DIVEST 3

10 22

see shareholder revolt

see ESG?

see kochademia / exxon $

CRC ATTACK // DEFEND KOCHADEMIA TPPF

CORE CIVIC PVT PRISONS?

11 23

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Students at six universities filed legal complaints on Monday accusing their colleges of breaking a little-known law by investing in planet-heating fossil fuels, the Guardian has learned.

Campus organizers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, Tufts University, Pomona College, Washington University in St Louis and Pennsylvania State University wrote to the attorneys general of their respective states to ask officials to scrutinize their universities’ investments. Each filing elicited signatures of support from dozens of faculty and staff members, alumni and local, national and international climate-focused groups.

The students argue that by investing in coal, oil and gas, the schools are violating their obligations as non-profit organizations to prioritize the public interest.

“Fossil fuel companies have long engaged in a well-documented campaign to undermine climate science and distort public debate about how to deal with the climate crisis – including through efforts targeting Penn scientists and researchers,” University of Pennsylvania students wrote in their filing. “The industry’s spread of scientific misinformation undermines the work of Penn faculty and students who are researching and designing solutions for a sustainable future.”

The filings estimate that each of the schools has tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars invested in fossil fuels.

“If universities say, ‘We’re climate leaders, we stand for justice,’ but then on the other hand financially contribute to the climate crisis, we just see that as unacceptable,” said Moli Ma, an undergraduate student at Tufts, who helped lead the complaint against her university. “There’s an incongruence there. It doesn’t match up.”

The six complaints follow more than a dozen similar initiatives at colleges around the US, beginning with Boston College in 2020. The filings were written with help from the Climate Defense Project, a non-profit environmental law organization.

State officials have not affirmed any of the legal filings, but several schools – including Harvard, Cornell and Stanford – said they would divest from fossil fuels shortly after complaints against them were filed.

“We feel like this might have been the last straw that really pushed Harvard’s administration over the edge on divestment,” said Ma, who is part of the Tufts Climate Action student group. “We wanted to replicate the success that happened there.”

Four of Monday’s filings allege that schools breached the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act, a law adopted by 49 states requiring non-profit institutions to consider their “charitable purposes” in their investments and to do so with “prudence” and “loyalty”.

Pennsylvania has not passed such a law, so students’ legal complaints against the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania State University are based on similar regulations that fall under the state’s Decedents, Estates, and Fiduciary Code.

In interviews, the student organizers noted that the climate crisis had wreaked havoc on each of their universities’ home states, whether through more frequent and severe wildfires in Pomona College’s California or more devastating heatwaves in Washington University in St Louis’s Missouri. Those disasters often disproportionately harm youth, poor communities and people of color, the complaints note.

Another key argument in each complaint: investing in fossil fuel stocks not only harms the climate and threatens human health, but also creates financial risk.

“We make the case that fossil fuels from a purely financial point of view are a very bad investment,” said Ted Hamilton, a lawyer with the Climate Defense Project who has worked on each of the legal filings. “This sector is very volatile. It’s been underperforming lately, and especially for long-term institutional investors like universities, it has a very bad value thesis [for] the coming decades.”

The complaints build on pre-existing fossil fuel divestment efforts at each of the six universities. Students said they had heard college officials defend their continued financial backing of fossil fuels in various ways, from touting their existing efforts to clean up investments to arguing that investment should not be governed by specific political agendas.

“Investing in fossil fuels is a political statement,” said Clara Dutton, a student organizer at Washington University in St Louis. “And it’s a hypocritical one.”

Bill McKibben, the veteran environmental activist and author, supports the students’ efforts.

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“Some of these institutions have produced world-class climate science, all of them are in places facing huge climate threats, and yet they’re still trying to profit off the most dangerous thing humans have ever done,” said McKibben, who has been calling for fossil fuel divestment – including from universities – for more than a decade.

Each of the six schools has also made pledges to boost sustainability and engaged in climate research, but Hamilton said that does not undercut the validity of the legal claims.

“The fact that they are doing these wonderful, sustainable things is a recognition that this was part of their charitable mission, part of the reason why they’re raising money and promoting their vision of the public good,” he said.

Ron Ozio, spokesperson for the University of Pennsylvania, said his institution’s board of trustees has “thoughtfully reviewed” requests to divest from fossil fuels.

In a November 2022 statement, University of Pennsylvania officials said: “Selling fossil fuel investments does not end fossil fuel production or create clean energy alternatives, and it risks transferring ownership to buyers who may care little for the environmental consequences of their actions.”

The students, however, said they do not believe their colleges divesting their endowments from fossil fuels would cause oil and gas to collapse. But refusal to do so represents a tacit endorsement of an industry that is fueling planetary destruction, they said.

The action comes amid rising pressure on institutions to cut ties with fossil fuel companies. This fall, New York University pledged to divest from coal, oil and gas firms following years of pressure from activists. About 250 US educational institutions have divested from fossil fuels, according to data from Stand.earth and 350.org.

In an email, Pomona College said it was still reviewing the legal filing, but stated it was “strongly committed to environmental sustainability and to reaching carbon neutrality for our campus by 2030”.

Even in the absence of legal complaints, McKibben said he expects more universities to divest from fossil fuels, but added that he hoped the students’ action can “hustle them along”.

“The planet is running out of time for their games,” he said.

an 7 23

no lnx

How Wall Street underwriting quietly funnels billions into fossil fuels: analysis

Kenny Stanciland Common Dreams July 25, 2023

A report out Monday sheds light on how big U.S. banks' underwriting of bonds and equities for polluting corporations constitutes a "hidden pipeline" for fossil fuel financing.

It's no secret that financial institutions play a leading role in driving the climate emergency. Since 2016, the year the Paris agreement took effect, the world's 60 largest private banks have provided more than $5.5 trillion in financing to the fossil fuel industry, flouting their pledges to put themselves and their clients on a path to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions as the window to avert the worst consequences of the intensifying climate crisis rapidly closes.

But banks' underwriting activities receive far less attention than their direct lending practices, even though both are instrumental in enabling fossil fuel expansion and must be reformed to rein in the industry most responsible for imperiling the planet's livability.

That's the key takeaway from a new analysis of Wall Street's participation in capital markets published by the Sierra Club's Fossil-Free Finance campaign.

"Banks play a vital role in capital markets," the report explains. "Acting as underwriters, they are the gatekeepers of fossil fuel companies: they advise companies issuing bonds and equities, hold the vital information on the issuer, and help market the instruments to investors disclosing only the necessary risk."

Since 2016, the six largest U.S. banks—JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs—have provided more than $433 billion in lending and underwriting to 30 of the companies doing the most to increase fossil fuel extraction and combustion worldwide, the report notes.More than three-fifths (61%) of that financing comes from underwriting, with those half-dozen banking giants issuing $266 billion in new bonds and equities for the world's top 30 fossil fuel expansion firms.

Climate justice advocates have long criticized the concept of "net-zero" because, they argue, allowing planet-heating pollution to be "canceled out" via dubious carbon offset programs or risky carbon removal technologies is an accounting trick that doesn't guarantee the significant emissions cuts needed to avoid the climate emergency's most destructive impacts.

But even if one accepts the premise of net-zero, big U.S. banks' policies on the topic are misleading.

"Despite the importance of capital markets activities in helping fossil fuel companies secure new funding, banks focus primarily on lending, while downplaying the importance of underwriting,when setting their emissions reduction targets," the report says. "Banks are performing sleight of hand, distracting investors and regulators with net-zero transition plans that are half-finished, while continuing to funnel money to fossil fuel companies via capital markets with limited scrutiny."

In a statement, Adele Shraiman, senior campaign strategist with the Sierra Club's Fossil-Free Finance campaign, said that "without banks, fossil fuel companies cannot raise money through capital markets."

"By downplaying their role in capital markets and refusing to include facilitated emissions in their climate targets, big U.S. banks are intentionally sidestepping a major source of real-world emissions and making it impossible to meet their own net-zero commitments," said Shraiman.

According to the report: "Only three of the six major Wall Street banks include bond and equity underwriting in their sectoral emissions reduction targets—JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo. The remaining three banks have so far chosen to only apply emissions reduction targets to lending activities."

However, "even among those who have set emissions reduction targets that include underwriting, insufficient disclosures and lack of standardization make it difficult to understand how robust banks' facilitated emissions accounting methodologies are, and what progress they are making toward achieving their emissions reduction targets," the report adds.

In a blog post, Shraiman wrote that "banks don't want us to know all of the ways they help fossil fuel companies raise funds to continue building the pipelines, oil rigs, fracking wells, and coal mines that are destroying the climate and hurting communities."

"But investors, regulators, and customers around the world see through their duplicity," she continued. "We are demanding complete, robust, and transparent net-zero plans that cover all types of financing activities and will lead to real-world emissions reductions in line with our global climate goals."

Monday's report comes at a key moment in the fight to stop Wall Street from continuing to fund climate chaos.

As the Sierra Club observed, "Banks currently point to a lack of industry standardson underwriting to justify why they do not disclose or set targets for facilitated emissions." However, the industry-led Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials is expected to release its updated methodology on accounting for and reducing facilitated emissions in the near future.

"Underwriting is a huge missing piece of net-zero transition plans, allowing big U.S. banks to continue to help fossil fuel companies raise billions of dollars with limited scrutiny," Shraiman said. "By only focusing on emissions reduction targets for their lending activities, banks are conveniently excluding half of their fossil fuel financing from their climate commitments."

"It's time," she added, "for the major Wall Street banks to adopt a robust and consistent methodology for accounting facilitated emissions, and take full responsibility for the climate impacts of their underwriting decisions."

The International Energy Agency has stated unequivocally that there is "no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net-zero pathway."

After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest assessment in March, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said that limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C is possible, "but it will take a quantum leap in climate action," including a ban on approving and financing new coal, oil, and gas projects as well as a phaseout of existing fossil fuel production.

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ref guk

https://yyy.theguardian.com/education/2023/mar/27/fossil-fuel-firms-us-universities-colonize-academia

students at Princeton describe unease that Exxon employee had an office on campus, while dozens of universities have big oil links

Oliver Milman

:{Mon 27 Mar 2023

t}:he lecturer looked, and sounded, the part. Sporting a pale blue shirt and Princeton University ID badge, he had his own office on campus, a short stroll from the room where several dozen students were gathered to hear him confidently talk about the challenges in moving away from fossil fuels.

Tim Barckholtz is not a Princeton professor, however. He is a senior scientific adviser at ExxonMobil, the oil giant that has done so much to both perpetuate and downplay the climate crisis. Barckholtz, an affable figure who has touting its emissions reduction research, spent around six months sitting in and contributing to lectures and research groups, based in his own office space at the elite university.

In September, with the university poised to cut its extensive ties with certain fossil-fuel companies including Exxon, Barckholtz even taught a class of engineering students on “negative emissions technologies”, during which, over pizza and soda, he criticized the divestment decision, warned that the transition away from oil and gas will be “very difficult” and that the unfolding climate emergency was “not our fault”.

“It’s hard for me to figure out who wins [from divestment],” Barckholtz told the class, a recording of it shows. “There are, like, 10 people who win. They are sleeping better at night, but technology is the loser.” Barckholtz then noted that Exxon makes the type of rubber that goes into most car tires. “Are all of the Princeton security cars going to go back to the Flintstones and have no tires?” he asked. “There are some parts of this they didn’t think through completely.”

Asked by a student about the Paris climate agreement, Barckholtz expressed doubt that it could be met, as it was too hard to ditch fossil fuels. “I’m not optimistic, I’m going to call it the way I see it,” he said. “The system is just too big to be flipped.”

“A few of the students thought it was weird he was in the class and that he then taught the class,” said Claire Kaufman, a second year master’s student in public affairs who said she started talking to Barckholtz during one of the first negative emissions technology classes and was “quite shocked” to discover he was an Exxon employee.

Dozens of US universities, however, retain links with the fossil-fuel industry in a variety of ways, despite the growing pressure on them to cut them. Several host Exxon representatives on campus and even provide them with office space, similar to Princeton’s previous arrangement, a Guardian investigation has found.

According to Kaufman, Barckholtz told her Exxon had no interest in renewable energy – aside from, perhaps, offshore wind – beyond using it as a public relations exercise, and that he was looking to fund the work of the professor whose class he sat in. He showed her his Princeton office space, which included a list of a dozen Exxon-funded research projects on a whiteboard.

He later told the class that he was there to “scout out” useful things for Exxon’s nearby research center in New Jersey, and that the company has had someone, like him, monitoring Princeton classes for the previous five years. (In 2015, Princeton said it was “delighted” to forge a new “e-filliates” partnership with Exxon). Barckholtz did not respond to questions from the Guardian over his role at Princeton.

“The fact there was an Exxon employee in this undergrad class blew my mind,” said Kaufman, who is also an organizer at the Divest Princeton group. “It’s weird and problematic he then took the class, but the biggest issue is that public opinion is against Exxon so they are looking to install themselves as impartial-looking bodies in classrooms.

“This is not a neutral industry. It has an agenda, it wants to shape the conversation around climate change and energy. They aren’t putting people in classrooms for fun.”

Barckholtz has since vacated his office, following Princeton’s announcement on 29 September that 90 companies, including Exxon, would not only be divested from its endowment but also would have research funding ties cut, following years of pressure from students for Princeton to follow other major universities in dropping fossil-fuel investments.

But Exxon, which is among a group of oil and gas companies that have funneled more than $700m into research partnerships with leading US universities since 2010, still maintains close ties to dozens of universities, and has a regular on-campus presence at a clutch of prestigious colleges.

At MIT, Exxon is provided office space through its funding of the MIT Energy Initiative research collaboration, and company representatives “come to campus from time to time to meet with principal investigators who are doing sponsored research and student fellows they sponsor”, a university spokesperson said.

Ellie Rabenold, an engineering student and part of the MIT Divest group, said she was unaware that Exxon had office space at her university, and that divestment is a “touchy subject” for members of the faculty that have been bankrolled by various fossil-fuel-funded initiatives. In 2019, an auditorium at MIT was set to be named after Shell, another oil company, until a student and faculty backlash forced a rethink.

Exxon researchers do not have their own office space at Stanford, a university Exxon has given $120m to over the past two decades for climate and energy research, although the company’s researchers are often seen on campus. At other universities, Exxon employees are present at jobs fairs, or as guest speakers or to treat students to meals.

“I see something with Exxon on it once a week, at least.They have a very evident presence on campus,” said Evan Montoya, a third-year student at Georgia Tech. “They definitely have a substantial influence here.”

Even as elite American universes such as Harvard have bowed to pressure to divest their multibillion-dollar endowments from fossil fuels, and student activists take recalcitrant holdouts to court, oil and gas companies continue to exert a grip upon campus life, through funded research and the physical presence of oil and gas industry employees in lectures and meetings with faculty.

Fossil-fuel firms have purposely sought to “colonize” academia with industry-friendly science, rather than seed overt climate denial, according to Ben Franta, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford who has studied industry’s influence over universities.

Their research dollars, he said, had effectively discouraged academic endeavors that challenge the core business model of burning oil and gas, instead shifting the focus to favored topics such as capturing carbon emissions from polluting facilities, a still niche technology that would allow industry to continue business as usual.

[pix Barckholtz at Princeton in an office and in a university class. Photograph: Divest Princeton

“When you have these companies in class and on campus, it’s like an audition for academics to get research grants,” Franta said. “Sometimes a researcher who’s funded by industry does drift into an anti-industry posture, and then they just cut off their funding. You have professors who will quietly say: ‘I think divestment is a great idea, but I can’t support it because I’ll lose my research funding from oil companies.’

“A standard strategy that industries under threat try is to influence what gets studied and what doesn’t get studied, and how the problem is framed. The tobacco industry did the same thing. For Exxon to have someone with an office at Princeton, and for that person to teach a class, is a shocking example of this.”

The reach of fossil fuels into academia “never ceases to amaze me”, said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist at Brown University. “You can barely study climate change at elite universities and not be funded by fossil-fuel companies,” he added. “They drive all this study into carbon capture, so that influences policy and becomes a part of the Biden administration’s agenda. The influence is profound, and the students are right to be wondering what kind of education they are getting here.”

Researchers have stressed that proper academic guardrails ensure no funder dictates outcomes they desire and that important, scientifically sound studies have come from work backed by arm’s-length fossil-fuel interests. Exxon has financed studies and research groups into areas such as carbon capture and dangerous chemical exposures, often alongside other independent researchers.

princeton denies Exxon has had an undue influence over the university’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment,which has received fossil-fuel funding and has produced annual reports in which Exxon expresses gratitude for “access to extraordinary talent and facilities”. Barckholtz sat in some class meetings but “did not play a role in developing the course or its learning objectives”, a Princeton spokesperson said.

Barckholtz was a “fun and productive collaborator” on a project to burn biomass such as forests for energy and capture and bury the resulting emissions, said Eric Larson, a senior researcher at the Andlinger Center. More than a dozen Exxon-funded research projects at Princeton, including work on technologies to offset or capture carbon emissions, will have to be funded by other means itself following the disassociation, a move that Larson considers unnecessary and potentially counterproductive.

“We chose the project, and Exxon was interested enough to support it. My research agenda isn’t impacted at all by who is funding it,” Larson said. “I’m OK with taking Exxon stock out from the Princeton endowment – that’s a way to make a statement – but this was taking research money away from work designed to decarbonize our society as rapidly as possible. We need everyone inside the tent to solve this problem, including the fossil-fuel industry.”

An Exxon spokesperson said that the company “enjoyed a long and fruitful relationship with Princeton, but it has become clear that there are individuals associated with the university who are choosing to put their individual views above the opportunity to accelerate the energy transition we all seek”

Exxon, which has provided more than $10.7m in research funding to Princeton over the past 10 years, had more than 25 research projects with the university, the company spokesperson added.

But even Princeton has not jettisoned all fossil-fuel partners. Its Carbon Mitigation Initiative will continue to be financed by BP, which has given $26.4m to the university over the past decade and does not fall under the precise terms of the divestment, which was only aimed at companies with coal or tar sands assets, rather than all oil firms.

Other oil and gas companies, such as Shell, may even join as partners under these terms in a new “energy research fund”. Princeton’s ties to the industry are deep and historical – letters buried in the university’s library archive show its leadership aggressively courted Exxon in the 1970s, complaining in one instance it has “not received its fair share from Exxon”.One PhD student told the Guardian she was almost certain her work was being funded by fossil fuels, but that she had not received a straight answer from the university over this.

Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton climate scientist, said he was disappointed the university’s trustees did not enact a divestment broad enough to also evict businesses such as BP, but that it is difficult to criticize researchers for getting funding where they can.

"They have to live with whatever decisions they make. I try to not judge others,” he said. “Personally, I would never take a penny from Exxon due to their disinformation on climate change. You can talk to the devil sometimes, but you don’t have to take to take money from the devil, and the devil is Exxon.”

The presence of carbon-intensive industries in Princeton classrooms has not dissipated, either. Two weeks ago, a class called Oil, Energy and the Middle East featured a guest appearance from Sheikh Nawaf Saud Al Sabah, chief executive of the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, who told the gathered students that “we are never going to get out of fossil fuels: we need them for plastics and medicine … we are too reliant upon them”, according to Frida Ruiz, a sophomore in mechanical engineering who took the class.

Just before the class, Ruiz was perusing the shared class materials on a Princeton phone app, and saw a professor had posted a cartoon mocking supporters of fossil-fuel divestment, showing them near-naked and befuddled without any of the modern appliances that require fossil fuels.

“I thought, ‘Huh, I guess I now have a sense of what this class is going to be like,’” Ruiz said, adding she heard later it was meant as an example of industry propaganda.

Are you a student at a US university where fossil fuels industry staffers have an on campus presence? If so we would like to hear from you. Contact oliver.milman@theguardian.com

Topics

Princeton University

Climate change: Democratic Sens. Scott Wiener of San Francisco, Lena Gonzales of Long Beach andHenry Stern from Calabasas introduced, or rather reintroduced, a package of bills.

Wiener put forward SB 253, the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act — a bill that failed last year to require corporations with more than $1 billion in revenue that operate in California to publicly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. He said the bill would make corporations “a heck of a lot more interested in buying clean energy.”

Wiener: “It gives large corporations two options: disclose your emissions publicly or stop doing business in California — and they won’t choose the latter.”

Gonzalez introduced SB 252, a proposal that was also blocked last year and that seeks to force the state’s public pension funds to divest from fossil fuels. Stern introduced SB 261, another measure that also failed last year. It requires companies that earn more than $500 million in revenue to prepare climate-related financial risk reports.

The climate efforts come in the midst of negotiations to cover a projected $22.5 billion budget deficit. Newsom has proposed cutting $6 billion from the $54 billion, five-year climate package he pushed through last year.

Press Democrat: New state senate bill would force CalPERS, CalSTRS to divest from major fossil fuel holdings

February 17, 2022

By MARY CALLAHAN

California’s two powerful public employee pension funds would be required to withdraw their investments from fossil fuel companies to help fight climate change under a state Senate bill introduced Thursday.

Authored by Sen. Lena A. Gonzalez, D-Long Beach, and co-sponsored by Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, the legislation would give the California Public Employees' Retirement System and the California State Teachers' Retirement System until July 2027 to divest a combined $9.9 billion from the Carbon Underground 200 — a list of companies considered to have the greatest potential for future emissions from their coal, oil and gas reserves.

