Norway Divests From Coal
The Norwegian Parliament voted early in June to order the country’s huge oil fund — at $890 billion, the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund — to pull billions of dollars of investments out of companies that derive 30 percent or more of their business from mining or burning coal. The move is a major boost to the three-year-old campaign to persuade large investors to divest their fossil fuel stocks. And it could add to the momentum toward concrete action at the climate-change summit conference to be held in Paris in December.
That much is good. There is, however, a problem. Norway is also Europe’s biggest producer of other fossil fuels, and the money that the country is pulling out of coal came from more than four decades of pumping oil and gas out of the North Sea. Coal may be a worse offender on the climate change front, and the Norwegian legislators may truly have the planet’s best interests at heart, but it is hard to avoid the perception of hypocrisy in Norway’s selective combat against carbon emitters.
There is no question that climate change is one of the great challenges of our time, that action is sorely overdue, and that it is imperative for the Paris COP21 climate conference to make the serious decisions on reducing carbon emissions that previous such conference have failed to take. If the decisions to curb or cut coal investments by major institutions such as the Church of England, Oxford University, Stanford University, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (also the product of oil production), the French insurer Axa — and now the Norwegian oil fund — help raise awareness and build momentum, good.
But that cannot be all, especially not for Norway. It is simply not enough for a country that contributes so much gas and oil to publicly put the onus on coal. The divestment decision must be only the first step: If Norway is not yet ready to keep its own fossil resources in the ground, it should at least seriously examine how its vast wealth could be used to support research and development of ways to wean the world from its reliance on fossil fuels. All fossil fuels.
SOURCE: nytimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/opinion/norway-divests-from-coal.html?_r=0
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Photo source: Greenpeace
