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Business, Climate Solutions, News, Observation, Politics

Climate Movement Hails ‘Mind-Blowing’ $40 Trillion in Fossil Fuel Divestment Pledges

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“Institutions around the world must step up now and commit to joining the divest-invest movement before it is too late—for them, for the economy, and for the world.”

Over the past decade, nearly 1,500 investors and institutions controlling almost $40 trillion in assets have committed to divesting from fossil fuels—a remarkable achievement that climate campaigners applauded Tuesday, while warning that further commitments and action remain crucial.

“Divestment has helped rub much of the shine off what was once the planet’s dominant industry. If money talks, $40 trillion makes a lot of noise.”

“Amidst a depressing era in the race against climate change—with killer fires and titanic storms, political stalemate, and corporate greenwashing—the fossil fuel divestment movement is a source for tremendous optimism,” states a new report—entitled Invest-Divest 2021: A Decade of Progress Toward a Just Climate Future—published Tuesday.

“Ten years in, the divestment movement has grown to become a major global influence on energy policy,” the publication continues. “There are now 1,485 institutions publicly committed to at least some form of fossil fuel divestment, representing an enormous $39.2 trillion of assets under management. That’s as if the two biggest economies in the world, the United States and China, combined, chose to divest from fossil fuels.”

The paper—a joint effort between the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Stand.earth, C40, and the Wallace Global Fund—comes on the eve of the United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow, and notes that the divestment movement “has grown so large that it is now helping hold fossil fuel companies accountable for the true cost of their unregulated carbon pollution.”

The report continues:

Since the movement’s first summary report in 2014, the amount of total assets publicly committed to divestment has grown by over 75,000%. The number of institutional commitments to divestment has grown by 720% in that time, including a 49% increase in just the three years since the movement’s most recent report. The true amount of money being pulled out from fossil fuels is almost certainly larger since not all divestment commitments are made public.

The movement has now expanded far beyond its origins as a student-driven effort on college campuses. Divestment campaigners now target cities, states, foundations, banks, investment firms, and any player who participates in the global investment pool.

“Major new divestment commitments from iconic institutions have arrived in a rush over just a few months in late 2021,” the report notes, “including Harvard University, Dutch and Canadian pension fund giants PME and CDPQ, French public bank La Banque Postale, the U.S. city of Baltimore, and the Ford and MacArthur Foundations.”

Underscoring the paper’s assertion, ABP, Europe’s largest pension fund announced Tuesday that it would stop investing in fossil fuel producers.

“Divestment remains a critical strategy for the climate movement,” the publication states. “It must be combined with an accelerated push for investment in a just transition to a clean, renewable energy future if the world is to avoid a future of worsening human injustice and irreversible ecological damage. Financial arguments against divest-invest no longer hold water.”

Bill McKibben, co-founder of the climate action group 350.org, wrote in a Tuesday New York Times op-ed that “divestment has helped rub much of the shine off what was once the planet’s dominant industry. If money talks, $40 trillion makes a lot of noise.”

“This movement will keep growing, and keep depriving Big Oil of both its social license and its access to easy capital,” McKibben said in a separate statement introducing the new report.

The report’s authors contend that institutional investors must agree to three principles “if they want to be on the right side of history and humanity”:

  • Immediately and publicly commit to fully divesting from and stopping all financing of coal, oil, and gas companies and assets;
  • Immediately invest at least 5% of their assets in climate solutions, doubling to 10% by 2030—including investments in renewable energy systems, universal energy access, and a just transition for communities and workers—while holding companies accountable to respecting Indigenous and other human rights and environmental standards; and
  • Adopting net-zero plans that both immediately cut investments in fossil fuels and ensure that all other assets in their portfolio develop transition plans that reduce absolute emissions by 50% before 2030.

“Institutional investors everywhere are beginning to come to terms with the danger that fossil fuels pose to their investment portfolios, their communities, and their constituencies,” the report states. “This realization is important but it is not enough. Institutions around the world must step up now and commit to joining the divest-invest movement before it is too late—for them, for the economy, and for the world.”

“Societies, economies, and the climate are all changing,” the paper concludes. “The financial world will have to change with them.” 

Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., president and CEO of Hip Hop Caucus, said in a statement that “the climate crisis is here, and so are climate solutions. We know communities of color are disproportionately impacted by the climate crisis here in the U.S. and across the world. In order to create a just future, we must divest from fossil fuels and invest in communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis.”

“It is not enough to divest from only some fossil fuels or with only some of your portfolio—all investors must immediately divest all fossil fuels from all of their portfolio, while investing in climate solutions.”

