SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
copenhagen
Another Green Victory: Copenhagen Set to Divest from All Fossil Fuels
"Copenhagen is at the forefront of the world’s big cities in the green transition...Therefore it seems totally inappropriate for the city to still be investing in oil, coal and gas."
Feb 02, 2016
The Copenhagen City Council on Tuesday is expected to approve a vote to divest the city's investment fund, worth 6.9 billion kroner, or roughly $1 billion USD, from all its fossil fuels holdings.
If the vote passes, the Danish capital will sell off its stocks and bonds in coal, oil, and gas in its continued effort to become "the world's first CO2-neutral capital by 2025," Mayor Frank Jensen told local media.
The exact amount the city has invested in fossil fuels has not been made publicly available, but reporting indicates the divestment would cost approximately 1 million kroner in fees to execute.
"Copenhagen is at the forefront of the world's big cities in the green transition... Therefore it seems totally inappropriate for the city to still be investing in oil, coal and gas," Jensen said. "We need to change that and I think this will sit will with Copenhageners' desire for a green profile for their city."
In the wake of the COP21 global climate pact signed last December in Paris, communities around the world are increasingly turning away from fossil fuels and looking to renewable energy. Jensen said he hoped Copenhagen's move would inspire other cities to follow suit.
"I'm not aware of other capitals that have made such a clear decision as the one we are now making. But I think more will follow in the wake of the climate agreement in Paris," he told the Danish news outlet Information. "The development will go quickly--we are now hearing about coal companies going bankrupt at a fast clip."
The divestment movement has been picking up steam--so to speak--as climate change becomes an increasingly urgent concern. The divestment advocacy group Fossil Free estimates that more than 500 institutions, representing over $3.4 trillion in assets, have committed to pulling their resources from the carbon-intensive industries.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'It Is Not Hopeless,' says World's Chief Climate Scientist
As Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change opens meeting to finalize latest report to the world, head of agency says meeting challenge of global warming will not be easy, but that it can be done
Oct 28, 2014
"It is not hopeless."
That was the key message delivered in Copenhagen on Monday by Rajendra Pachauri, chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as the agency met to finalize the findings and language of its pending Synthesis Report, the last installment of its Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), designed to provide the world's policymakers with a comprehensive scientific assessment of the risks of human-caused global warming and climate change.
"We still have time to build a better, more sustainable world. We still have time to avoid the most serious impacts of climate change... But we have precious little of that time." --Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chair
"The Synthesis Report will provide the roadmap by which policymakers will hopefully find their way to a global agreement to finally reverse course on climate change," said Pachauri. "It gives us the knowledge to make informed choices, the knowledge to build a brighter, more sustainable future. It enhances our vital understanding of the rationale for action--and the serious implications for inaction."
What was critical for world leaders, policymakers and the global public at large to understand, he said, was that though it won't be easy to avert the worse impacts of the world's changing climate, it is possible.
"A great deal of work and tall hurdles lie ahead. But it can be done. We still have time to build a better, more sustainable world. We still have time to avoid the most serious impacts of climate change," he said. "But we have precious little of that time."
The series of recent IPCC reports that have come out over the last twelve months and make up the AR5 assessment have shared the common theme of urgency and the Synthesis Report, once finalized, will be the official word from the world's top climate scientists as national government's send their delegates to next year's meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) in Paris. Alongside the most thorough review of the available climate research ever conducted, the report will offer specific guidance on both mitigation and solutions to address the dangerous levels of greenhouse gases that are increasingly warming the planet's atmosphere and oceans.
"Much has been made of the growing peril of delaying the hard choices that need to be made to adapt to and mitigate climate change," said Pauchari. "I do not discount those challenges. But the Synthesis Report shows that solutions are at hand."
At the last high-level UNFCC talks, known as Conferences of Parties meetings or (COP), world leaders agreed to the goal of limiting global temperature increases this century to 2degC, but so far no binding commitments have been made, either at the national or international level, that scientists say would such a target.
Watch the IPCC's opening session:
IPCC Opening Ceremony AR5 SYR - 27 October 2014, CopenhagenOpening ceremony of the AR5 Synthesis Report.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Bring Home Best-in-the-World Ideas to Make Sure Your City Thrives
Oct 13, 2014
Imagine a major city where 35 percent of all traffic is people on bikes. Or think even bigger--an entire nation where 27 percent of all trips are pedal-powered.
This is not some Utopia dreamed up by a 24-year-old after too many handcrafted beers. These are real places located in modern societies with high levels of car ownership. Places not so different from the US named Copenhagen and the Netherlands.
Don't believe it? Go there, and you can see for yourself. You'll be surprised to find these are great places for everyone, no matter how they get around, because cities that work for bicyclists are more vital, prosperous, convenient and attractive places to live and work.
It's never been easier for local leaders across the US to experience life in these world-class communities. Next summer PeopleForBikes, a Colorado-based non-profit, is organizing tours of Denmark and the Netherlands to offer public officials, planners, civic activists and business leaders practical lessons about how to help their own cities thrive. (Minimum of four participants from each community.)
"These tours are 20 percent about bikes and 80 percent about how to make great places full of economic, social and cultural wealth," said PeopleForBikes' Zach Vanderkooy in a phone conversation from Amsterdam, where he was leading a group of officials from Atlanta, Seattle and Boston.
"Nothing is better than getting on a bike to see how it feels," said Rick Dimino, CEO of the Boston business coalition A Better City, who was part of the recent Netherlands tour. "We saw some very creative and robust ways that a strong bicycling system can improve mobility, quality of life and our economy in the US."
"I took hundreds of pictures on those trips and I gave many slideshows for our planners and transportation people to show what could be done," remembers Gabe Klein, former Director of the Chicago Department of Transportation, who visited Danish and Dutch cities on PeopleForBikes study tours.
Chicago, never noted previously as a great place to bicycle, is now ranked as America's #2 Bike City by Bicycling magazine. That's because the city is now second only to New York (Bicycling's #1 city) in the number of protected bike lanes--bike routes on busy streets that are physically separated from fast-moving vehicles. According to Vanderkooy, "protected lanes together with slow-speed local streets and off-street paths create a seamless transportation system that strengthens public transit and helps keep all traffic well-organized and free-flowing."
Since 2009, more than 275 leaders from American communities coast-to-coast have enjoyed up-close and personal experiences with world-class transportation infrastructure and public spaces on these study tours, including current or future transportation directors in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago as well as the Transportation Manager for Facebook.
Up to this point, the tours have been by-invitation only, but applications are now being accepted for next summer's expanded PeopleForBikes World Class Cities 2015. Candidates are encouraged to apply as soon as possible to be part of "this five-day rolling conversation about transforming US streets".
Brian Payne, President of the Central Indiana Community Foundation and a participant in a recent study tour to Denmark and Sweden, has already snapped up 12 spots for a delegation from Indianapolis. "We're planning to bring neighborhood leaders, traffic engineers, city council members and public works employees," Payne says, "because these trips change how people think about and experience a city, especially when they can all share moments of inspiration."
"It's a serious trip," Payne adds. "You get up early in the morning and go all day and then go out to dinner to talk over everything you've learned. But you're studying what makes a city livable and great, and that's a lot of fun."
Alumni of the tours enthuse about discovering great ideas that can be applied back home, not only European examples but also what they learn from peers in other American cities. "We'll be taking a trip to Indianapolis," explains Tami Door, CEO of the Downtown Denver Partnership who was on the same tour as Payne. "We want to see what they're doing there."
Indianapolis, a city that until now was more famous for car racing than bike riding, has become one of America's leaders in protected bike lanes. Payne's foundation launched a campaign to create the Cultural Trail, a bike and pedestrian route separated from traffic that winds for eight miles through the center of the city. A study from Indiana University's Center for Urban Policy and the Environment calculates that the Cultural Trail's impact on residential and commercial development and tourism will add $863 million dollars and 11,000 jobs to the local economy.
Vanderkooy stresses that the point of these study tours is not for local US leaders to simply copy what they see in Denmark or the Netherlands, but to stimulate their creativity to find the best ways to promote social and economic vitality in their own communities. He explains that the workshops, seminars and firsthand experience on the streets help them "figure out how to do if faster--and better--in America."
Three weeks after they returned home from the Netherlands, a delegation from Madison, Wisconsin was laying the groundwork for protected bike lanes. Chicago Alderwoman Pat Dowell quickly settled a controversy about bike lanes in her South Side ward and helped expand bike education programs for youth after seeing what's possible in Denmark. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto toured Danish cities and Malmo, Sweden, with PeopleForBikes in late June--and by early September, with help from the local business community, the city had built three new protected bike lanes.
For Denver City Councilman Albus Brooks, who toured Denmark in June, the transformation was personal as well as professional. "I once had been skeptical of bike lanes, and by the time I went to Copenhagen I was a supporter. Now I am fierce advocate."
"I got a new bike--my first serious adult bike--and rode 100 miles the first week I was home, even in my suit," he boasts. "A friend who knows me really well said that when I'm on a bike I just look happier. I've got my whole family biking more now--it's healthy for everyone."
Brooks is helping lead the push for major bike improvements in Denver. "Anytime we re-do streets we're going to think about protected bike lanes, bike boulevards and wider sidewalks-- the whole complete streets idea."
