Former U.S. Vice President turned climate campaigner Al Gore and his longtime business partner David Blood, a former Goldman Sachs executive, are out with a bit of financial advice for their wealthy comrades who remain in the habit of investing in the world’s high-polluting carbon industry: Don’t.
Saying the misguided dependence on the world’s fossil fuel reserves is creating the “largest bubble ever” in the investment community, Gore and Blood are telling people to find ways to dump their “high-carbon assets” and start using their money to invest in the clean energy future that the Earth demands. As it turns out, they say, it’s not only the morally correct and responsible thing to do in terms of battling climate change, it will ultimately serve their bottom lines.
Gore and Blood, as the Guardian’s Fiona Harvey reports,
Though critics of the powerful duo may voice concern over some of their underlying assumptions—the unproven and largely derided prospect of carbon storage technology, for instance, or the supremacy of the capitalist experiment in general—the idea that the fossil fuel paradigm is not only an ecological disaster, but a financial one, has steadily come to the center of the debate on climate change.
As Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate action group 350.org, wrote earlier this year, recognizing and dealing with the “carbon bubble” now cited by Gore and Blood is a vital step in shutting down the (very profitable) oil and gas industries that are cooking the planet. As McKibben wrote:
It is this thinking that is driving 350.org’s nationwide divestment campaign, which is trying to leverage the power of student voices in getting colleges and university endowments to divest their holdings from the world’s biggest polluters. The campaign is also beginning to target pension funds, the portfolios of churches and municipalities in the U.S., and 350.org has just launched a similar drive in Europe.
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