Yearwood added that “over 10 years the divest-invest movement has become one of the most powerful global forces in a just transition to a clean energy future.”

Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund, said that “the activist-driven divestment movement has yielded unprecedented and historic results in moving tens of trillions of dollars out of the industry driving the climate crises and exposing its failing business model.”

“But investors need to do more,” she argued. “It is not enough to divest from only some fossil fuels or with only some of your portfolio—all investors must immediately divest all fossil fuels from all of their portfolio, while investing in climate solutions with at least 5% of their portfolios, scaling to 10% rapidly.”

“Mission investors have a unique role to play to ensure the energy transition is a just one and that all people have access to safe, clean and affordable energy by 2030,” Dorsey added. “To do anything less does not address the scale or pace of this climate crisis.”

Originally published on Common Dreams by BRETT WILKINS and republished under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

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News, Observation, Politics, Tech

Germany’s Far-Right Political Party, the AfD, Is Dominating Facebook This Election

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Ahead of a national vote this month, Citizen Browser data shows that posts promoting the AfD party appeared more than three times as often as rivals’

Earlier this month, Germany’s far-right nationalist political party Alternative für Deutschland, or the AfD, posted on Facebook. Widespread support for Sharia law among Muslims in Afghanistan, the group claimed, illustrated the danger “wenn sich Massen von Afghanen auf den Weg nach Deutschland und Europa machen” (“when masses of Afghans make their way to Germany and Europe”).

The post was soon shared by thousands of users and commented on by thousands more. It was one of many posts by AfD-related pages over the past couple of months that railed against immigration or, another popular topic, disparaged COVID-19 restrictions as unnecessary.

Despite its modest size in Germany, the AfD has been remarkably successful on Facebook. Data obtained through The Markup’s Citizen Browser project, in partnership with Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung, shows how the AfD has gained tremendous traction on Facebook in the run-up to a historically contentious national election to replace Angela Merkel, the long-serving chancellor, later this month. 

The Citizen Browser project, which collects data from a diverse panel of 473 German Facebook users, shows the party and its supporters have peppered Facebook with pages promoting its ideology, with posts on those pages appearing in our panelists’ news feeds at least three times as often as those from any rival party. 

Fewer unique panelists had posts from AfD-related pages appear in their news feeds than posts from the sister parties of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) and the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CDU/CSU), which led in this count, and from Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (Alliance 90/The Greens). But the data shows AfD deeply engaged with its core audience: The users who did see content from the AfD tended to see it repeatedly, and the AfD was especially good at reaching its own supporters.

Citizen Browser captures up to 50 posts from a panelist’s Facebook news feed one to three times a day. The Markup catalogued every time a post from a page named for a German political party appeared in our panelists’ feeds over the past two months, from July 20 to Sept. 16, 2021. We included any pages that mentioned “AfD” or one of its political rivals (“SPD,” “CDU,” or “FDP,” for example) in its name. We did not determine whether the page was officially sanctioned by the party itself. We removed any pages meant to disparage a party.

Posts from more than 200 different pages promoting the AfD party—the most pages of any party we looked at—appeared in our panelists’ feeds. While the quantity of pages promoting the center-left Social Democratic Party, the SPD, followed closely behind with 175 pages, posts from AfD pages appeared four times as often in our panelists’ news feeds. Our panelists were shown posts from the AfD more than 3,200 times, while they were shown SPD posts only about 760 times. 

The other major political party in Germany, the center-right Christian democratic political alliance, or the CDU/CSU, fared slightly better. Posts by pages related to those parties appeared in panelists’ news feeds around 850 times. But the AfD’s posts still appeared more than three times as often. 

The AfD’s dominance of our panelists’ news feeds is especially stark considering the makeup of our Citizen Browser panel in Germany. Our panel consists of more people who identified themselves as SPD and CDU/CSU supporters—62 and 82, respectively—than the 44 who identified themselves as AfD supporters. 

Those who did report aligning with the far-right party had an average of 55 posts from AfD-related pages appear in their news feeds in the eight weeks of data we examined. By comparison, supporters of the CDU/CSU had an average of just six CDU- or CSU-affiliated posts appear in their feeds.  

“Given its very limited number of participants, data from The Markup’s ‘Citizen Browser’ is simply not an accurate reflection of the content people see on Facebook,” Facebook spokesperson Basak Tezcan said in an emailed statement. “We actively reduce the distribution of content that is sensational, misleading, or are found to be false by our independent fact-checking partners. Our approach goes beyond addressing the issue post-by-post, so when Pages or Groups repeatedly share this kind of content, we reduce the distribution of all the posts from those Pages and Groups.”

The AfD did not respond to a request for comment.

Our analysis has limitations. Citizen Browser tracks a small percentage of Facebook users in Germany compared to the tens of millions of Germans on the platform and is unlikely to perfectly mirror what Facebook shows all of its users in Germany. On Sept. 1, Facebook introduced a new interface that affected captures for 3 percent of the panel across all parties. Some captures for this small subgroup of panelists could not be included in this study. 

But the panelists represent a diverse set of party affiliations across the political spectrum in the country, from AfD supporters to centrists to far more liberal users.

And AfD’s savvy on Facebook has been documented in past elections. 

The AfD’s Rise on Social Media

The AfD launched in 2013, initially as a conservative party harnessing skepticism of the European Union. Though it failed to reach the vote threshold for representation in the German Bundestag in the federal election that year, the group’s facility with social media quickly became evident.

“Directly in their beginning, in 2013, they began to install a very strong network of interconnected Facebook accounts for nearly all local branches of the party,” said Isabelle Borucki, an interim professor at the University of Siegen who studies German political parties online. The AfD operates on many platforms, but Borucki said it was clear the party “understood especially how this network works.”

By the next federal election, in 2017, the AfD had shifted further to the right, tightening its focus on issues like immigration. That year, the party captured about 12 percent of votes, part of a rising tide of right-wing populism in many Western countries. That performance made the party the third-largest in the Bundestag, behind the far more established SDP and CDU/CSU.

It isn’t just Facebook where the AfD has performed well, either. This year, a report from Süddeutsche Zeitung and AlgorithmWatch that relied on data from hundreds of users showed how Facebook-owned Instagram seemed to favor right-wing content, with posts from the AfD tending to appear higher up in users’ feeds. 

While it’s difficult to say how social media popularity translates to votes, many observers have attributed the AfD’s growth, at least partially, to its social media strategy.

“They managed to use social media to explode and find people and citizens that weren’t interested in politics before,” said Juan Carlos Medina Serrano, a Ph.D. student at the Technical University of Munich who has studied the AfD’s use of social media and is now heading data operations for Germany’s Christian Social Union party.

In past elections, researchers and journalists have tried to measure how well the AfD has reached users on Facebook compared to other political parties. Like The Markup, they also found that the AfD has been able to use Facebook to find a large online audience.

After the 2017 national election, a Washington Post analysis noted that AfD posts had been shared more than 800,000 times that year, far outpacing all other major parties put together.

In 2019, one report found that AfD posts on Facebook accounted for about 85 percent of shared content from German political parties, according to Der Spiegel. A researcher told the outlet at the time that the AfD had become “the country’s first Facebook party.”

Facebook has highlighted its efforts to combat misinformation in past German elections. In 2017, after the last German federal election, the company said it had removed tens of thousands of suspicious accounts to clamp down on the spread of false information. 

Facebook also announced earlier this month that it had removed a network of pages associated with Germany’s anti-lockdown Querdenken movement that promoted violent content and health misinformation. The movement is not directly aligned with a political party, although it shares its COVID-skeptical perspective with the AfD.  

This month’s vote may present new challenges for the social network. In June, Politico reported that there had been a spike in election-related misinformation as far-right social media users appeared to be laying the groundwork to make claims of election fraud after the vote.

What’s Driving the AfD’s Success on Facebook?

Experts point to several factors that have contributed to the AfD’s Facebook presence. 

As the Citizen Browser data shows, the AfD and its supporters tend to run more active pages in general than their rivals, setting up relatively small, localized pages that garner support across the country. 

The AfD, researchers say, also relies more on sensational, aggravating content, which is a perspective Facebook rewards with greater reach. “They trigger anger, fear—I would say anarchic or basic emotions,” Borucki said. “Those trigger people and affect people more than bare facts.” One recent AfD post found in our dataset bemoaning “climate hysteria,” for example, led to more than 5,000 “angry” reactions on Facebook. 

This strategy seems to be catching on with other political groups. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that some European parties had shifted policy positions to align with what performs well on Facebook, including more negative content.

The CDU didn’t respond to The Markup’s requests for comment, and the SPD declined to comment.

Like many conservative politicians in the United States, the AfD has been eager to court voters skeptical of COVID-19 restrictions and vaccines, leaning into a populist stance against preventative COVID-19 measures. 

Facebook says it attempts to automatically tag any content related to COVID-19 with a flag sending users to reliable information. The Citizen Browser data shows that, of the posts shown to our panelists, posts from the AfD were by far the most likely to be tagged by Facebook as being related to COVID-19. Our panelists were shown AfD posts tagged by Facebook for being COVID-related more than 250 times. In contrast, our panelists were shown posts from the SPD with tags related to COVID-19 fewer than 15 times, and this was the second most tagged in our dataset.

