Low participation rate shouldn't matter too much for an RCT right? Just makes the sample smaller so finding statistically significant results is harder.
Different levels of Montessori authenticity make the results even more impressive. They do have some inclusion criteria, like 2/3 of the teachers must be AMI/AMS certified but even so I'd expect a lot of these public school montessori programs to be less "true montessori" than what you'd get at a fully certified AMI/AMS school.
I think the risk is that there is some systematic difference between those who chose to participate and the overall population of public Montessori kids. For instance, maybe those with high incomes disproportionately chose to participate, and Montessori strengthens learning for this group, but if we could measure the whole population the result is more mixed. It can't be a fully RCT if there's some kind of opt-in provision (which is not to say that an opt-in provision is bad, or a study that is not fully RCT is irrelevant).
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2506130122
You could have answered your own question by reading the abstract, which makes it clear that the OP's conjecture was correct: the lotteries were random or somewhat random, but the groups which consented to the study were notably different, with the treatment group being richer, more educated and whiter. They did of course attempt to control for this, whether the controls were adequate or omitted other underlying differences is another question.
If there is a company that you believe is causing some harm, you can buy shares of that company and donate any proceeds to a charity that cancels out that harm.
For example, if you are worried about climate change, you can buy shares of an oil company and pledge to donate the proceeds to an organization lobbying for a carbon tax.
If the oil company does well, the carbon tax lobby will need more financing, which you'll be in a position to provide as a shareholder of the oil company.
Buying shares doesn't necessarily mean you "support the company". You can be an activist and vote against current management. In many cases, activist investors have a big impact.
Realistically, it won't matter either way, but at least as an unhappy shareholder you have infinitesimally more power to influence the company than a grumbling outsider. Certainly more than the tiny amount of "support" that your stock purchase will cause should they issue more shares.
Christ almighty, you are so totally wrong. Sorry to be blunt.
First of all, buying a stock generates upward impact (that is, contributes to an increase in market cap) and puts volume/liquidity on the tape, two things that generally benefit a company.
Activists push for shareholder returns, so that they can turn a profit on their investment. Do you know who else tends to hold shares? Board members and executives. But those activists don't generally accomplish their goals by voting their shares. No, they publicize their views, putting pressure on the board by making open arguments for why their plans are more profitable for shareholders. In reality, shareholder votes are generally not dominated by retail investors, who lack the clout to sway other shareholders.
Note also that many short-sellers do the same thing: position themselves quietly, publicize their short thesis, wait for the price to move, and then cover slowly. In either case, in my view it's hard to argue that this is market manipulation -- so long as the arguments are simple revelations of fact, or otherwise in the best interest of shareholders. But the fact remains, a retail investor is not in a position to make either such move.
I don't see what share issuance has to do with any of this. You generally buy shares in the secondary market, on an exchange. Companies don't have to issue new shares for you to buy part of the float.
The greater risk is probably that if you succeed, it will cause the oil company's share price to decline dramatically. Which means you're essentially committing to losing the money. If you're willing to do that you might as well just donate the entire amount to advocating for a carbon tax to begin with, instead of only the dividends.
When you buy share in a company you are either handing them capital to expand directly, or making it easier for them to raise capital by lifting the stock price. Weigh that against voting that share to change their business model. The net result will be highly contingent on the details.
Divestment also results in less shareholder oversight of emission heavy companies because environmentally conscious investors are selling their shares to investors with less scruples.
This isn't just theoretical.
According to Fossil Free, asset managers with about 10 trillion under management have committed to divesting.
If you assume 10% of that is tracking something like the S&P 500, then these investors have sold about 80 million shares of Chevron.
In 2018, shareholders introduced a proposal asking Chevron to limit its methane emissions. That proposal failed with 46% of the vote.
80 million shares would have been enough to swing the vote to 54% in favor.
I quit my job a couple of months ago to fix this problem. You can learn more at greengovernance.org or by emailing me at (hn username)@greengovernance.org
(typed this from my phone on a plane but I will add citations later when I get to my computer)
3. Chevron makes up about 1% of the S&P 500. 1% * 10% * $10 trillion = $100 million = 78 million shares of CVX at price during 2018 shareholder meeting
4. If 78 million shares voted YES on proposal instead of NO, vote would have passed with 52% in favor (as opposed to 54% in original post)
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Also, for those interested in other arguments against divestment:
1. Economics Nobel Laureate Oliver Hart wrote a paper calling on companies to maximize shareholder "welfare" (including environmental concerns) not just financial value. In this paper he explicitly calls for a fund that uses engagement rather than divestment. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3004794
Does this case extend to general advice though - that people should stay invested in fossil fuel companies in order to regulate them a bit? It should follow that if we invest more in fossil fuel extraction we can regulate them more. It seems to confound reasonable expectations of what results from investment.
I think it's important to note that when you buy shares on the secondary market the company doesn't get any capital. You are just trading ownership for cash with the current owners.
There's a somewhat subtle and pervasive assumption that all owners will seek only to maximize returns (or similar) but that notion really needs to go.
Even with that assumption, it doesn't matter if you own shares in fossil fuel companies since all investors are equivalent.
> I think it's important to note that when you buy shares on the secondary market the company doesn't get any capital.
Companies are artificial abstractions. The people who invested in the company before you get money. If you consistently engage in a policy of engagement to deal with bad corporate citizens, you increase the positive financial rewards for earlier investors to use their governance influence to direct firms to bad corporate citizenship. Conversely, divestment does the opposite.
The magnitude of the effect of any one investor doing that is small, but that's the situation with all economic boycotts.
It might be rather intangible, but I expect there must be a strong tendency for businesses to benefit overall when their shares are bought or kept rather than sold.
It's not as intangible as most people think. Executive compensation very often has bonuses and incentives tied to share price so the incentives don't even have to be business wide, they just have to be set up for the people ultimately in charge.
> There's a somewhat subtle and pervasive assumption that all owners will seek only to maximize returns (or similar) but that notion really needs to go.
I think a slight modification holds, though:
"all owners will seek only to maximize returns across all of their holdings, to themselves"
Chevron causing environmental damage costing me $100 personally outweighs the extra $50 those shortcuts added to my fraction of the company, etc.
And if you include moral/social costs on top of that, then IMO there really isn't anything that the expanded "maximize returns" statement doesn't cover.
At yourstake.org, we're trying to help anyone create change by making use of your shareholder rights. We're try to simplify the process to be as easy as an online petition.
You can sync your portfolio just like with other personal finance sites (e.g. Mint.com) and leverage your rights in whatever funds you already have. If you have a 401k, you have rights.
Also happy to talk to you offline about shareholder engagement. There are actually a number of funds that prioritize shareholder engagement -- you can see some rankings at another project I've been involved with: www.realimpacttracker.com.
Doesn't this avoid the core point of decarbonising the economy? Rather than getting Chevron to limit emissions, we need them to cease emissions. Which for an oil company means find an entirely new line of business - hopefully something like renewables - or cease to exist. Allow a tiny few to continue for the purposes of creating plastics we can't easily substitute by something else. Yes, that expects and requires far-reaching regulation.
Continuing to exist, and emit, just a bit slower is only delaying climate impact, and by a tiny amount.
The way I figure if someone buys a gasoline powered car, they've just committed us to 50-100 tons of CO2 emissions. Seems like that is what you want to stop not playing games with fuel taxes.
This is incorrect. Beef takes a ton of food and releases a good bit of greenhouse gases but nowhere near a ton per kg of meat. Here's a study looking at multiple other studies on the CO2 equivalent greenhouse gases per kg of beef. In particular you'll want to look at page 85.
Can you provide some sources for this number? Seems high, and first results from a cursory Google search suggest it's between 14 to 60 kg CO2 per 1 kg of beef.
Although beef and other animal ruminants have always been part of the planet's carbon cycle where carbon sources are kept in balance by carbon sinks. What knocks us out of balance is extracting carbon sources (ancient forests) from underground and burning them rapidly within a century-- much faster than any natural carbon sink can absorb.
Much of the developed world already has deregulating populists - that's half the damn problem. Except populism never lasts, and populist regimes are always incredibly divisive and usually end discredited.
Agreed. At this point I'm more inclined to follow the "seize their assets and jail their leaders" doctrine rather than a "let them continue to profit" one.
I'd suggest, if you go that route, just revoking their drilling licence. I find it highly unlikely as current governments, with few exceptions, seem hell bent on extracting even more, even if that means using grotesqly environmental destructive practices such as fracking.
What country would ever vote for such a policy? It is immensely impractical. This level of radicalism is how you get right wing populists who will rather happily jail the environmental radicals.
Most of the world continues to rely on fossil fuel for the essentials of life. Change that before throwing execs in jail.
This is moronic. Unless we are going to massively step up building of nuclear plants, you cannot eliminate fossil fuel usage, for transport, for heat, and most of all electricity. Renewables don't cut it.
