Tag Archives: Corporate

God help us, Donald Trump tried to dispense energy facts again.

And pretty much nobody is happy about it, except maybe Nestlé.

Since 2011, 23 national parks had ended the sale of plastic water bottles to cut down on trash and litter. Before the ban took effect at the Grand Canyon, for example, water bottles made up 20 percent of the park’s total waste. But on Aug. 16, the Trump administration ended the six-year-old policy that enabled the ban, welcoming plastic bottles back to the Grand Canyon, Zion, and other national parks.

Bottled water companies had lobbied against the Obama-era policy for years. Coincidentally, the National Park Service’s statement on the reversal echoes the industry’s arguments: “It should be up to our visitors to decide how best to keep themselves and their families hydrated during a visit to a national park.”

Lauren Derusha Florez, Corporate Accountability International* campaign director, is calling for park superintendents to resist. “We know that many of our parks want to do away with bottled water,” she wrote in a blog post. “Let’s make sure they know that we support them in that move, even if the current administration doesn’t.”

*Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Florez as the campaign director at the Sierra Club.

Original article:  

God help us, Donald Trump tried to dispense energy facts again.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LG, ONA, Ringer, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on God help us, Donald Trump tried to dispense energy facts again.

There’s One Last Thing Obama Can Do to Fight Global Warming

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Ever since Donald Trump’s surprise victory in November, climate activists have been scrambling to find ways to safeguard the progress made by President Barack Obama in the fight against global warming. It won’t be easy. The president-elect has pledged to back out of the Paris climate agreement and repeal Obama’s limits on greenhouse gas emissions. But advocates believe they’ve found one final action Obama can take that Trump won’t be able to undo: funding climate action abroad.

In 2010, the United Nations established the Green Climate Fund, a mechanism for wealthy countries to finance efforts by poor countries to reduce their emissions and adapt to climate change. Four years later, Obama pledged $3 billion to the fund. In March this year—despite objections from the GOP-controlled Congress—the administration submitted its first payment of $500 million. The funds came from the Economic Support Fund, $1.9 billion that Congress had already appropriated to the State Department for the promotion of economic and political stability in countries with special conditions.

Climate advocates were hoping that the next president would continue to support the GCF by making contributions over the next several years. But Trump has made it clear that making payments to the fund and combating climate change in poor countries will not be priorities for his administration. In October, the Trump campaign pledged to “cancel billions in payments to UN climate change programs” and instead use the money to “fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure.”

So climate activists are calling on the White House to deliver the rest of the funds before Obama leaves office on January 20. Last week, more than 100 organizations, led by Corporate Accountability International, signed a letter urging the Obama administration to hand over the remaining $2.5 billion to the GCF before Inauguration Day.

The basic idea behind the fund is that developing countries did little to cause the problem but in many cases will be hit with huge climate impacts that they can’t afford to deal with. “It’s set up that way because wealthy countries are predominantly responsible for the crisis of climate change,” says Jesse Bragg, who is Corporate Accountability International’s media director. “The total budget is $100 billion, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what it will cost.”

Developing countries will use the money for renewable energy projects. “It will also be used to assist with projects and programs that will reduce the risks of climate-related disasters,” says Michael Burger, an environmental law expert at Columbia University, who added that many of those disasters can be linked to the United States’ consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

“The debt for the damage inflicted on the global climate by American carbon will never be fully repaid,” Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org, said in the Corporate Accountability International press release. “And the Trump administration can be counted on to do nothing for the most vulnerable people on the planet.”

Activists hope that because Obama was able to make the first payment despite a hostile Congress, he can do it again. Republicans made a lot of noise over the transfer but ultimately weren’t able to reverse or cancel the payment. “It’s no small feat to move this amount of money in this amount of time, but we’ve seen the administration take similar action before,” says Bragg.

The clock is ticking. “Any transfer that is made and completed would not be reversible,” says Burger. “But, it will certainly be within the Trump administration and the incoming Congress’ power to withhold future payments.”

“This is Obama’s legacy at the end of the day,” adds Bragg. “Is he going to let everything he’s done on climate be unraveled by Trump?”

Read original article:

There’s One Last Thing Obama Can Do to Fight Global Warming

Posted in Bragg, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on There’s One Last Thing Obama Can Do to Fight Global Warming

Meet the nun trying to reform Exxon Mobil

Meet the nun trying to reform Exxon Mobil

By on May 26, 2016Share

Rex Tillerson runs Exxon Mobil, historically the world’s most profitable company, which raked in a cool $16 billion last year. On Wednesday, he found himself sitting across from Sister Patricia Daly, a Brooklyn-born Dominican nun from Caldwell, N.J., and member of a coalition that manages more than $100 billion in assets — including a stake in the oil and gas company. Between the two of them, there was a whole lot of money on the table.

“Decades have been lost in the fight against climate change, due in part to our company’s campaign of disinformation,” Daly said, as she presented a statement at Exxon’s shareholder meeting in Dallas, Texas, this week. Daly, along with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, was there to propose a resolution that Exxon acknowledge its “moral imperative” and address climate change. The resolution demands that Exxon adopt business policies consistent with limiting average global warming to under 2 degrees C.

The company, Daly explained, owes it to their investors to do this.

“We’ve been clear from the beginning that we were taking the issue on because the poorest people on the planet were experiencing the greatest impact,” she said. “And they’re also the people who had very little to contribute to climate change.”

This campaign comes at a time of energetic engagement on the part of religious groups in climate action, perhaps epitomized by the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si last year. The document railed against obstructionism of climate solutions which “can range from denial of the problem to indifference, nonchalant resignation, or blind confidence in technical solutions.” That text, coupled with the promises of the Paris agreement, spurred Daly and her coalition to act.

Sister Daly at the Numont Mine in Peru.Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility

But it wasn’t enough to force Exxon Mobil’s hand. At the end of Daly’s speech, Tillerson recommended that the company’s board vote against her resolution — and they did just that, earning only 18.5 percent of votes in favor.

“We have a pool in my office, and I was the most optimistic one,” she told Grist, explaining that the support for her resolution was nevertheless much higher than she expected. Out of nine climate-related resolutions proposed on Wednesday, just one passed: A shareholder resolution calling for more investor input on board nominations, which could pave the way for more climate-concerned board members in the future. 

The phrase “moral imperative” may be new in the world of oil and multi-billion-dollar stocks. Daly, who is also executive director of the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment, acknowledges that requiring it “is a little weird” for the companies. “But we’re born into this planet and we should be upstanding people,” she said.

As Daly explains, if Exxon were to accept this imperative, it would need to adjust both its energy outlook and its business plan, and come forward with a new plan that would be truthful in a way that Daly says the company has never been before.

“They weren’t truthful, they didn’t tell the truth,” Daly says, referring to recent evidence that Exxon’s climate scientists and leadership knew about the relationship between fossil fuels and climate change as early as the 1960s. “They never offered that.”

Daly’s campaigns for corporate responsibility, including against the likes of General Electric and Ford, has earned her some hate mail over the years from proponents of the fossil fuel industry. But it’s worth it, she says, because each company she goes up against is another skirmish in the battle for climate justice. That’s Daly’s moral imperative.

Share

Get Grist in your inbox

Read this article – 

Meet the nun trying to reform Exxon Mobil

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized, wind energy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Meet the nun trying to reform Exxon Mobil

Crashing the Party: Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender

[amzn_product_post]

Posted in St. Martin's Griffin | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Crashing the Party: Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender