#divestment

DIVESTMENT NEWS: Hayward, California votes to remove Intel, Hyundai, Caterpillar, and Chevron from its investment portfolio. All four companies are complicit in Israel's human rights violations. It's time for other US cities and institutions to divest from genocide and apartheid!

The Hayward City Council voted to divest the city’s stock ownership stakes in four companies that have ties with Israel — apparently the first city in the Bay Area to take such a measure.

Hi Anon!

This is a really fantastic question!

The thing about climate change is that when you get down to the nuts and bolts of actually fixing things, there isn’t One Big Thing we need to do—there’s tons of little issues and projects that all add up to releasing less and sequestering more greenhouse gases.

That’s probably why most of the organizations you’ve found working on climate in general are focused on political or legal advocacy—because political and legal systems are some very powerful levers for facilitating a bunch of those smaller solutions at once.

Here are some recommendations of places to donate if you want to more directly fund the work itself:

For general climate change mitigation: There are climate change or environmental funds that will essentially do all the legwork of finding high value projects to allocate funding to. The Founder’s Pledge Climate Fund is a highly rated one, but I’m sure there are others.

If you’d like to contribute to more specific climate change work: Check out the Project Drawdown Explorer. They rate different climate change solutions based on plausibility, readiness, evidence, effectiveness, impact, risk, and cost to sort them into Highly Recommend, Worthwhile, Keep Watching, or Not Recommended. Find a highly recommended solution that aligns with your interests and values, then look for high rated charities or organizations tackling that issue. If you’re curious about the relative effectiveness/importance of various environmental solutions, I also highly recommend the book Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data.

Mitigating the human welfare cost of climate change: While this may not be the first thing that comes to mind, alleviating poverty is absolutely an environmental and sustainability issue (I could write a whole other post about this). One of the deepest cruelties of climate change is that the communities least responsible for contributing to it are often the hardest hit by its effects. Addressing poverty so that the most vulnerable communities have more resources to mitigate climate impacts is one of the most direct rubber-meets-the-road ways of fighting the human cost of climate change (and often has environmental/emissions benefits too, one of Project Drawdown’s highest rated solutions is access to cleaner cooking fuels). Data shows one of the best ways to do this is infusions of no-strings-attached money into impoverished communities. Give Directly is a great organization for this—they have also in the past had programs for giving directly to survivors of other major climate crises such as the California wildfires.

Don’t forget money you might already have sitting around: If you’re lucky enough to have a long term savings account or retirement account, see if you can move that money into a green bank or ensure it is invested in more climate-friendly companies or projects. Even if your retirement fund is managed by your employer, pushing employers to divest retirement accounts from fossil fuel companies has been a major trend in recent years. How you manage your money is a very personal decision and this obviously won’t be possible for everyone, but it’s a powerful way to put the money you already have towards something aligned with your values. Here are some links to learn more about green banking and divesting.

I hope this is helpful to you! <3

"More than three-quarters of UK universities have pledged to exclude fossil fuel companies from their investment portfolios, according to campaigners.

The move, which is part of a wider drive to limit investment in fossil fuels, follows years of campaigning by staff and students across the higher education sector.

The student campaign group People & Planet announced on Friday that 115 out of 149 UK universities had publicly committed to divest from fossil fuels – meaning £17.7bn-worth of endowments are now out of reach of the fossil fuel industry.

Laura Clayson, from People & Planet, said it would have been unthinkable a decade ago that so many institutions had formally refused to invest in fossil fuels.

“That we can celebrate this today is down to the generations of students and staff that have fought for justice in solidarity with impacted communities. The days of UK universities profiteering from investments in this neo-colonial industry are over.”

People & Planet set up the Fossil Free universities campaign in 2013. As part of its efforts the group has highlighted the “struggles and voices” of communities on the frontline of the climate crisis in an attempt to bring home the real-world impact of investment decisions made by UK universities.

Clayson said: “The demand for fossil-free came from frontline communities themselves and it is an act of solidarity from global north organisers campaigning on this … We have a responsibility to speak the lived experiences of the communities resisting these inequalities into megaphones at protests and in negotiations within university boardrooms, to highlight their stories of struggle in spaces so often detached from the reality of everyday life on the frontlines.”

One of the projects highlighted by the campaign is the proposed East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) – a mega project that would stretch almost 900 miles from the Lake Albert region of Uganda to the coast in Tanzania, and release vast amounts of planet-heating carbon.

The pipeline is being built in spite of local opposition, and there are reports that protesters and critics have been met with state violence. Hundreds of student organisers have been involved in the struggle.

Ntambazi Imuran Java, the lead coordinator at the Stop EACOP Uganda campaign, said its members appreciated the efforts of UK students to bring an end to universities’ fossil fuel investments.

“[This] supports those who have worked tirelessly to stop deadly extraction projects like EACOP … Regardless of the arrests and violations on the activists, students’ activists and communities, we continue to demand for the Uganda authorities to stop the project and instead invest in renewables.”

People & Planet said four UK institutions – Birmingham City University, Glasgow School of Art, Royal Northern College of Music and the University of Bradford – had recently incorporated fossil fuel exclusions into their ethical investment policies, meaning 115 out of 149 UK universities have publicly committed to divest from fossil fuels.

Later this month, the group will group will unveil its latest university league table that ranks institutions by their ethical and environmental performance. Campaigners say they will then increase pressure on the remaining 34 UK universities yet to go fossil-free."

I put this on a bunch of shirts and stickers and stuff, I figure it'll be good for protests and campus activism. Found here. As usual ALL PROCEEDS are for my Palestinian best friend, to help take care of his loved ones. He'll donate any his family doesn't need to the charities he works with.

To my fellow grad students: this friend and I are working with our department on making it easier for grads to bow out of research they have a moral objection to. We're also working on putting together a statement on Palestine. If you have a lot of colleagues on your side and particularly if you're in a program like engineering, physics, astronomy or applied math (with a lot of military applications) you should try to see where your funding is coming from and support grads in divesting from ethically questionable research. I won't say too much about what we're doing because I don't want to risk doxing my friend, but here are some examples of statements from grads at the Goldman School of Public Policy and the UCSC Astronomy Department. We (STEM students in particular) are the next generation of minds behind the military-industrial complex. It's up to us to make it clear we will not be complicit in work that supports genocide.

You can also find my full shop here. To see a design on different products click on the display product and scroll down or go here to browse by design. Here's a small sample of some of my other work, I make stuff in a bunch of different styles so there's something for everyone: