THE CARBON WAR

We cannot pretend we don’t hear them 93
I join what is being called the solutions segment: people from clean-energy
companies, and investors in them. Here speeches are being delivered from
a PA system run by the Sierra Club. My friend Danny Kennedy, founder of
Californian solar company Sungevity, is giving one as I arrive. In 2001, new
electricity was 81% dirty and 19% clean, he says. In 2013 it was 58% clean and
42% dirty. The trend is clear. As somebody said on Twitter, The Mend is Nigh.
“100% renewables” signs everywhere. This the work of a single campaigner
from the World Future Council, Anna Leidreiter. I am wearing a “100% Renewables”
tee-shirt that she gave me in a bar last night.
I look across at the American Museum of Natural History. The current
exhibition is Flight in the Age of the Dinosaurs. How rather hopefully
appropriate.
Chanting now: What do we want? Clean energy. When do want it? Now!
In Melbourne earlier, the crowd chanted not “now”, but “ten years ago”.
Silence descends. This is the minute for the victims of climate change
around the world to date.
A forest of arms held aloft as a wave of noise spreads up the column. The
front of the march is moving. But it will be 15 minutes before we can, people
say. And the march extends all the way to 86 th Street.
I see my favourite banner so far. “I can’t believe we still have to protest
this crap.”
I peel off the march when we get to 59 th street. Back in my hotel on Times
Square, as I change into my suit for the opening of the Clinton Global Initiative,
I can still hear drums and cheering echoing through the canyons of Manhattan.
Bloomberg’s headquarters on Lexington Avenue next morning. A Manhattan
tower housing the global base of a business communications empire created
by one man with an idea. Fortunately, Michael Bloomberg is a Republican who
cares about climate change – indeed, is working hard to fix it. Accordingly,
in the conference suite, a who’s who of global finance has assembled to hear
Carbon Tracker’s analysts launch the second in our three-report series on the
state of global fossil fuel industries: on coal. They are in town because the UN
Secretary-General’s summit on climate change is about to start. And Wall Street
is only a few blocks away.
They are abuzz with today’s news. Members of the Rockefeller family have
announced that their $860 million foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund,
is divesting from all fossil fuels. The fund had already pulled out of coal and