Political leaders and businesses are taking action in the lead up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris this December, which aims to come to a legally binding and international agreement on climate change.
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Political leaders and businesses are taking action in the lead up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris this December, which aims to come to a legally binding and international agreement on climate change.
In mid-October, 81 of the world's largest companies, including Apple Computer, Google, Walmart and Coca-Cola, joined a White House initiative to curb greenhouse gas emissions and to invest in clean energy.
The numbers behind the companies are huge: together, companies backing the “American Business Act on Climate” have a $5 trillion market capitalization, $3 trillion in annual revenues and employ 9 million people, according to Fortune magazine.
The Obama Administration also set up a Twitter account called @FactsOnClimate to push environmental reform.
Universities have been divesting their endowment portfolios from fossil fuel-related companies for a while. Unity College did so a couple years ago, and was followed by College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor and others. Nobleboro native Chloe Maxim co-founded Divest Harvard, and won an award from the Maine Women's Fund for her efforts in 2014.
Refusing to divest can carry a social and financial toll. Trillium Asset Management estimated this spring that Harvard Management Co. lost at least $21 million over the past three years by ignoring calls to divest fossil fuels and retaining investments in coal, oil and gas reserve companies that showed diminishing returns.
But divesting fossil fuels can be more complicated than it sounds, according to Suzanne Uhl-Melanson, a certified financial planner and principal at Uhl-Melanson Investor Services in Waterville.
The company in October launched a new service to help clients considering divesting from fossil fuels. She noted that can be difficult, because the majority of equity mutual funds have holdings in energy companies, notably in oil and coal.
She suggests to her clients both divesting from fossil fuels in existing portfolios and rebuilding their portfolio to be greener using a mix of mutual funds, stocks and individual bonds.
Last December Mainebiz wrote about the divestment movement, and how many colleges and other institutions have resisted doing so out of concern they would reduce diversification in their portfolios and potentially compromise return on investment.
A challenge, the article noted, is that there is no standard index that excludes fossil fuel stocks. While petroleum and chemical companies are usually grouped in the energy sector, coal usually is lumped into basic materials.
And recently, there have been questions about how to measure corporate sustainability pledges, and how to assure they are carried out. Volkswagen found out the hard way how damaging the reputation of being a polluter can be when it was discovered the company had rigged emissions tests on some of its diesel vehicles.
