16. Brief History of Divestment
• Quakers divest from all investments
in the slave trade in the year 1750
17. Brief History of Divestment
• SRI Campaigns launched against Dow Chemical
and manufacture of Napalm,
the use of which heightened opposition
to the Vietnam War
18. Brief History of Divestment
• South Africa SRI divestment campaign
helps end Apartheid government
19. Brief History of SRI
• Definition of Socially Responsible Investing:
– Investment process that considers social and
environmental consequences of investments, both
positive and negative, within the context of rigorous
financial analysis.
• Invest in companies that pay attention to
Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG)
or the triple bottom line.
• 1995-- $639 billion in SRI
• 2012-- $3.74 trillion in SRI
20. How Does SRI Perform?
• Goldman Sachs Report:
http://www.goldmansachs.com/citizenship/esg-reporting/index.html
– companies that are considered leaders in implementing
(ESG) have outperformed the general stock market by 25 per
cent since August 2005.
– 72 percent of these companies have outperformed their
peers over the same period (Sachs 2007)
• The longest running SRI Index, the FTSE KLD 400
has shown around 11% return on investment
since its inception in 1990.
22. Two Strategies
for Impacting Fossil Fuel Companies
1. Screening and Divesting
– Not investing in companies
and their activities
that contradict institutional values
2. Shareholder Advocacy
– All attempts at advocacy within Fossil Fuel
Companies haven’t come close to changing policies,
at most only gaining 20% of shareholder votes
23. Divestment
• Divestment campaign launched in 2012 by 350.org
• Bill McKibben: Founder of 350.org.
• Wrote an article called “The Terrifying
New Math on Climate Change”
– provided a new frame for the
climate change problem
• A 3.6° F rise in global average temp would be catastrophic.
• If the fossil fuel companies burn their proven reserves, they
would create 5 times more carbon pollution than what would
cause a 4 degree rise in temp.
24. Divestment
• Divest from fossil fuels national campaign
– McKibben suggests endowments freeze all new investment
in fossil fuel companies and then make a five year plan to
completely divest your institutions endowments from fossil
fuels.
• Today:
– Over 250 universities with divestment campaigns
– Three universities have already announced plans to divest
– City of Seattle’s $1.7 billion fund was divested, proving that it
can be done at a large scale.
– Overall, 18 Cities and 12 Religious Institutions have divested
so far
25. Oregon’s History
of Progressive Leadership
From the Bottle Bill and Land Use Planning
to Death With Dignity and Public Beach
Access, Oregon has been a national leader
in progressive issues.
We call on Oregon to lead once again
in this pivotal moment.
27. Institutional Commitments and Responsibilities
• Environmental, Social, and Fiscal Responsibilities
• President’s Climate Commitment
– carbon neutral by 2050
• Equally weighing environmental, social, and fiscal
responsibility into investment decisions
• Our institutions investments are not separate
from our institutions
28. The Solution
Start an SRI Conversation!
Make Your Institution’s
Investments Socially
Responsible.
Editor's Notes
The Extremes Become the Norm By Sonia Aggarwal and Hallie Kennan June 2013 Energy InnovationAn understanding of probability curves is critical in order to envision the way our climate will shift over the next century. Probability is a measure of the likelihood that a given event will occur. It is useful to think of probability as relative rather than absolute; the most likely event is the norm, but events closely related to the norm have a much higher chance of happening that the events that are far from the norm. This is called a “normal probability curve,” or a “bell curve.”
The Extremes Become the Norm By Sonia Aggarwal and Hallie Kennan June 2013 Energy InnovationAs Figure 2 shows, a very small shift in the average translates to a much larger probability of extreme events. The small upward shift in global average temperature described above will result in a much higher frequency and intensity of extreme high temperatures (the dark red part of the graph at the bottom right will continue to grow) and much lower frequency of extreme low temperatures (the blue part of the graph will continue to shrink).
The Extremes Become the Norm By Sonia Aggarwal and Hallie Kennan June 2013 Energy InnovationThis shift in the average temperature probability curve causes once-extreme events to become much more likely, and occur much more frequently. The “heat wave of the century” will become the “heat wave of the decade.” For example, under current climate change trends, an area in Texas that usually experiences 10-20 days over 100⁰ Fahrenheit (37.7 degrees Celsius) each year will instead experience temperatures higher than 100⁰ F for nearly four months every year by the end of the century.xii These projections are consistent with findings from the National Climate Impact Assessment Report, which predict that the United States will experience significant mid-continental drying, while the coasts will experience wetter weather.
The Extremes Become the Norm By Sonia Aggarwal and Hallie Kennan June 2013 Energy Innovation21st century avg20th century avgHigh temperatures that were extremely rare in the middle of the 20th century will become common by the middle of the 21st century. Increasing average temperatures are already taking place on a global scale; the decade from 2002 - 2012 was the warmest decade on recordxiv, with temperatures rising approximately .2° C (.38° F) per decade for the last 30 years.xv Parts of the United States, Russia, and other European and Asian countries were impacted by heat waves during the summer of 2010. June and July of that year set the record temperatures for the entire northern hemisphere. Wildfires, heat stroke, and crop loss all resulted from the extreme temperatures.xvi Climate scientists believe this event was made three-times more likely due to man-made climate change activity.xvii
2 degrees — Almost every government in the world has agreed that any warming above a 2°C (3.6°F) rise would be unsafe. We have already raised the temperature .8°C, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the climate dice are loaded for both devastating floods and drought.
565 gigatons — Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. Computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 levels now, the temperature would still rise another 0.8 degrees above the 0.8 we’ve already warmed, which means that we’re already 4/5 of the way to the 2 degree target.