Many of the AfD posts inveigh against lockdown measures and suggest that the vaccines may not be as effective as health officials claim. A post about infections spread in a club that required proof of vaccination, for example, called vaccine-related restrictions quatsch, or nonsense. 

The group’s posts remain popular, but it’s also not clear whether those posts are leading to new votes. The party is projected to end up in fourth or fifth place in the upcoming election.

Since the 2017 election, Medina Serrano said, the AfD’s explosive growth on Facebook seems to have leveled off. Now, he said, the party has gone from a strategy of looking to pull in new voters to one of cementing its base in German politics through Facebook.

“It’s more about maintaining the base than growing—it’s already capped, in my opinion,” Medina Serrano said. “But we’ll see the results on election night.” 

This article was originally published on The Markup By: Angie Waller and Colin Lecher and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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Climate Solutions, Earth and Ecology, Observation

‘Unimaginably Catastrophic’: Researchers Fear Gulf Stream System Could Collapse

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Above: Gulf Stream Sea Surface Currents & Temperatures / Photo / NASA

“Scientists say we cannot allow this to happen. People in power stand in our way.”

Originally published on Common Dreams via Creative Commons

While heatwaves, fires, and floods produce warnings that “we are living in a climate emergency, here and now,” a scientific study suggested Thursday that a crucial Atlantic Ocean current system could collapse, which “would have severe impacts on the global climate system.”

“The likelihood of this extremely high-impact event happening increases with every gram of CO2 that we put into the atmosphere.”
—Niklas Boers, PIK

The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, focuses on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream. As the United Kingdom’s Met Office explains, it is “a large system of ocean currents that carry warm water from the tropics northwards into the North Atlantic,” like a conveyor belt.

Previous research has shown AMOC weakening in recent centuries. The author of the new study, Niklas Boers of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research (PIK), found that this is likely related to a loss of stability.

“The Atlantic Meridional Overturning is one of our planet’s key circulation systems,” Boers, who is also affiliated with universities in the U.K. and Germany, said in a statement.

“We already know from some computer simulations and from data from Earth’s past, so-called paleoclimate proxy records, that the AMOC can exhibit—in addition to the currently attained strong mode—an alternative, substantially weaker mode of operation,” he continued. “This bi-stability implies that abrupt transitions between the two circulation modes are in principle possible.”

In the absence of long-term data on the current system’s strength, Boers looked at its “fingerprints,” sea-surface temperature and salinity patterns. He said that “a detailed analysis of these fingerprints in eight independent indices now suggests that the AMOC weakening during the last century is indeed likely to be associated with a loss of stability.”

“The findings support the assessment that the AMOC decline is not just a fluctuation or a linear response to increasing temperatures,” he continued, “but likely means the approaching of a critical threshold beyond which the circulation system could collapse.”

As The Guardian‘s Damian Carrington reports, the collapse of “one of the planet’s main potential tipping points” would be devastating on a global scale:

Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America, and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level in the eastern U.S. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.

The complexity of the AMOC system and uncertainty over levels of future global heating make it impossible to forecast the date of any collapse for now. It could be within a decade or two, or several centuries away. But the colossal impact it would have means it must never be allowed to happen, the scientists said.

“The signs of destabilization being visible already is something that I wouldn’t have expected and that I find scary,” Boers told the newspaper. “It’s something you just can’t [allow to] happen.”

It is unclear what level of global heating would cause a collapse, “so the only thing to do is keep emissions as low as possible,” he added. “The likelihood of this extremely high-impact event happening increases with every gram of CO2 that we put into the atmosphere.”

Some climate action advocates responded to the study by highlighting a science fiction movie that, as famed film critic Roger Ebert wrote nearly two decades ago, “is ridiculous, yes, but sublimely ridiculous—and the special effects are stupendous.”

“We all laughed at The Day After Tomorrow, back in 2004,” said Guy Shrubsole, policy and campaigns coordinator at Rewilding Britain. “Turned out it was a documentary.”

The environmental advocacy group 350 Tacoma responded to the findings with a call to action.

“There are warning signs that the Gulf Stream could collapse, an unimaginably catastrophic (and irreversible) impact of fossil fuel-caused climate breakdown,” the group tweeted. “Scientists say we cannot allow this to happen. People in power stand in our way.”

The study comes ahead of a United Nations climate summit in Glasgow set to begin October 31. Last month, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres noted the upcoming event and reminded leaders of wealthy countries that “the world urgently needs a clear and unambiguous commitment to the 1.5-degree goal of the Paris agreement,” and “we are way off track.”

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