Investment Bankers Are Now Waging the War on Coal – By Robinson Meyer (The Atlantic) / Dec 17 2019
As UN climate negotiations faltered, bankers on Wall Street brought good news for the climate. What’s even happening?
So let’s say you have one (1) global economy. It currently generates most of its energy by burning carbon-based fuels, which is fine, but then it disposes the resulting carbon-dioxide pollution in the air, wreaking all sorts of general havoc too extensive to recount here, which is not as fine. Naturally you might want to wean your economy off carbon fuels. But how to do it?
For the last quarter century, the world has tried to do it through meetings, lovingly dubbed COPs, or “conferences of the parties.” The parties in question are countries that have ratified the United Nations’ 1994 framework treaty on climate change. Every major UN climate negotiation since then has been a COP: The 2015 Paris Agreement, which encourages countries to decarbonize their economies over time, was finalized at COP21.
The most recent COP, the 25th, ended on Sunday. It ran two days longer than planned and went, by most accounts, very poorly. “There is no sugarcoating it: The negotiations fell far short of what was expected,” said a vice president of the World Resources Institute, a nonpartisan environmental think tank, in a statement. Corporate Accountability, a progressive advocacy firm, decried the result: “COP25 failed to rise to the challenge of our time.” Even the staid New York Times, in its headline, bemoaned “few commitments and a ‘lost’ opportunity” at the meeting.
What happened? This year, negotiators were supposed to be finishing the “rule book” for the Paris Agreement while preparing for next year’s COP, when countries are supposed to announce more ambitious promises under that treaty. But problems arose on both issues.
Continue to article: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/12/goldman-sachs-fighting-climate-change-un/603760/
