Tag Archives: divest

350.org Does The Math

I attended the Do The Math tour last night put on by Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben describes the simple math of global warming:

If we want to avoid a climate catastrophe we need to keep our warming below a 2 degree Celsius rise.

To avoid that we will need to keep the amount of carbon below 565 gigatons of CO2

Current proven reserves of oil/gas/coal are 2795 gigatons of CO2. Five times more than we will need to doom us to runaway global warming.

These companies will dig up and burn that carbon, its how they make money. They should no longer be considered companies, and be reclassified as radical enemies of humanity.

So what do we do with these companies? We go after the only thing they care about.

We need to make schools, colleges, pensions, unions, etc to divest from these companies. We can no longer offer these companies a profit for destroying our earth.

If you are a college who invests in Exxon, what is the point of educating your students if there will not be a viable climate for them to use that education in. If you are a pension fund manager what is the point of investing in Shell if there is no future for your pensioners to use their retirement in.

And if all that wasn’t enough Bill explained it all in a metaphor we can all understand Beer.

Learn how you can get your institutions to divest from these big carbon companies at GoFossilFree.org