Tomorrow, a U.N. climate summit kicks off in New York. More than 120 countries are expected to attend and discuss ways to reduce greenhouse emissions.
On the eve of the conference, the Rockefeller family announced it will start divesting of fossil fuel stocks through its Rockefeller Brothers Fund. This is no small move considering the Rockefellers are considered the first family of oil in the United States.
Climate change activist Bill McKibben spoke to Take Two about the announcement:
The theme of the UN summit is "catalyze action." What does that mean to you?
Truthfully, I think the summit itself will be seen as inaction. I don't think we'll see much more than we've seen out of the UN in the past.
But there's a lot of action going on on the sidelines. Yesterday, in New York City, was by far — by a factor of four probably — the largest rally about climate change in the planet's history. And it's already helping to catalyze other action.
The Rockefeller's announcement last night is a pretty signal moment. If anyone can say that the oil era is drawing to a close, it's the heirs of John D. himself, the guy who started the oil era.
But the Rockefellers are quite wealthy and it seems they'll be able to fare just fine without investing in fossil fuels. Not everyone feels financially comfortable enough to make that decision...
The evidence is pretty clear that if you're looking at it in purely financial terms, that you'd be wise to get out of fossil fuel. The AP commissioned a study last year asking stock analysts to look at what would have happened if a university with an endowment of $1 billion had gotten out of fossil fuels ten years ago, and the answer was they would have had an extra $120 million that they would have made in the last decade.
This is not just morally a bad idea to support the industries that are flooding the atmosphere with carbon, it's also a financial bet that the fossil fuel era is going to keep going on for years and years, and it's pretty clear that it isn't.
Not everyone feels that way, though. Just last week in California, the University of California regents made the decision not to divest from coal and oil...
Yes. People who run money are, you know, conservative and sometimes it takes them a while. It took seven or eight years for the UC regents to decide that they wanted to divest from apartheid, but then they did divest from apartheid. And when Nelson Mandela got out of prison, the first trip he took was to California to go thank students at the UC system... and he said, 'We fought to liberate ourselves, but we couldn't have done it without your pressure.'
UC's not divesting, but Stanford is. And I predict that the UC system will do it before long. And I predict that they'll do it in part because they can't afford to keep being invested in yesterday's technologies.
Even if you do get major institutions to divest, it seems that the oil industries aren't too hurt by it. We spoke with one oil analyst who said that this move by the Rockefellers is purely symbolic, and any reduction in investment is really just a drop in Exxon or Chevron's overall market cap...
Well, that's definitely one way of looking at it, and I'm under no illusions that we can bankrupt Exxon financially in the short term. But we can start to politically bankrupt them.
The problem is mostly that they're incredibly powerful... These guys are the biggest players that there is. Your local California oil company Chevron gave the largest single corporate campaign contribution in history two weeks before the last federal election. And it was designed to make sure that the House of Representatives would stay in the hands of climate [change] deniers.
If you're an investor in Chevron, then you're a part of that process. And if you're comfortable with that, then so be it. But more and more people aren't comfortable with it— and that those people now include the Rockefellers is a pretty remarkable moment.