scholarly journals Shifting Discourse on Climate and Sustainability: Key Characteristics of the Higher Education Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (23) ◽  
pp. 10069
Author(s):  
Dylan Gibson ◽  
Leslie A. Duram
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Text Analysis ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
The Us ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
Facebook Pages

In the last decade, the fossil fuel divestment (FFD) movement has emerged as a key component of an international grassroots mobilization for climate justice. Using a text analysis of Facebook pages for 144 campaigns at higher education institutions (HEIs), this article presents an overview and analysis of the characteristics of the higher education (HE) FFD movement in the US. The results indicate that campaigns occur at a wide array of HEIs, concentrated on the east and west coasts. Primarily student led, campaigns set broad goals for divestment, while reinvestment is often a less clearly defined objective. Campaigns incorporate a mixture of environmental, social, and economic arguments into their messaging. Justice is a common theme, used often in a broad context rather than towards specific populations or communities impacted by climate change or other social issues. These insights contribute to the understanding of the HE FFD movement as ten years of campus organizing approaches. In particular, this study illustrates how the movement is pushing sustainability and climate action in HE and in broader society towards a greater focus on systemic change and social justice through campaigns’ hardline stance against fossil fuels and climate justice orientation.

scholarly journals Shadows of Divestment: The Complications of Diverting Fossil Fuel Finance

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Kate J. Neville
Keyword(s):  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Commodity Trade ◽  
Global Environmental Politics ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Two Sectors ◽  
Social Damage

This forum article offers a critical assessment of the strategy of divestment from fossil fuels as climate action, considering the unintended or spillover consequences of reinvestment in other industries. With a focus on two sectors—agriculture and renewable energy—it examines how reinvestment to achieve competitive financial returns might exacerbate non-emissions-based environmental and social damage. The analysis draws on established and emerging research in global environmental politics on the political economy of commodity trade to sound a cautionary note about divestment, arguing that the strategy can maintain the status quo as readily as it can disrupt systems of power. A focus on divestment addresses a crucial immediate problem, but without a critical look at reinvestment and the current political economic order, activists could be reinforcing the same systems of environmental and social damage they are aiming to dismantle.

scholarly journals Rationale of early adopters of fossil fuel divestment

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Todd Beer
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Qualitative Data ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Ecological Modernization ◽  
Early Adopters ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Us ◽  
Ecological Values

This research uses the social science perspectives of institutions, ecological modernization, and social movements to analyze the rationale used by the early-adopting universities of fossil fuel divestment in the US. Through analysis of qualitative data from interviews with key actors at the universities that divested their endowments from fossil fuels, I examine how institutions navigate competing logics and frame their rationale. The results show that while many institutions relied on ecological values embedded in their missions to justify their decision to divest, many also continued to embrace an altered version of market logic.

Long-Term Climate Justice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Nolt
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Theories Of Justice

Anthropogenic global climate change resulting mainly from the burning of fossil fuels during the historically brief fossil fuel era will displace, sicken, injure, and kill large numbers of people over the coming centuries, perhaps millennia. This is an unprecedented injustice. This chapter aims to articulate the sense which these extremely long-term harms constitute injustice and to show that prominent contemporary theories of justice do not adequately account for that injustice. Distributional theories are largely blind to it because they do not consider harms, and long-term human rights theories falter, both because they posit mutually unfulfillable rights and because they lack a persuasive moral psychology. As remedies, this chapter suggests, first, a long-term consequentialism of rights, perhaps differing little from plain objective welfare consequentialism, and, second, a moral psychology inspired by the Hebraic prophetic tradition and analyzed by John Stuart Mill.

Climate talks highlight shortcomings in global efforts

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Gas ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Paris Agreement ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Net Zero ◽  
The Us ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
Trump Administration ◽  
Credibility Gap

Significance Washington has re-joined the Paris agreement and announced new climate commitments, but still faces a credibility gap. It must demonstrate by November’s COP26 summit, how it can meet its new goals. Impacts Private sector companies will face increasing pressure to set net-zero targets. The use of natural gas as a transition fossil fuel will face greater scrutiny as pressure for drastic climate action increases. Fossil fuel subsidy reform is likely to return to G20 priorities after having been neglected during the US Trump administration.

Divest–Invest: A Moral Case for Fossil Fuel Divestment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Lenferna
Keyword(s):  
Global Warming ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
Moral Case ◽  
Moral Arguments ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
Fuel Industry ◽  
Do So

This chapter begins by providing a brief overview of the divestment movement and the carbon bubble. It then argues that in order to avoid grave, substantial, and unnecessary harm, there is a collective moral responsibility to transition away from fossil fuels in line with the Paris Agreement’s targets of keeping global warming well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels with the aspiration of holding warming to 1.5°C. It uses that argument as the basis for the following three distinct but reinforcing moral arguments in favor of divesting from fossil fuels: (1) investing in fossil fuels contributes to grave, substantial, and unnecessary harm and injustice; (2) divesting from fossil fuels helps fulfill our moral responsibility to promote climate action; and (3) investing in fossil fuels morally tarnishes those who do so by making them complicit in the injustices of the fossil fuel industry. The chapter begins by providing a brief overview of the divestment movement and the carbon bubble.

scholarly journals Climate change and fossil fuel: An examination of risks for the energy industry and producer states

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Krane
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural Gas ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Coal Industry ◽  
Low Carbon ◽  
Climate Action ◽  
Fossil Fuel Industry ◽  
Fuel Industry ◽  
Developed World

ABSTRACTThis article compiles and categorizes the various forms of climate risk facing the fossil fuel industry. The type and intensity of risk differs greatly among the three forms of fossil fuels, as well as between countries in the developing and developed world. The paper finds heightened risk for the coal industry and reduced risk for oil businesses, due to its lack of substitutes.Burning coal, oil, and natural gas is the source of two-thirds of the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Sales of these fuels also represent the economic underpinning of resource-rich countries and the world’s largest firms. As such, steps taken to abate emissions undermine commercial opportunities to monetize fossil fuel reserves. Risks to the industry correlate with progress on climate goals.This article analyzes recent literature on climate action strategy and finds that a new or intensified set of risks has arisen for the fossil fuel industry. These include government policies and legislation, financial restrictions among lenders and insurers, hostile legal and shareholder actions, changes in demand and geopolitics, as well as the onset of new competitive forces among states and technologies.The exposure of carbon-based businesses to these risks and the potential for loss is neither distributed uniformly across the sector, nor adheres to a uniform time scale. Shareholder-owned firms in the developed world will be incentivized to react sooner than large state-owned resource owners in developing countries. The fates of the three fossil fuels also appear likely to play out differently. Demand for oil appears insulated by its lack of viable substitutes, while coal businesses are already undergoing climate-related action, pushed by decreasing social acceptance and constraining financial regulation. At the other end of the spectrum, climate action has improved the medium-term viability of low-carbon natural gas. What appears clear is that, as effects of climate change grow more pronounced, the industry faces a future that is less accepting of current practices.

scholarly journals Carbon Management in UK Higher Education Institutions: An Overview

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (19) ◽  
pp. 10896
Author(s):  
Ebiyon Idundun ◽  
Andrew S. Hursthouse ◽  
Iain McLellan
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Higher Education ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Higher Education Institutions ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Carbon Management ◽  
Energy Technologies ◽  
Industrialization Process ◽  
Uk Higher Education

The paper presents a review of carbon management in relation to UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), forms part of a wider study on the ongoing reliance on fossil fuels in Scotland’s public sector with a focus on Universities and Local Government Authorities. It compares the CF (carbon footprint), emission sources, and the fossil fuel contribution to the CFs reported in 3 identified articles relating specifically to the estimation of CF for HEIs. The consumption of fossil fuels results in human induced climate change however, fossil fuels boosted the industrialization process and remains the dominant source of global energy consumption. Action in tackling climate change has led to organizations coming under increasing pressures to monitor and report their CFs. HEIs have a key role to play in reducing its reliance on fossil fuels and reducing GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions through delivery of scientific research and innovative carbon management solutions, increase in its uptake of renewable energy technologies, educating and training future leaders, and raising public awareness, in contribution to a sustainable society. This paper highlights the need for a shift of focus to reducing fossil fuel reliance in response to climate change and demonstrates how HEIs can impact GHG reductions.

scholarly journals Separation of biospheric and fossil fuel fluxes of CO<sub>2</sub> by atmospheric inversion of CO<sub>2</sub> and <sup>14</sup>CO<sub>2</sub> measurements: Observation System Simulations

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sourish Basu ◽  
John Bharat Miller ◽  
Scott Lehman
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
New England ◽  
Co2 Emissions ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Observation System ◽  
National Scale ◽  
The Us ◽  
Atmospheric Inversion

