Written by Aaron Pickus:
Wall Street Knows Our Name!
Two exciting developments in the movement to divest from fossil fuels. First, you may have seen the news break yesterday that Goldman Sachs is divesting from the coal train export proposal in the Pacific Northwest. This is great news, and follows on their report last year that the window for investing in coal is passing: http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2014/01/08/goldman-sachs-bails-out-on-coal-port-builder/.
The second piece of news is that the annual report on emerging market trends by MSCI Inc. (one of the world’s largest investment data providers) highlights fossil fuel divestment as the #1 trend to watch in 2014.
“Not since the apartheid era in South Africa have college campuses in the US and elsewhere teemed with the call for divestment. For this generation of students, the moral imperative today is to stop all fossil fuel extraction. Spurred by the nonprofit organization, 350.org, the movement is calling for divestment from approximately 200 companies that hold the vast majority of the world’s carbon reserves.”
You can read (and please share) the full report here: http://www.msci.com/resources/factsheets/MSCI_ESG_Research_2014_ESG_Trends_to_Watch.pdf#
A few top line things to highlight in this report:
“Purely from a financial perspective, even the outside chance that some reserves could become ‘stranded assets’ if a red line is breached should prompt a hard look at the assumptions underlying the valuation of fossil fuel producers.”
The report (page 4) details that divestment not only lowers financial exposure to companies with stranded carbon assets, but also yields profitable returns.