The bill also would prohibit any new investments in those companies....

amy w 11 22 student 5 ivy lawsuit ~ admin

https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/gop-lobbying/

an badash 11 22

For decades ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council quietly drafted right-wing legislation, pushing it to conservative state lawmakers who only had to change a few words here or there and all of a sudden they become a sponsor of a bill that would further the conservative corporate agenda.

According to a 2012 Bloomberg BusinessWeek investigation (archived), about 200 of ALEC’s model bills became law every year.

While most of the bills don’t garner public attention, many Americans are familiar with the rash of so-called “Stand Your Ground” laws that effectively allow the use of deadly force in the name of self defense by people who would claim they felt threatened by another person. Trayvon Martin’s killer successfully used a “Stand Your Ground” defense to avoid conviction.

ALEC, which is supported by corporations, is now “pushing states to adopt a new law shielding all US businesses from ‘political boycotts,'” according to The Guardian, in response to what some are calling “woke capitalism.”

How?

By drafting model legislation that states would pass which would require any government entity to include a clause in all their contracts banning any company they do business with from supporting political or economic boycotts. Those government entities could include a state government or a local police dept., school district, or perhaps a county clerk’s office.

“According to the text of the proposed law, which is written by Alec’s lawyers so that all a legislature has to do is fill in the name of its state, it is a response to banks, investment funds and corporations refusing to invest in or do business with industries that damage the environment or are aligned with oppressive laws,” The Guardian reports.

One line from the model legislation reads: “The collusion of corporations, and institutions to boycott, divest from, or sanction any industrymayviolate existing antitrust and fiduciary laws and harms consumers, shareholders, and states.” [kermit roosevelt exclusive vs inclisive equality]

The Guardian adds that “Some corporations are increasingly concerned that consumer pressure will cause other companies to boycott them over their funding of rightwing politicians and causes, or social positions.”

===

icn 11 22

yikes

with Fossil Fuel Companies Facing Pressure to Reduce Carbon Emissions, Private Equity Is Buying Up Their Aging Oil, Gas and Coal Assets

BY NICHOLAS KUSNETZ

Environmentalists fear the sell-offs could keep those facilities operating for years into the future, worsening climate change...

heated mail

10 22

as governor of the most climate-vulnerable state in the U.S., Ron DeSantis has gone to great lengths to convince people that he is Not Like Other Republicans.

He created a chief resilience officer position for his administration to "prepare Florida for the … impacts of climate change.” He signed two bills to strengthen sea level rise protections across the state. Overall, DeSantis has committed a total investment of $1.2 billion in resilience projects to prepare Florida for climate impacts.

But as DeSantis invests all these taxpayer dollars protecting Floridians from climate change, he is also enacting anti-climate policies to ensure those investments will fail. It’s like spending a bunch of money to buy new tires, while also installing a bunch of spikes in your driveway. Stupid. Why would anyone do that?

I don’t know, but DeSantis is doing it. The only explanation I can think of is that he doesn’t think spikes cause holes in tires, or that fossil fuels cause climate change. That is evidenced not only by his rhetoric—he’s said he’s not ”concerned about what is the sole cause” of climate change—but by two major policies he has recently enacted to ensure fossil fuels keep burning as long as humanly possible.

These policies, if adopted on a national level, would all but doom Florida and other climate-vulnerable states. Considering DeSantis is widely considered a 2024 presidential contender, it’s worth taking a look at how truly dangerous and financially irresponsible they are—and how lots of other Republicans are adopting them, too.

Two recent policies to keep Florida underwater

The first policy enacted by DeSantis in Florida is what Food & Water Watch called “the most extreme energy preemption bills in the nation.” Signed last year, these bills ban Florida cities and towns from adopting 100 percent clean energy goals, reasoning that those goals “discriminate” against fossil fuels.

That means municipalities in the literal Sunshine State are being forced to keep using fossil fuels even if they don’t want to. It doesn’t matter if a climate change-fueled hurricane destroyed your town and now you want to be part of the solution. Sorry, honey. DeSantis said no.