Abstract. National annual total CO2 emissions from combustion of fossil fuels are likely known to within 5–10 % for most developed countries. However, uncertainties are inevitably larger (by unknown amounts) for emission estimates at regional and monthly scales, or for developing countries. Given recent international efforts to establish emission reduction targets, independent determination and verification of regional and national scale fossil fuel CO2 emissions are likely to become increasingly important. Here, we take advantage of the fact that precise measurements of 14C in CO2 provide a largely unbiased tracer for recently added fossil fuel derived CO2 in the atmosphere and present an atmospheric inversion technique to jointly assimilate observations of CO2 and 14CO2 in order to simultaneously estimate fossil fuel emissions and biospheric exchange fluxes of CO2. Using this method in a set of Observation System Simulation Experiments (OSSEs), we show that given the coverage of 14CO2 measurements available in 2010 (969 over North America, 1063 globally), we can recover the US national total fossil fuel emission to better than 1 % for the year and to within 5 % for most months. Increasing the number of 14CO2 observations to ∼ 5,000 per year over North America, as recently recommended by the National Academy of Science (NAS) (Pacala et al., 2010), we recover monthly emissions to within 5 % for all months for the US as a whole and also for smaller, highly emissive regions over which the specified data coverage is relatively dense, such as for the New England states or the NY-NJ-PA tri-state area. This result suggests that, given continued improvement in state-of-the art transport models, a measurement program similar in scale to that recommended by the NAS can provide for independent verification of bottom-up inventories of fossil fuel CO2 at the regional and national scale. In addition, we show that the dual tracer inversion framework can detect and minimize biases in estimates of the biospheric flux that would otherwise arise in a traditional CO2-only inversion when prescribing fixed but inaccurate fossil fuel fluxes.

scholarly journals TNO_CAMS high resolution European emission inventory 2000–2014 for anthropogenic CO<sub>2</sub> and future years following two different pathways

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugo A. C. Denier van der Gon ◽  
Jeroen J. P. Kuenen ◽  
Greet Janssens-Maenhout ◽  
Ulrike Döring ◽  
Sander Jonkers ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Emission Inventory ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Isotopic Signature ◽  
Change Scenario ◽  
Emission Data ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Climate Action

Abstract. The most important climate forcer over the period 1750–present is CO2 from fossil fuel combustion (IPCC, 2013). European countries that are Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) submit national greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories to the Climate Change secretariat. However, these reported emissions are annual totals and do not provide spatial or temporal patterns within the country. Recently the interest in high resolution CO2 emission data is growing, both from the side of the research community as well as cities that want to make tailored climate action plans. Here we present a model-ready historic emission inventory at high spatial resolution (~7×7 km) for UNECE-Europe for 15 consecutive years (2000–2014) providing CO2 from fossil fuels (CO2_ff) and CO2 from biofuels (CO2_bf) to support carbon cycle modelling and sub-national scale identification of emissions. Where available and considered fit for purpose, we have used CO2 estimates as reported by the Parties to UNFCCC. The data have been supplemented by other estimates, most notable from the IIASA GAINS model and the JRC EDGAR database to create a complete coverage. The growing importance of biofuel over the time 2000–2014 time period is clearly visible. This changes the isotopic signature of anthropogenic emissions which is important for quantifying fossil fuel emissions. The inventory is compatible with the TNO-MACC emission inventory for air pollutants (Kuenen et al., 2014) which can provide information on co-emitted species like CO and NOx. The dataset is complemented by two projections based on the CIRCE project scenarios and using the latest historic year (2014) as the starting point for projection. The scenarios include a business-as-usual and a climate change scenario. The projections provide a range of possible future emissions that can be used for sensitivity tests, for example when designing a possible future observational system. The annual grid-maps are available for the historical years 2000–2014 at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.112889, and for the future years 2018–2050 at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1009519.

scholarly journals TIME-SERIES ANALYSIS OF PRICE INTERRELATIONS IN MAJOR U.S. FOSSIL FUELS MARKETS

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
DRAGAN MILJKOVIC ◽  
NATE DALBEC
Keyword(s):  
Time Series ◽  
Natural Gas ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Fossil Fuel ◽  
Structural Break ◽  
Oil Prices ◽  
Gas Oil ◽  
Fuel Prices ◽  
The Us ◽  
Per Capita

The objective of this study is to analyze price movements and interrelations of U.S natural gas, oil, and coal prices, as three main fossil fuels in the US. Structural break were identified in both natural gas and oil prices in February of 2009, at the peak of U.S. financial crisis. Both natural gas and oil are shown to be weak substitutes for coal, while the opposite relationships are not found. Stronger U.S. dollar led to lower fossil fuel prices, while only oil prices have been shown to depend on movement of income per capita and stock market.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document