THE CARBON WAR

A reminder to the powerful of the Earth 191
On 27 th , activist investors win a historic vote at the Chevron AGM. In a
breakthrough for corporate governance activists, 55% vote for large investors
to nominate a quarter of directors to the board. People like Ian Dunlop will
be polishing up their CVs.
But at the ExxonMobil AGM, though, CEO Rex Tillerson stays true
to form by mocking renewables. “We choose not to lose money on purpose,”
he says.
As for the impacts of climate change: “Mankind has this enormous capacity
to deal with adversity”.
A second day of deliberations. I multi-task, as I am forced to do so often these
days if I am to keep up with the simple march of events.
Norway’s $900bn sovereign wealth fund is today told by the government
to divest from coal.
Nina Jensen and the WWF team I worked with on coal investment in
Oslo celebrate all over Twitter. Carbon Tracker colleagues are quick to talk up
the significance of this great victory of the Norwegian environment movement.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund could trigger a wave of large fossil fuel divestments,
Mark Campanale tells the press.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is in fine form in the Telegraph today. He tours
the carbon war battlefields in masterful form, and reaches an inescapable headline
conclusion: “Fossil industry faces a perfect political and technological storm.”
The FT’s Lex column chases another key dimension of the drama. In
Saudi Arabia as much as one million barrels of oil a day, or more than 15 per
cent of oil exports, is going up in smoke for electricity production. This is
unsustainable. Solar investments beckon, Lex observes.
The FT’s Alphaville column picks stranded assets as a theme, in an article
by Izabella Kaminski. “The idea of treating climate change as a financial market
risk has gained a lot of traction the last few years in no small part due to the
efforts of Anthony Hobley and colleagues at the Carbon Tracker Initiative,
who understood the issue had to be framed in the language of finance to make
progress. That language is now blunt. Trillions of dollars worth of financial
assets could be grossly mispriced due to the incorrect valuation of fossil fuel
assets – many of which probably can’t ever be burned if the world is to limit
global warming to two degrees.