Worldwide rallies demand action – Fossil fuel divestment drive gathers momentum

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Sydney, Nov 29, (AFP): Tens of thousands marched across Australia Sunday on a third day of worldwide rallies as pressure mounts on global leaders to strike a pact on cutting greenhouse gases at crucial talks in still-shaken Paris.
Some 150 leaders including US President Barack Obama, China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi and Russia’s Vladimir Putin will attend the start Monday of the UN conference, tasked with reaching the first truly universal climate pact.
The goal is to limit average global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), perhaps less, over pre-Industrial Revolution levels by curbing fossil fuel emissions blamed for climate change.
Rallies demanding curbs to carbon pollution have been growing since Friday, with marches across Australia Sunday kickstarting a final day of people-powered protest.
Similar events were planned for Rio de Janeiro, New York and Mexico City, while 1,000 braved rain in Seoul, with scientists warning of superstorms, drought and rising sea levels swamping vast areas if concrete action is not taken.
“There is no Planet B,” said one placard in Sydney where 45,000 people converged, while another read: “Solidarity on a global scale”.
“There’s nothing more important that I can be doing at the moment than addressing climate change,” said Kate Charlesworth, a doctor and Sydney mother.
“In 10 years’ time our children are going to say, ‘Mum, did you know about this? What was everyone doing?”
A large protest in Melbourne on Friday kick-started the global campaign, with rallies on Saturday from New Zealand to the Philippines, Bangladesh, Japan, South Africa and Britain.
A march of some 5,000 people in Adelaide on Sunday focused on the global impact which climate change has on health, food security and development, particularly among the world’s poorest.
“Those who did the least to cause the problem are feeling the impacts first and hardest, like our sisters and brothers in the Pacific,” said Judee Adams, a community campaigner with Oxfam.
Many low-lying Pacific nations such as Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands fear they could disappear beneath the waves completely as sea levels rise.
The message to curb global warming and help poor countries deal with climate change was hammered home by religious leaders in Paris, who delivered petitions with almost 1.8 million signatures from people around the world.
In the past week the UN’s weather body said the average global temperature for the year 2015 is set to rise one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, halfway towards the Paris conference’s attempted limit.
And analysts say voluntary carbon-curbing pledges submitted by nations to bolster the Paris pact, even if fully adhered to, put Earth on track for warming of three degrees C.
On the eve of Saturday’s protests, French President Francois Hollande, host of the Nov 30-Dec 11 talks, warned of obstacles ahead for the 195 nations seeking new limits on heat-trapping gas emissions from 2020.
“Man is the worst enemy of man. We can see it with terrorism,” said Hollande, who spoke after leading ceremonies in Paris to mourn the victims of the Nov 13 bombing and shooting attacks that sowed terror in the French capital.
“But we can say the same when it comes to climate. Human beings are destroying nature, damaging the environment.”
The French leader called for “a binding agreement, a universal agreement, one that is ambitious.”
But he also spoke of fears that a handful of countries — which he did not name — may stymie consensus if they felt the deal lacked guarantees.
The campaign to sell off investments in fossil fuel projects, particularly those involving coal, is no longer a fringe movement as big players like banks and investment funds get on board.
The divestment campaign has come a long way from its beginnings in the United States, where students began pressuring their university investment funds in 2008 to pull their money out of companies connected with fossil fuels.
Norway decided in June to pull its sovereign wealth fund — the world’s biggest — out of coal and many advanced nations agreed earlier this month to restrict subsidies that help companies export coal-fired power plants.
Financial institutions have also joined up, to varying degrees, such as insurers Axa and Allianz, as well as banks like Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas and Societe Generale.
“The world of finance has begun to move on climate,” French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who presides over the Paris conference on climate warming that opens on Monday, told AFP in an interview earlier this year.
Even Standard and Poor’s has begun to take account of climate change risks in its credit ratings.
“You can clearly see that it is beginning to get a bit worrying for banks to not take it into account,” said Pierre Forestier, who heads the climate change section at AFD, France’s development agency.

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