The second policy came about a month ago, when DeSantis adopted measures to ban the state’s $186 billion pension fund from making investment decisions that consider climate change. DeSantis did this because he said such decisions constitute an “ideological agenda."

the pension measure is particularly mind-boggling given the staggering economic damage of Hurricane Ian, which scientists have already confirmed was made worse by climate change. That excess rainfall contributed to massive economic damage, which could total between $100 billion and $120 billion, according to AccuWeather. Many Florida insurance companies will likely go bankrupt.

Climate change is also just generally very costly, both to Florida and the world. Locally, Florida homes have lost $2.4 billion to floods since 2005, and $2.86 trillion of insured state property is vulnerable to hurricanes. Globally, the insurance provider Swiss Re predicted climate change could reduce global GDP by 11 to 14 percent by 2050 compared with a world without climate change, amounting to a $23 trillion loss.

It is obviously not “ideological” to consider climate change in investment decisions. This is why BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, said it would make climate change central to its investment decisions in 2020.

But DeSantis is not trying to make financially prudent decisions. He’s trying to make politically prudent ones. After all, this is what all the other Republican governors are doing. And hopping on the oil train is known to have its perks.

Courting the oil industry for political gain

For DeSantis to make a successful 2024 run, he needs to have the oil industry on his side. To that end, there’s nothing better he can do than push their priorities—which just so happen to be the two policies described above.

“DeSantis is following political trends,” said Dan Cohen, an energy researcher for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. “Republicans across the country are trying as hard as they can to move the funds they have control over to stand against the tide”—the tide being toward clean energy and a safe climate.

Indeed, Florida is just one of 17 Republican-led states that have proposed or adopted legislation limiting the ability of the state government to do business with entities that are moving away from fossil fuels. DeSantis is also part of a coalition of 19 Republican-led states that sent a strongly-worded letter to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, threatening legal action against him for investing with a clean energy future in mind. 19 other Republican-led states have adopted laws that prohibit cities from banning natural gas and other fossil fuels.

If legislation like this were adopted nationally, effective action to slow climate change would be near-impossible. Both governments and financial institutions would be forced to fund fossil fuels, financial risks of climate change be damned.

“This is the Republican’s latest version of climate denial, where all of a sudden climate science is out the window,” said Jackie Fielder, co-director of the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition. “Ultimately, the people who will pay for it are the folks in Florida having to repair their homes, and so many other victims of climate change.”

So stupid that it probably won’t work — for now

Republicans like DeSantis are trying their best to prevent financial institutions from moving away from fossil fuels. But it turns out that, at least for now, their best is not very good.

DeSantis’s new policy to ban Florida’s pension fund from considering climate risk, for example, “doesn’t actually change much,” said Cohen. “He's making a big show of it, but Florida law already says that investments must be made for the sole, exclusive purpose of providing benefits to members and beneficiaries.”And if you want to get the best investment benefit, you actually have to consider climate change.

This is the problem with all these Republican states’ efforts to ban investments that move away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy: they’re not actually in the states’ best financial interest. “In order to believe [DeSantis is] right, you have to agree that climate risk is not an investment risk,” said Cohen. “But climate risk is an investment risk, and Florida just got bombarded again. They’re trying to make you forget that that’s a real thing.”

Because of this reality, the Republican states’ threats to sue financial firms like BlackRock for investing with climate change in mind are likely empty. Last month, Martin Lipton, the founding partner of one of of the world's most influential corporate law firms, agreed, accusing Republicans of spreading “misinformation” about environmental risks in order to “politicize” them.

Of course, this could all change if Republicans continue their coordinated drive to appoint judges that are against climate action. And if a Republican like DeSantis wins the presidency, there’s no telling how far these financially stupid actions could go.

For now, though, some climate advocates are just taking it as a sign that the tide is truly turning against fossil fuels.

“I view this as a sign that the divestment movement is winning,the fact that DeSantis and all these Republicans are suddenly engaged on this topic,” said David Arkush, the policy director of Public Citizen’s climate program. “Of course, I would like them to not do these things, not hurt their own citizens … But these are ultimately fossil fuel lobbying dollars that are behind this push. So if they’re pushing money here, it's because they feel themselves losing.”

florida’s Statewide Climate Change Response Ignores Cause.Tampa Bay Times, March 2022.

-The Deranged Demands of the “Anti-ESG” Movement. The New Republic, August 2022.

-Rightwing Lobby Group ALEC Driving Laws to Blacklist Companies That Boycott the Oil Industry.The Guardian, February 2022.

-How the Natural Gas Industry is Freezing Climate Action in its Tracks. Vox, September 2021.