Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced the city's decision to divest more than €4 billion from fossil fuels. Together with San Francisco and Oakland, it will sue oil companies to cover the damages caused by climate change.
It is a historic announcement from New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. The American city has decided to launch a plan to divest more than €4 billion (5 billion dollars) in pension funds from stocks linked to oil companies. The main objective is to divest the city's entire pension fund — a substantial €158 billion (187 billion dollars) — within five years. Moreover, the city has decided to sue Exxon, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips and Royal Dutch Shell, as they are considered responsible for and connected to climate change.
"New York will be the first major city in the United States to divest from fossil fuels," Bill de Blasio declared at a press conference. "We are taking the fight against climate change directly to the oil companies, which have always known about the effects and have intentionally deceived citizens to protect their profits. It was their greed that put us in this situation, and it is up to them to bear the cost of making New York safer and more resilient."
Decisive words that leave no room for doubt and that pave the way towards an economy decoupled from investments in fossil fuels. This is probably the largest shift of funds ever to have taken place. By the end of 2016, divestment from fossil fuels had reached 5 trillion dollars, involving 688 institutional investors and 58,399 individual savers across 76 countries worldwide.
"We want to safeguard the pensions of our city's police officers, teachers and firefighters, while also believing that their financial future is tied to the sustainability of the planet," said budget comptroller Scott Stringer. "It's complex, it will take time and there will be many steps." But the path is now set. With this decision, the Divest movement grows exponentially, joining a list that grows year on year and includes names such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Gates Foundation.
But that is not all. The mayor himself explains that the city of New York has filed a lawsuit against the five largest fossil fuel companies: BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell. In this way, the companies themselves will have to bear the costs of the damages already suffered by the city and those that will occur in the future as a direct result of climate change. Through this lawsuit, the administration expects to fund all the measures necessary to increase the city's resilience in the face of extreme weather events, from coastal protection to the upgrading of water and sewage infrastructure and the mitigation of heatwaves.
But New York is not the only one to have sued the five majors: as early as September 2017, the city attorneys of San Francisco and Oakland had already filed legal action against BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell to make the companies pay "the cost of protecting citizens and their property." Behind it all lies the clear desire to ensure that the costs of climate change are borne by those deemed responsible. Both cities are in fact calling on the five majors to foot the bill for the adaptation plans that will need to be tackled in the coming years.
It has, after all, been widely demonstrated that only a small circle of companies is responsible for CO2 emissions at a global level. This is revealed, for example, by the Carbon Major report from Cdp (which is certainly not an environmental association), which explains how just 100 companies, linked mostly to the extraction and production of fossil fuels, are responsible for 71 per cent of global emissions from 1988 to the present day. Over the past 28 years, more greenhouse gases would have been emitted than in the preceding 237 years — taking 1751 as the year of the birth of the Industrial Revolution: 833 billion tonnes of CO2, compared with the 820 billion released in the two preceding centuries. History, however, could change. And New York is at the forefront of rewriting it.
