Potential Fossil Fuel Divestment training in Adelaide

Mike Pulsford, from 350.org,au, writes

I’ve been talking to Charlie Wood, 350.org’s national campaign director, about a possible date for a fossil fuel divestment training session in Adelaide. This session covers all the concepts, terms, strategies and arguments you need to run a divestment campaign with confidence, as well as an overview of the more detailed resources we’ve got for campaigners – primers, reports, templates and so on. It’s designed so that once you’ve done it, you can run the training yourself for others, and we’ll make all slides and materials available for this too.

She’s suggesting Sunday September 1. How many of you would be interested and able to make this date? We’d need at least 15 participants (though more is fine too – feel free to pass this email on to anyone who you think might be interested). Otherwise we can wait until later in the year.

The training itself goes for 3 hours; in Melbourne we had a share lunch and a brainstorming/campaign planning session afterwards, which made it a 5 hour event, but that’s optional (while very nice).

Let me know your thoughts, in any case!

Here in Melbourne we’ve made progress with the City of Melbourne, and one of the councillors has agreed to champion divestment to the rest of council, which is exciting. It looks from our initial research like they have no money invested in fossil fuels, so pledging to remain free of such investments should be pretty easy for them! We framed it as an invitation for them to lead on this nationally, which they seem to like the sound of. We’re also talking to Yarra Climate Action Now about collaborating on a campaign aimed at the City of Yarra.

The University of Melbourne campaign, run by the Environment Collective, is speeding ahead, with postering and actions and FOI requests and research and all the rest of it. And the RMIT Greens and Environment Collective have just started a campaign there too.

What else? The Melbourne Unitarian Church just announced plans to divest, too. Exciting times!

Cheers,

Mike

350 Melbourne Divestment Coordinator

e mike@350.org.au

m 0418 326 814

A word to the banks…

Bill McKibben’s Do the Math tour

So that’s the issue. Is it true that ANZ Bank continues to invest in fossil fuel exploration and extraction? Is it true that ANZ Bank and its investors continue to make profits from destroying the planet’s ecosystem?

Isn’t that criminal

Brian Loffler, writing an open letter to the CEO of the ANZ bank on Divestment From Fossil Fuels

on the New Internationalist blog.

“Do the Math” meeting streamed to Adelaide

Bill McKibben's Do the Math tour

Bill McKibben’s Do the Maths tour

FoE Adelaide simulcast the Canberra “Do the Math”
meeting with Bill McKibben from 7pm on June 5th
at the BH209 Lecture Theatre,
The Barbara Hanrahan building,
City West Campus,
University of SA,

Thanks to 350.org.au for making the feed available
and the School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences,
Division of IT, Engineering and the Environment at UniSA for providing the venue.

We had an audience of 39 for the talk, followed by a short panel with activists from various groups working on Climate Change.

Representatives from DEA, CORENA, CLEAN, FoE and New Internationalist

Representatives from DEA, CORENA, CLEAN, FoE and New Internationalist

Live feed on the left hand screen

Live feed on the left hand screen

BZE had their scale model of the Solar Thermal plant for Pt Augusta on display, and we handed out leaflets from FoE, 350.org et alia.

Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign

There’s a meeting for those interested in a fossil fuels divestment campaign next Wednesday, May 8th, at 6pm in the community room at Christie Walk (entry via 101 Sturt St).

If you’re interested, please come. If you can’t come, you can leave an  expression of interest by leaving a comment below

Chart from The Australia Institute reportBackground

As Bill McKibben noted in his Rolling Stone Article last year — “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math”, the fossil fuel companies currently have six times as many conventional reserves as they could safely burn  if we are to stay below 2 degrees global warming.

For the past year he has been touring the US, urging institutions to divest themselves of shares in these companies.

Now this movement has come to Australia.

FoE affiliate Market Forces is looking at three key areas:

(a) divestment of fossil fuel shares;

(b) disentanglement of super from fossil fuel companies;

(c) removal of government subsidies for fossil fuels.

In the US, the GoFossilFree campaign is encouraging unis, towns and citizens to divest themselves. [3]

The Renew Economy website has reported on divestment and the recent

report on potentially stranded assets from The Australia Institute:

“The report, Unburnable Carbon: Australia’s carbon bubble, warns that much of  the nation’s coal reserves will become worthless as the world hits carbon  emission limits, and that there is little fossil fuel companies can do

little to avoid this.”  Download the report