Divestment or investment due to ESG score goals is effective. Internal decisions at F500 oil & gas companies are being made with ESG in mind due to the amount of capital increased scores open up.
He simply may not know. If the oil industry shows a willingness to increase these scores, investors could continue to set them higher, causing a death spiral of capital availability.
The ESG-centric investor pitch is a private, C-suite affair.
Username checks out. I'd definitely believe Bill Gates over J Random Ycombinator any day of the week. And he's right, nuclear is the road to go on if you want reduced emissions.
Resolutions like this one are non-binding. The real power held by shareholders is to fire directors, so if a company's board doesn't comply with the shareholder resolution the shareholders can vote against the directors at the next annual meeting.
In practice, companies "mostly meet" or "completely met" their commitments in response to shareholder engagement 89% of the time according to a 2015 report by Ceres [0].
Just be honest. It's bullshit. That vote and any vote like it means absolutely nothing. You know it, and anyone with any knowledge of this knows it.
We really really need to stop these fake feel good energy sinks. What you said was at best disingenuous, and at worst just lying.
I want to remove fossil fuels as much as anyone, but I will not do it by tricking people. You should try and work on some ethics.
There are two insanely simple things to end global warming if you live in the US. Stop driving to work and stop eating meat. If only a 30% of the population does that, all this is solved immediately. Pretending resolutions matter simply helps people pretend they can't solve the entire problem with two simple actions
Walk, ride a bike/e-bike/electric scooter, or drive an electric vehicle (to not include the last option is unreasonable IMHO). A Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt are options, or a Tesla if you want to splurge.
Walk 20 miles twice a day? Is buying a Tesla for $50,000 really better for the environment than driving my old Volvo that gets 30 mpg? After you take into account all the environmental costs associated with constructing a new vehicle?
Do not live 20 miles from work. With that said, you may have extraordinary circumstances that absolutely require you to live 20 miles from your employment. No problem. Statistically, that would place you in the vast minority of people. As long as the massive majority of people that can very realistically replace their commute with public transit and/or other options do so, the problem is solved immediately. There will always be a small minority of people that have to drive a car to work. We are not talking about that tiny minority of people. As I said, we only need 30% and this problem is solved immediately. I repeat, immediately.
Shareholder resolutions are generally non-binding (precatory) as was the Chevron case, though it's possible to have binding resolutions depending on the state and the company's bylaws.
Shareholder activism rests on shaky legal ground, which is actively being eroded by the current administration.
Generally speaking, shareholders are not considered legal owners of the companies in which they invest and they have little legal right to influence those companies. Shareholder powers, as enshrined in court decisions, basically come down to the decision to buy/sell the security, and voting for directors.
But even directors have little legal authority to direct the operations of a corporation--that's the job of management. The job of directors is to hire the CEO and provide oversight, which is itself a limited role.
Fundamentally, securitization of the public corporation is not constructed to enable democratic control of corporate operations. Corporations are set up to respond to democratic action (i.e. the collective will of the populace) in two ways: purchase decisions from their customers, and the legal duties placed upon them by governments.
Therefore, IMO public activism is best pointed at boycotts and government policy, to affect the decisions of corporations. EDIT to add: divestment is a form of boycott.
If human society is going to reduce its production of greenhouse gases, clean technologies will have to displace greenhouse-gas-producing technologies in the economy. That takes innovation and investment. I slightly disagree with Gates in that every dollar that is divested from fossil fuel companies has to go somewhere else. Even if it is not specifically redirected at cleaner technologies, money is fungible and it will result in the relative growth of the overall pool of investment that is available for cleaner technologies.
This comes down to the question whether you should do change "from within".
There are probably cases where there's a reasonable case to do such a thing, e.g. if you have an electricity company that has a somewhat balanced mixture of fossil and renewable energy.
However I don't think this is a sensible approach if we talk about pure or almost pure fossil companies. There's no way Chevron can be "part of the solution". It's either these companies disappear or the planet will become uninhabitable, there's no middle ground on that. The idea that they can reform themselve has been a lie the oil industry has been peddling for a while. More than a decade ago BP said that now stands for "Beyond Petroleum". We can see how well that went.
This is a really intresting idea and definitely a big, worthwhile problem.
One thing I'm curious about is how do you expect the economics of a green-fund to work? There's a handful of issues I see with this model:
1. ETFs/trackers are commoditized at the moment and, in a lot of cases, the broad, market-tracking funds are subsidised by more niche products offered by the same provider.
2. From a voting perspective, this only really makes sense at a truly massive scale. Even to get something like 0.1% of each company in S&P500, you need 24 billion AUM - and I doubt a 10bps shareholder can hold much sway, even when actively campaining around AUMs.
So, you need to be really big to have impact (assuming you follow S&P weightings), but you're competing in a highly comoditized space.
I'm sorry if I sound negative, I do hope this works out! I'm really curious to see how you plan on working around the issues I see in the space.
This seems like a great idea in theory- potentially better than the so-called luxury ETFs that only invest in what the fund manager deems as socially-responsible companies. If your expense ratios are low, and you allow me to have a meaningful say in how I or the fund as a whole votes for better climate outcomes, I would be personally interested.
I'd love see how you guys do it, and will be following your progress.
I've always wondered, could large ETFs providers propose a few voting profile you could pick from and vote accordingly? Or are they forced to vote the same for all the shares they hold?
I'd love to be able to tell eg vanguard how to vote, currently I'm an indirect shareholder with no voice.
I've divested from oil companies, not because I think it will change corporate governance at XOM or BP, but because I like to buy things that I can hold for a decade or three, without thinking too hard about them.
I don't want to spend my time thinking about when, precisely, XOM and BP will have peaked. I'd rather just get rid of them and free up that mental space to concentrate on what's next in the world of energy generation, storage, and transmission.
For most people that's the wrong question. If you have capital that can be applied to long term resolute ideals you likely don't have to worry about capital in general. We all know fossil fuels have have an expiration date. We can easily state that money invested in building next generation power acquisition, delivery and storage will displace them. But again, you need a stack of chips to play.
This is a good idea, unfortunately when it comes to investment it is not enough for a company to be in the right track. It also needs to dominate the market, which is more difficult. For example, lots of companies were created in the Internet bubble, but only a few survived and came to dominate the market.
This is a big part of the problem, but there is some hope!
Shareholders of the big oil and gas companies have started to recognize the long-term threat of climate change. There were 87[0] shareholder proposals last year that asked firms to adopt emission reduction targets, disclose lobbying expenses, or take other action that would result in lower emissions.
Most of these failed, largely because the big institutional investors voted against them.
Shameless plug: I'm trying to solve this problem by creating a governance-first index fund [1].
You mean the same oil/gas companies that have known about these issues for decades and covered it up?[0] I trust them to do the right thing about as far as I can throw them. If they are making any changes now, it's simply because it's economically sensible, not because they want to save the planet.
They knew about it long before that even. That carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and questions about our use of fuels that produce it were raised in the late 1800 hundreds. Climate change is a problem that has been ignored for over 120 years. they had some better excuses for ignoring it in the past, but this is not a new problem. It should have been solved in the past, and not solving it now will lead to disaster.
For others that are unaware of who this is, first paragraph from his wikipedia page:
> Svante August Arrhenius (19 February 1859 – 2 October 1927) was a Swedish scientist. Originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, Arrhenius was one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, becoming the first Swedish Nobel laureate. In 1905, he became director of the Nobel Institute, where he remained until his death.
Don't plants require carbon dioxide to grow? I am not sure it was immediately obvious to people 120 years ago (the Mariner 2 spacecraft, which flew past Venus in 1962, was the first to take detailed pictures showing its heat-trapping clouds) that CO2 was such a "dangerous" thing.
I have recently been made aware of relatively inexpensive massive high density tree planting projects as a way to potentially solve the CO2 "problem"[0] I personally find ideas such as these are far better for world's ultra-poor then raising the price of energy thru carbon taxes, as pretty much the only way people can move into a significantly better living situation is thru the use of energy.
Only new forests sequester. Old forests are in approximate CO2 balance: rotting trees and the consumption of green mass by wildlife emit CO2 at approximately the same rate as it is absorbed. Since we have a limited area to plant new forests this is only a temporary solution.
But it's important, since it could buy us a few more years to implement more permanent solutions.
*Younger forests pull the most out over a given period of time. The bulk of the carbon stays locked up as long as the wood doesn't decay/isn't burned. It's one reason some architects are starting to look at structural wood for larger buildings again, as long as the building stands you keep the carbon locked up in the framing. If we had a magic wand we could create a few super-fast growing species and plant massive amounts of forest of complimentary species that provide the soil with nearly everything needed to grow one another and simply harvest the lumber, drag it out to anoxic depths at sea and sink it not unlike the commonly accepted theory of the azolla event doing similar with aquatic ferns in our planet's past.
The best trees can manage about 48lbs of CO2 per year, that's 46 trees per metric tonne and healthy forest is 40-60 trees per acre. Just to go carbon neutral last year that would mean you would have needed at LEAST 53 million square miles of optimal forest. For reference, there are 196.9 million square miles of land on earth, effectively 1/4 of the land mass on earth would need to be 100% optimized decade or two old forest.
Roughly 31% of the earth is forest, however it's far from the above optimal conditions. In reality we'd need probably 50% (if not more) of the earth to be forest to manage what we did last year.
Coincidentally, pre-industrial era the earth was about 48% forest and current estimates are we lose something like 28,125 square miles annually to human operations. We're producing more and more while reducing the planet's ability to sequester.
Sadly planting more trees isn't even going to equate to a bandaid, it's going to be like loosing a limb to a wood chipper and gently blowing on the wound. It's purely a "this makes me feel good" thing.
Yes, but they also require other things to grow, so the scaling of their growth with rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration isn't as impressive as some people imagine, and it's only been empirically demonstrated in the short term. As far as I've read, the main uncertainty as to what happens in the medium-long term relates to how much nitrogen is available in the soil, and how the nitrogen-fixing topsoil ecosystem adapts. If it can thrive in such a way as to fix more nitrogen, that could lead to further plant growth. But it's also plausible that the rapid shift in the environment disrupts that system and leads to a regression in plant growth rates.
And all of that assumes that unseasonably warm/cold temperatures from changing weather patterns, drought or flooding from changing weather patterns, increased wildfires from changing weather patterns etc doesn't kill off many species in an area.
That is like arguing against drowning because you require water. The dose and application make the "poison".
It is even true that the CO2 was at this point before. If it had shifted at geological timescales even if it was from human activity it would be more or less fine as the ecosystem could adapt to it like previous epoches.
Certainly there would be extinctions but would give time to adapt and speciate.
Tree planting helps some but it isn't comparable at scale at all - as in running out of available landmass bad.
Tree planting would help the ultrapoor if they maintained it locally given things like impact on soil erosion and rainfall but those are only localized effects
Of course. Nobody is saying there should be no CO2. But if your implication is that higher CO2 means better growth, it is generally wrong. Some plants do grow better, some don't, in a higher CO2 environment. But more importantly, it isn't as if CO2 is an independent variable. Along with it comes significant changes that plants are not adapted to -- higher average and peak temperatures, more or less rainfall (depending where in the world it is). Yes, given enough time, the plants that make it through the stresses of climate change will adapt and thrive, but in the near term (a few generations of humans) it will cause problems.
> I am not sure it was immediately obvious to people 120 years ago that CO2 was such a "dangerous" thing.
In short: Joseph Fourier (of the Fourier transform) advocated for the idea of atmospheric gasses causing a greenhouse effect. It was advanced along the years, in 1896 Arrhenius even calculated the effect on the climate due to a doubling of CO2.
There were scientific papers published in the 50s using the terms "climate change" in the 50s, well before the Mariner 2 spacecraft.
Not all energy sources generate significant CO2 or even cost more than those that do. It’s vastly more efficient to make the least economically expensive changes early than to wait and be forced to use more drastic approaches.
Long term carbon sequestration via forests is extremely expensive as you can’t then use the land for anything else. Not extracting carbon is by far the cheapest option for long term sequestration.
PS: Sequestration of biomass underground is a viable long term option, but it’s again expensive.
Forested land has tons of economic uses, and in many cases it improves the productivity of the other activities that are done within the land. Most human dwellings do better when they are surrounded by trees (lowers cooling/heating costs and improves the sanity of the occupants). Most livestock can be raised in orchards, along with quite a few consumable plants (coffee, cows, mushrooms, etc.). Also the trees themselves can be converted to charcoal through gasification, which provides a carbon feedstock for graphite, activated charcoal, or biochar, all of which lock away the carbon. The gasification process produces syngas/woodgas/producers gas which is a viable fuel source. Lastly the wood can be used itself for building structures and furniture which locks away the carbon for the life of the item.
Not sure how any of that is expensive, as it fulfills our requirements for food, housing, and luxury goods.
The issue with this line of thinking is we are not talking about a single forest or some minor changes to urban settings, but a massive change to the number of forests. The scale is vastly beyond adding more trees near buildings or a few more orchids. Ideally you want massive trees that live a long time and spend as much energy as possible growing larger not making fruit.
This land is not already being used for forests because other uses are simply more useful or less costly. The net loss of utility then needs to continue for as long as the carbon is sequestered.
Finally, if you want to sequester carbon somewhere else you need to collect and transport it which adds more costs. Further, if that’s the goal forests are simply slow carbon sinks in comparison to other plants.
Sequestered carbon just goes into the ground. You need not transport it anywhere. It improves the health of the soil. There is equipment that will take dead standing wood and gasify it into biochar which is stable in the soil for theoretically 10k years. These systems also produce a net positive energy (electricity and heat). Source: I wrote the firmware that runs All Power Lab's Power pallet, which does just this. It fits on a 4' pallet and can be taken to a fuel source (woodchips, corn cobs, walnut shells, grass pellets, etc.).
I'm having a hard time understanding the fundamental problem that you are bringing up. Sure, machinery doesn't just magically transport itself, same goes for the plant matter. But these machines produce fuel/electricity, so they can be used to power chippers, tractors, or whatever machinery you need to run your orchard, timber mills, or office park cleanup activities. This is the point I'm making, there is free fuel that can be used from growing plants (of a variety of sizes and uses). Just as we use lawn mowers and wood chippers to clean up our yards, we should also be using the resulting material to fulfill our energy needs and produce biochar to lock away carbon back into the soil.
You're correct, nothing comes for free, but the alternative is to leave this dead standing wood on forest floors to be later fuel wild fires. Or in the case of agricultural waste, to be composted or burned directly. Seems like a waste, as composting produces methane and CO2, which unless captured in an anaerobic digester just goes into the atmosphere and contributes to global warming, and burning does similar harm.
Small scale gasification reactors can run equipment, and are easily transported on trailers to the site of waste if it is not already easily centralized (in which case a dedicated cogeneration plant is usually a better option). A 20kW reactor can produce enough electricity to run 16 US homes, so situating one on every block is also a viable option that we should be considering.
> I personally find ideas such as these are far better for world's ultra-poor then raising the price of energy thru carbon taxes, as pretty much the only way people can move into a significantly better living situation is thru the use of energy.
"Carbon tax hurts the poor" is oil industry propaganda. The poor use less carbon than average -- especially the "ultra poor" -- but everyone receives the same dividend. It's a net transfer to the poor.
On top of that, the underlying cost (after accounting for tax, subsidies and regulations) for oil in poorer countries is higher than in richer countries because they have worse infrastructure for delivering fuel. You can put solar panels and batteries on a shack in the middle of a field and have electricity for decades. To do that with a gas generator you need gas stations, vehicles to deliver it, roads to drive them on etc. They don't have those things, and won't get them overnight, but meanwhile you can give them electricity today and they immediately get running water and electric light and wireless telecommunications etc. So oil is garbage for them and they're better off never burning a drop of it while the people who do are paying a carbon tax that funds a dividend they can use to buy solar panels.
It is true but not on individual level, on country level. There are countries that generate > 80% of their energy from fossil fuels and do not have enough money to invest at scale in nuclear, or wind, or solar. Rich Western countries on the other hand invested in clean energy first, and now that they have significant advantage in that area they are trying to impose arbitrary CO2 limits, which is kind of pulling up the ladder behind them - now the poor countries not only have to find money to invest in clean energy, but also twice the amount, to pay penalties for exceeding those limits.
> It is true but not on individual level, on country level.
It's true all over the place.
Suppose you live in a country which gets 80% of its energy from fossil fuels. Well, that sucks, so now your average energy costs go up by $1000 a year. You can't afford that! Only you get it all back. You get a $1000 dividend, use it to pay for the same energy you did before, and nothing changes.
Except for one thing. When your country continues its path to industrialization, nobody is ever going to build a new coal fired power plant again. All the new capacity will be non-fossil fuels, because now they're much cheaper relative to coal -- no carbon tax.
The only cost you're really paying is the relative price difference between fossil fuels and alternatives. But that's already close to zero and has non-cost benefits for your country like air quality and energy independence.
Moreover, the idea that this is some cost for developing countries that developed countries didn't have to pay is also a lie. The cost of renewables is driving the cost of fossil fuels down through competition. The carbon tax is only needed to prevent that -- to keep their price back up around their traditional cost, which makes them uncompetitive with the falling price of renewables, so that they die out instead of the lower demand causing their price to fall to the point that they still end up as 20-50% of generation capacity.
That's not how science works. Some scientists theorized that CO2 emissions could have consequences for climate. There was a lot of theoretical and technological development that needed to happen before such an outlandish (at the time and up until the recent present) idea could be verified and acted upon. It's no small claim to suggest that humans can not only alter global climate, but do so in a catastrophic manner. Add to the mix the social and economic cost of acting on such a theory, and it makes sense to understand and prove the science with some minimum certainty before using it to justify massive policy change.
Hindsight is 20/20. Even now, because of the nature of what amounts to an empirical science who's primary effects will only be measured in the future, we haven't unambiguously proven that climate change is occuring, and cannot do so without additional decades or centuries of data, at which point it may be too late.
It is similarly fallacious to accuse oil companies of knowing about this problem and failing to act. 30 years ago this was similarly a theory with even less evidence than today, and only a handful of scientists even considered it.
None of that is true. It has never been considered outlandish except by oil company PR teams. Simple math from the very beginning of the fossil fuel era made it obvious we would eventually run into problems. It has been extremely obvious for decades that the predicted problems were here, now.
There's no social or economic cost to the world for acting to prevent climate change. The costs are all negative - we save vast amounts of money and societal damage by acting.
There hasn't been any serious scientific dispute over whether climate change was occurring for at least 50 years.
And of course it's completely accurate to note that the oil companies knew about the problem and have not only refused to act, but have spent massive amounts to prevent action. Many of their own documents are available on the internet for your inspection.
>It has never been considered outlandish except by oil company PR teams.
You're describing catastrophic terraforming on the scale of about 100 years. That's a huge claim with enormous ramifications and given the current expense of mitigation, it rightly warrants scrutiny, both in probability of occurance and scope of change.
>Simple math from the very beginning of the fossil fuel era made it obvious we would eventually run into problems.
Absolutely nothing about climate change is simple. Which is why it took decades to establish any kind of consensus. Global climate is a chaotic function of various positive and negative feedback mechanisms - simply noting that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses may cause climate change is not nearly enough to conclude that there is a problem without considering the hugely complex system in it's entirety.
>It has been extremely obvious for decades that the predicted problems were here, now.
We've been collecting the very data necessary to prove the "obviousness" of climate change over the same decades in which you claim the problem was already evident. You need time series data to establish a trend with any kind of certainty, and climate changes at a minimum over hundreds of years.
>There's no social or economic cost to the world for acting to prevent climate change. The costs are all negative - we save vast amounts of money and societal damage by acting.
Like the rest of your post, your perspective is biased by your assertion that climate change is happening. You need to view this from the perspective of a society which has not had time to perform the necessary data gathering and analysis to make such conclusion - in which case, there are now and were decades ago current costs to switching off of fossil fuels, which it would only be reasonable to incur given a minimum degree of certainty in future climate change. It is simply infesible to make drastic policy changes for every sounded alarm - one must obviously consider the expected value of the change, which is (disaster cost)*(probability of disaster)-(cost of change). The value of this probability is difficult to model and has been steadily increasing with recent climate science.
>There hasn't been any serious scientific dispute over whether climate change was occurring for at least 50 years.
Just decades ago the consensus was that of global cooling. Again, you underestimate the complexity of determining whether the climate is actually changing and, in particular, how it will change in the future.
>And of course it's completely accurate to note that the oil companies knew about the problem
Again, oil companies did not "know" of the problem, they were aware of the possibility of the problem. The very documents which you mention state that additional modeling was required to determine anything with certainty.
As somebody in an oil and gas town, I can assure you that more than zero oil and gas company owners and executives think global warming is a paranoid delusion or even a political conspiracy
Not everyone of course, but I just want to point out that “they know about it and are hiding it” isn’t always accurate. There is a lot of denial
I am pretty sure there is a famous quote along the lines of "It is hard to make a man understand something when his private jet trips depend on him not understanding it" :)
Of course, which is why it's in their best interests to do something now to avoid massive disruption later from potentially disastrous (for them) regulation.
Just a heads up, the sign up for your newsletter has a really irritating reCAPTCHA. I have gone through at multiple grids to no avail. I have given up at this point. The newsletter is not worth it.
I tried adding a similar caveat to my message, but my feeble attempts muddied my simple message. Even your caveat is slightly over-simplified because there's a significant time component: most ecosystems would probably be OK if the oil was burned over a few million years rather than a few decades.
Yes. Oil and gas and coal proven reserves of burned would produce about 4.5 trillion tons of CO2. About half of that would remain in the atmosphere. There’s currently about 2 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere today at 400ppm. So in proven reserves alone, we have enough to more than double the current CO2 levels, or triple/quadruple them from pre-industrial levels (when they were ~280ppm).