And he's planning a bike event for community people in his diverse downtown district. "I came back excited about how to make biking more multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-age."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Copenhagen: The Courage to Say No
Copenhagen
On the ninth day of the Copenhagen climate summit, Africa was sacrificed. The position of the G-77 negotiating bloc, including African states, had been clear: a 2 degree Celsius increase in average global temperatures translates into a 3-3.5 degree increase in Africa.
Dec 17, 2009
COPENHAGEN -- On the ninth day of the Copenhagen climate summit, Africa was sacrificed. The position of the G-77 negotiating bloc, including African states, had been clear: a 2 degree Celsius increase in average global temperatures translates into a 3-3.5 degree increase in Africa.
That means, according to the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, "an additional 55 million people could be at risk from hunger" and "water stress could affect between 350 and 600 million more people." Archbishop Desmond Tutu puts the stakes like this: "We are facing impending disaster on a monstrous scale.... A global goal of about 2 degrees C is to condemn Africa to incineration and no modern development."
And yet that is precisely what Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, proposed to do when he stopped off in Paris on his way to Copenhagen: standing with President Nicolas Sarkozy, and claiming to speak on behalf of all of Africa (he is the head of the African climate-negotiating group), he unveiled a plan that includes the dreaded 2 degree increase and offers developing countries just $10 billion a year to help pay for everything climate-related, from sea walls to malaria treatment to fighting deforestation.
It's hard to believe this is the same man who only three months ago was saying this: "We will use our numbers to delegitimize any agreement that is not consistent with our minimal position.... If need be, we are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threaten to be another rape of our continent.... What we are not prepared to live with is global warming above the minimum avoidable level."
And this: "We will participate in the upcoming negotiations not as supplicants pleading for our case but as negotiators defending our views and interests."
We don't yet know what Zenawi got in exchange for so radically changing his tune or how, exactly, you go from a position calling for $400 billion a year in financing (the Africa group's position) to a mere $10 billion. Similarly, we do not know what happened when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Philippine President Gloria Arroyo just weeks before the summit and all of a sudden the toughest Filipino negotiators were kicked off their delegation and the country, which had been demanding deep cuts from the rich world, suddenly fell in line.
We do know, from witnessing a series of these jarring about-faces, that the G-8 powers are willing to do just about anything to get a deal in Copenhagen. The urgency clearly does not flow from a burning desire to avert cataclysmic climate change, since the negotiators know full well that the paltry emissions cuts they are proposing are a guarantee that temperatures will rise a "Dantesque" 3.9 degrees, as Bill McKibben puts it.
Matthew Stilwell of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development--one of the most influential advisers in these talks--says the negotiations are not really about averting climate change but are a pitched battle over a profoundly valuable resource: the right to the sky. There is a limited amount of carbon that can be emitted into the atmosphere. If the rich countries fail to radically cut their emissions, then they are actively gobbling up the already insufficient share available to the South. What is at stake, Stilwell argues, is nothing less than "the importance of sharing the sky."
Europe, he says, fully understands how much money will be made from carbon trading, since it has been using the mechanism for years. Developing countries, on the other hand, have never dealt with carbon restrictions, so many governments don't really grasp what they are losing. Contrasting the value of the carbon market--$1.2 trillion a year, according to leading British economist Nicholas Stern--with the paltry $10 billion on the table for developing countries, Stilwell says that rich countries are trying to exchange "beads and blankets for Manhattan." He adds: "This is a colonial moment. That's why no stone has been left unturned in getting heads of state here to sign off on this kind of deal.... Then there's no going back. You've carved up the last remaining unowned resource and allocated it to the wealthy."
For months now NGOs have gotten behind a message that the goal of Copenhagen is to "seal the deal." Everywhere we look in the Bella Center, clocks are going "tck tck tck." But any old deal isn't good enough, especially because the only deal on offer won't solve the climate crisis and might make things much worse, taking current inequalities between North and South and locking them in indefinitely. Augustine Njamnshi of Pan African Climate Justice Alliance puts the 2 degree proposal in harsh terms: "You cannot say you are proposing a 'solution' to climate change if your solution will see millions of Africans die and if the poor not the polluters keep paying for climate change."
Stilwell says that the wrong kind of deal would "lock in the wrong approach all the way to 2020"--well past the deadline for peak emissions. But he insists that it's not too late to avert this worst-case scenario. "I'd rather wait six months or a year and get it right because the science is growing, the political will is growing, the understanding of civil society and affected communities is growing, and they'll be ready to hold their leaders to account to the right kind of a deal."
At the start of these negotiations the mere notion of delay was environmental heresy. But now many are seeing the value of slowing down and getting it right. Most significant, after describing what 2 degrees would mean for Africa, Archbishop Tutu pronounced that it is "better to have no deal than to have a bad deal." That may well be the best we can hope for in Copenhagen. It would be a political disaster for some heads of state--but it could be one last chance to avert the real disaster for everyone else.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy