Leonardo DiCaprio is joining a campaign to use investment decisions to fight global warming by shedding his own fossil fuel investments.
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Researchers have said that more than $100 trillion in oil, gas and coal reserves should remain unproduced if the world is to stave off a climate crisis brought on by rising global temperatures – a warning that some investors see as a threat to fossil-fuel companies.
Now is the time to divest and invest to let our world leaders know that we, as individuals and institutions, are taking action to address climate change, and we expect them to do their part this December in Paris at the United Nations climate talks.
One of the latest, if least surprising, pledges came from the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, the environmental charity led by the actor and climate activist.
The star of The Wolf of Wall Street and Blood Diamond, 40, joined members of the Divest-Invest Coalition as it announced his plans and highlighted growth in such pledges during the past year. A leader of the effort, Ellen Dorsey, said DiCaprio planned to divest his own and his foundation’s fossil fuel holdings.
Now, foundations, pension funds, insurers, state and local governments and others worth a total of $2.6 trillion have pledged to reduce or eliminate their fossil fuel investments, the coalition said in a report released Tuesday.
Last year, Arabella Advisors calculated that the total amount of funds committed to divestment totaled a comparatively paltry $50 billion in assets, with 181 institutions and under 1,000 individuals taking part in the movement.
Some of the most notable have been the University of California System and the Norway Pension Fund, which has drawn particular notice as the Scandinavian country – like the Rockefellers – grew wealthy thanks to oil production. Dorsey said that a typical organization has about 3% to 8% of its assets invested in fossil fuels, meaning the actual money leaving the sector is well below that $2.6 trillion mark.
Recent reports from the Carbon Tracker Initiative, worldwide Energy Agency, HSBC and Citigroup have each warned of the financial consequences of holding large portfolios of fossil fuels.
The executive director of 350.org, an online anti-global-warming group, May Boeve, said that their movement “is growing faster than expected”.
“The Arabella Report shows that more and more investors are reducing their carbon risk today and diversifying their portfolios with the goal to harness the upside in the sustainable clean growth industries of the future”, said Thomas Van Dyck, Managing Director-Financial Advisor of SRI Wealth Management Group. This year, however, that figure dropped to 57 percent, and divesting institutions now represent more than 646 million individuals around the world, the report said.
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Divestment strategies vary among participants in the movement. That makes me hopeful for our future, and it’s sending a clear message to world leaders as they head into Paris: “It’s time for them to follow suit, and divest our governments from fossil fuel companies too”.