...but the real kicker is that proven reserves are just a small fraction of total likely recoverable reserves long-term. Proven reserves basically assumes no tech improvement and no exploration, two things we’re continually doing. So proven reserves have actual GROWN over time and likely will. There are truly vast amounts of fossil fuels available that could be tapped if we had to tap them.
For instance, there’s over a trillion barrels of kerogen/oilshale oil (which is expensive to extract, like Canada’s oil sands) in JUST the Green River formation in Colorado/Wyoming, more than all the world’s proven oil reserves combined. But it sits untapped because oil prices are so low. And practically all of northern Alaska has coal underneath it if you drill to the right depth, 5 trillion tons (~18 trillion tons of CO2), more than four times all the world’s coal proven reserves combined. Source: https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-077/
America alone has enough fossil fuels in the ground to single-handedly double or triple or sextuple the CO2 level. Add in similar fossil fuel amounts in much of Africa, South America, Russia, Canada, Antarctica, Australia, and the world’s oceans, and the planet would be unrecognizable.
There’s enough fossil fuels (if we tried hard enough) to get the CO2 levels in the 10,000 ppm range where there are serious long term health effects from just breathing the stuff. And psychological effects start becoming apparent at just 500-1000ppm, which we will see by the end of the century or so.
So yeah, we’ll run out of atmosphere to dump the CO2 into before we run out of fossil fuels.
Yes. We have more than twenty years of fossil fuel reserves. We need to be carbon neutral in less than twenty years if we want to stay below 2° of warming.
I quit my job last month to work full time on (what I think is) an under-explored area of climate change: how institutional investors block shareholder proposals calling for firms to adopt more climate-friendly policies.
I have just published the first bit of research with data on how 500+ funds from the big 3 fund managers voted on climate change-related proposals in 2018: https://voting.greengovernance.org .
Later this year, I'm planning to launch a "governance-first" ETF that gives investors the same exposure as other funds but is much more aggressive in fighting climate change.
I'd love any feedback! Feel free to email me at <hn-username>@greengovernance.org
-Which consumer product companies still use a lot of plastic packaging vs those already use bio-degradable packaging?
-Which heavy-industry manufacturing companies use coal or diesel as the main source of energy in their factories vs those use renewable energy source?
-Any company forbid their executives to fly excessively whether in private jet or business/first class? How many miles per year they travel ? It's simply not environmentally friendly when video conferencing should be effective in 90% of the cases?
Thanks! Those are all interesting questions -- and also quite hard to answer without a lot of research into each individual company.
One thing my fund will push for is more consistent and granular emissions disclosures across firms so that shareholders have a better idea of where firms are "spending" their emissions and identify inefficiencies.
I think this is great! I’ve moved money from VTSAX to Vanguard’s ESG funds, despite big concerns about their governance voting. There’s nothing inherently incompatible about climate friendly voting and index funds, so I wish you the best of luck.
It seems the search is only by name. Is it possible to add a view that shows the funds sorted by which ones are most friendly to climate change proposals?
I quit my job last month to work full time on (what I think is) an under-explored area of climate change: how institutional investors block shareholder proposals calling for firms to adopt more climate-friendly policies.
I have just published the first bit of research with data on how 500+ funds from the big 3 fund managers voted on climate change-related proposals in 2018: https://voting.greengovernance.org . Later this year, I'm planning to launch a "governance-first" ETF that gives investors the same exposure as other funds but is much more aggressive in fighting climate change.
I'd love any feedback! Feel free to email me at <hn-username>@greengovernance.org
Creator here. Please let me know if you have any questions! This was a lot of fun to build.
I scraped SEC filings to track how 500+ mutual funds voted on proposals related to climate change. The raw data is 376mb, which I parse and filter down to 2.5mb of JSON files. Gatsby creates a GraphQL interface with that data, and I query that to create 1600+ pages of static content. The build is pretty fast: 40s locally, 90s on Netlify's free-tier build server. I'd definitely recommend Gatsby and Netlify for anyone considering a similar project!
I quit my job a couple weeks ago to start a company that does exactly this. If anyone is interested in learning more, feel free to reach out at [hn-username]@greengovernance.org.
Different levels of Montessori authenticity make the results even more impressive. They do have some inclusion criteria, like 2/3 of the teachers must be AMI/AMS certified but even so I'd expect a lot of these public school montessori programs to be less "true montessori" than what you'd get at a fully certified AMI/AMS school.