Dear friends,
Climate activists are working to help regular folks to connect the dots that explain our predicament. I missed this story a few weeks ago: Fossil Free Media posted billboards with weather maps reddened by extreme heat warnings with the message
There is more work to be done, of course. There is continued action, both in the streets and in the halls of power, to demonstrate the real costs of fossil fuel extraction and to demand accountability from all of the institutions that fund them.
More than 100 participants in yesterday’s civil disobedience were arrested in order to make the point that banks have a special role in accelerating climate change.
Call on the World Bank to clean up their act and stop funding fossil fuels. This quick action is from 350.org.
Brazil’s new government is fighting deforestation, but the meat industry has found ways to shrink the Amazon in violation of environmental protections.
Over the last decade, scientists and environmental advocates have begun to uncover those missing hectares, and their research points to a concerning practice in the beef industry: “cattle laundering.”
In a cattle laundering scheme, ranchers move cattle from “dirty” ranches, which contribute to deforestation, to ranches that are “clean,” with no recent forest loss. By the time those cattle arrive at slaughterhouses, the path they’ve taken is obscured, as is the damage they’ve caused.
Don’t let the banks that fund the meatpackers continue to hide behind their “net-zero” commitments.
Tell the Bank of America and Citibank to stop funding deforestation and climate chaos in the Amazon. This quick action is from Rainforest Action Network.
ESG is shorthand for the practice by which investors consider a company’s environmental, social, and corporate governance when making investment decisions. A recent study found that a company’s total stock returns correlate positively with higher ESG ratings.
So, when you hear “but the economy!” when you’re in settings where environmental considerations are being dismissed, be ready with facts.
Governor Newsom pledged to sign California's two important disclosure laws: the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act and SB 261, which would implement climate-related financial risk reporting requirements.
In 2022, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated $165 billion in economic loss due to extreme weather events, said Steven Rothstein, managing director of Ceres' Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets."Climate is a financial risk for companies and investors," Rothstein said. "Investors, employees and the boards want to understand what that risk is. You can't manage any problem if you first can't measure a problem."
California’s economy is larger than those of all but the top four national economies in the world — the US, China, Japan, Germany, and India. So, it matters a great deal when California starts assessing the costs of climate risk.
California is the ninth state to bring a lawsuit against several major oil companies to hold them accountable for lying about their products’ role in climate change. Read the story:
NYU, one of the largest universities in the US, announced plans to divest from fossil fuels, after almost two decades of pressure from student activists. The announcement was addressed to the Sunrise Movement, a rare acknowledgment of the young organizers who made this happen.
A small group of young people between the ages of 11 and 24 will argue next week at the European court of human rights that the failure to act to reduce emissions is a violation of their rights. Their goal is to compel a rapid reduction of emissions.
Fun fact: Half of the world’s population is under 30 years of age. If they were a country, they’d be bigger than the populations of India, China, the US, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Brazil combined.
Young people are trying to hold us accountable. It’s impossible not to root for them.
with love,
L