scotland Vice President of Communities) 07950 671 772, kirsty.haigh@nus-scotland.org.uk
Eleanor Dow (Student campaigner) 07770 433 737
Juliette Daigre (Fossil Free Campaign Manager, People & Planet) 01865 264 194, juliette.daigre@peopleandplanet.org
University of Edinburgh Concedes to Divestment Campaigners: Divestment from Coal and Tar Sands Likely Within 6 Months
EDINBURGH, UK
On Tuesday 26 May, in a big step forward for student campaigners, the University of Edinburgh announced its intention to divest from coal and tar sands within the next 6 months. The news represents a significant shift in the university's position, after it announced on Tuesday 12 May that it would not divest from fossil fuels, sparking a student occupation of a university management building which lasted for more than 10 days.
The University announced today that it is writing to three of the world's biggest fossil fuel producers to inform them that it intends to fully divest from their activities within the next six months, giving the three companies the opportunity to respond in the next four weeks. It is not known what, if any, response from companies might change their stated intent to divest.
Kirsty Haigh, student campaigner with Edinburgh People & Planet and NUS Scotland VP Communities, said:
"We are glad to see the University finally accept that there are lower carbon alternatives to coal and tar sands, but it should have never taken this long. The University is pledging to 'engage' with these companies for the next 4 weeks before divesting, but have refused to outline what that means. These companies pour millions into greenwashing and it is crucial that the University is not bought over by this, and that they follow through and fully divest from them."
The announcement follows a 3-year campaign by Edinburgh People & Planet student group, which has been calling for the university to divest from the world's top 200 fossil fuel companies. The University of Glasgow, Bedfordshire University and SOAS, University of London have all committed to divest from fossil fuels, whilst the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has committed to divest from coal and Oxford University has spurned coal and tar sands investments.
Since the University first announced its decision not to divest two weeks ago, students have staged dozens of actions including pickets, marches, rallies, banner-drops, die-ins and a 10 day occupation of the University's central management building. The students have also received endorsements from environmental groups Friends of the Earth Scotland, World Wildlife Foundation Scotland and Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, as well as from several MSPs and the Nobel Laureate author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report to the Kyoto Climate Summit.
Over 40 civil society organisations, including many from the Global South, have signed an open letter which condemns the University of Edinburgh for its refusal to divest from fossil fuels [2] in response to an article written by the university's senior vice principal published in the Guardian earlier this month [3]. Earlier today, 300 Edinburgh alumni have also pledged to not donate to the university until it commits to fully disinvest from fossil fuels [4].
Miriam Wilson, Fossil Free campaign coordinator at People & Planet, said:
"Companies involved in coal and tar sands extraction are irrevocably damaging our climate and attempts to engage with them to mitigate their climate impacts have failed. Eighty-percent of coal reserves and all of the Canadian tar sands need to stay in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change. We urge the University of Edinburgh to go beyond today's announcement and commit to full divestment within 5 years - nothing short of this is enough."
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The climate crisis will shrink the average global income 19% in the next 26 years compared to what it would have been without global heating caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels, a study published in Nature Wednesday has found.
The researchers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), said that economic shrinkage was largely locked in by mid-century by existing climate change, but that actions taken to reduce emissions now could determine whether income losses hold steady at around 20% or triple through the second half of the century.
"These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions," study lead author and PIK scientist Leonie Wenz said in a statement. "We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them. And we have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately—if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100."
"I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were."
Put in dollar terms, the climate crisis will take a yearly $38 trillion chunk out of the global economy in damages by 2050, the study authors found.
"That seems like… a lot," writer and climate advocate Bill McKibben wrote in response to the findings. "The entire world economy at the moment is about $100 trillion a year; the federal budget is about $6 trillion a year."
This means that the costs of inaction have already exceeded the costs of limiting global heating to 2°C by six times, the study authors said. However, limiting warming to 2°C can still significantly reduce economic losses through 2100.
"This clearly shows that protecting our climate is much cheaper than not doing so, and that is without even considering noneconomic impacts such as loss of life or biodiversity," Wenz said.
The damages predicted by the study were more than twice those of similar analyses because the researchers looked beyond national temperature data to also incorporate the impacts of extreme weather and rainfall on more than 1,600 subnational regions over a 40-year period, The Guardian explained.
"Strong income reductions are projected for the majority of regions, including North America and Europe, with South Asia and Africa being most strongly affected," PIK scientist and first author Maximilian Kotz said in a statement. "These are caused by the impact of climate change on various aspects that are relevant for economic growth such as agricultural yields, labor productivity, or infrastructure."
However, Wenz told the paper that the paper's projected reduction was likely a "lower bound" because the study still doesn't include climate impacts such as heatwaves, tropical storms, sea-level rise, and harms to human health.
Unlike previous studies, the research predicted economic losses for most wealthier countries in the Global North, with the U.S. and German economies shrinking by 11% by mid-century, France's by 13%, and the U.K.'s by 7%. However, the countries set to suffer the most are countries closer to the equator that have lower incomes already and have historically done much less to contribute to the climate crisis. Iraq, for example, could see incomes drop by 30%, Botswana 25%, and Brazil 21%.
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Wenz told The Guardian that the results were "devastating."
"I am used to my work not having a nice societal outcome, but I was surprised by how big the damages were. The inequality dimension was really shocking," Wenz said.
Levermann said the paper presented society with a clear choice:
It is on us to decide: Structural change towards a renewable energy system is needed for our security and will save us money. Staying on the path we are currently on, will lead to catastrophic consequences. The temperature of the planet can only be stabilized if we stop burning oil, gas, and coal.
McKibben, meanwhile, argued that the findings should persuade major companies to embrace climate action for self-interested reasons. He noted that most corporate emissions come from how company money is invested by banks, particularly in the continued exploitation of fossil fuel resources.
"If Amazon and Apple and Microsoft wanted to avoid a world where, by century's end, people had 60% less money to spend on buying whatever phones and software and weird junk (doubtless weirder by then) they plan on selling, then they should be putting pressure on their banks to stop making the problem worse. They should also be unleashing their lobbying teams to demand climate action from Congress," McKibben wrote.
"These people are supposed to care about money, and for once it would help us if they actually did," he continued. "Stop putting out ads about how green your products are—start making this system you dominate actually work."
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