Still Losing, After All these Years

Since we’re coming up on the Big Paris Meeting, and since it’s more or less inevitable that it’s going to be widely judged to be a failure (even if it’s not!) it’s worth noting that the DivestInvest movement is also failing to deliver the big breakthrough that we now so clearly need. This, at least, according to a piece called Fossil fuel industry still winning the investment war that Alex Kirby just published over at Climate News Network.

What’s the problem? Only the impacable force of fossil capitalism as usual. The economics of renewables are every day better than the last, but as far as the investment industry is concerned, that’s no reason to scale back fossil investment, not even fossil investment that’s increasingly unlikely to pay off at anything like the expected rate. If at all.

I don’t bring this up to be snarky. The fact is that nothing is working fast enough, at least not yet. But with the cost of solar dropping, and the negotiations posed before a possible breakthrough, and the Pope making all-important connections between climate change and economic justice, there’s clearly a smell of change in the air.  In all this DivestInvest is critical key, even if it’s not the silver bullet that its boosters imagined.

There isn’t going to be any silver bullet. Not unless you count the overarching ethos of the movement, the one that Paris is going to spotlight.  To wit: we’re in this together, and we’d better start acting like we know it.