"We just need to price the wrong paths according to their true cost."

Bingo. Now force the people in power to start doing it instead of profiting from them. That is the hardest thing for this movement.

What about getting china on board? Without change there, all other efforts are only 50% effective. They are the biggest contributor now to GHG

We are heading for over 2C+ have you told you family how the corporations acted with criminal negligence with disregard for our planets future
What values were Europe's political, business and religious leaders using when they profited from slavery and colonialism. What values was Chevron when they left behind their toxic legacy in Ecuador? What values was Shell using in the Nigeria What values are the corporation promoting sugar, salt, fat and sodium nitrite contaminated foods using. What values were the leadership of the automobile corporations using when the build fleets of Hummers and SUV. Lets be honest radical fundamentalist capitalist must face criminal prosecution for what must be acknowledged as ecocide. The corporations in the tar sands intend to massively increase climate destabilizing emissions. The airline corporations have shirked their climate responsibility while participating in the diabolical fantasy that we can fly around the planet. If we let the corporations deal with the destabilisation of our planets climate without pressure from ever sector, regulatory, legal , ethical, civil protest, creative destruction we will not survive. Today I discovered that AMEX does not have an environmental stewardship program. What kind of management conducts business with such disregard. Political, corporate and organized crime have demonstrated repeatedly that they are capable of ecocide and must face criminal prosecution for policies and action that amount global human, ecological and economic accounting fraud.
As a result the campaign has begun to have ecocide subject to criminal prosecution by the International Criminal Court because they are capable of ecocide http://thisisecocide.com/
Ecocide is now being debated
Prosecuting ecocide was debated at Rio in Jun 2012 at the World Congress on Law Justice and Environmental Governance for Sustainability and at the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) in cooperation with United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the Italian Ministry of Environment, at the international conference 'Environmental Crime: Current and Emerging Threats' held in Rome at the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation Headquarters in Oct 2012
It was significant in that it marked recognition by UNICRI and UNEP that criminal law, and perhaps a law of Ecocide, can play a major role in stopping the extensive damage and destruction to our environment.

Gordon Chamberlain
Eradicating Ecocide Canada

Cary,

Full kudos for responding to the comments and criticisms.

I still have an issue with the following points:

- Focusing on trying to find out if gas can possibly be less bad than coal. Who cares? Let the industry do the work on their dime if they think it's worth it. Once they've proven they can and will always perform much better than coal we MAY allow them to replace some capacity and not go directly to renewables. I will take a lot of convincing because you have to be suspicious of all those complicated computer models. In short - the burden of proof has shifted. Guilty until proven innocent is the only way forwards. We have no time for anything else any more.

-- Claiming that the way forwards isn't simple or even understood. It is : price carbon. We have all the technology we need and have had for 10 years to do everything we need without building another fossil fuel plant ever. Not easy, but simple. And Bill is getting that word out there. We don't need to "find a path" there are a million paths all known and understood, we just need to price the wrong paths according to their true cost.

- The assumption that there is a solution that works for everyone. There is no solution for short-sighted / stupid / wicked people who are trashing my planet. We stop them for our sake and theirs, whether they like it or not.

- The statement that divesting "a few" endowments will have no effect is wrong on so many levels:
-- it assumes that this is all Do The Math is about. Like the big piece of knowledge that we all need to share - the fossil fuel companies have a business plan that will destroy our planet.
-- it ignores the documented impact of divestment on apartheid
-- you can move onto pension funds after you've done colleges, it would be dumb to start anywhere else
-- divestment shifts fossil fuels into the pariah category where they belong. Until they are doing everything we need them to do to reduce their sales (but not necessarily their profits)
-- Thousands and thousands of people joining and committing and acting is a stone rolling down hill (don't try to be the moss)'

Thanks again for responding, and don't you just love sub-eds and headline writers!

Quentin

The Q is the math, not the tour!

(Written just before I saw Cory's response, which addresses many of the over-the-top criticisms he received.)

Kudos to the Carbon Tracker project he was involved in -- it started the ball rolling in public awareness about the fact that if fossil fuel companies meet their legal obligations for "fiduciary responsibility" to their shareholders, they will destroy the world 5x over.

What we do need is for people like him -- and any fossil fuel industry execs he or others can recruit to engage on the real issues, not the misleading "we're all in this together, let's talk" bromides -- to actually address the issue of how our economy can make a transition that effectively includes reducing the net asset value of the world's largest corporations by 80%. (Then we have the question of what happens to the national oil companies, even larger entities.)

Yes, oil companies can invest in renewables, sequester some petrochemicals in plastic, and use their drilling expertise on geothermal, but those don't stop their emissions in their primary business, or solve the transition problem.

If an energized and engaged public can figure out a way to prevent them from using most of their reserves, and along the way, of course, prevent them from buying elections, lawmakers, and public opinion, what happens to these companies, and to every sector of the economy that's entangled with them?

By the way, the Cara Pike article to which he refers so positively does none of the hard thinking we need. In fact, it is truly misdirected in many more ways than this one, my favorite being her "balancing" out the negatives of wind power. It also avoids the hard questions about how our economic system can evolve.

Thanks everyone for your comments. Let me see if I can answer some of your questions as follows:

1) First of all, I wrote this piece in my own capacity, not intending to represent the views of the Carbon Tracker Initiative nor the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets (NSFM) where I’m now Executive Director. I am no longer with Trucost per my recently update bio in case that wasn’t also clear.

2) The title of this piece was not what I had submitted, which was instead ‘Do Your Homework’ - I intended this piece to be constructive criticism of the 350.org Do The Math tour which I actually do support fully.

We need more awareness raising on this subject to be very sure, as when you Do The Math, we are heading towards Niagara Falls in a boat without a paddle on carbon. The altered title of this piece implied that I was critical of the tour itself which is not the case. Instead, I do feel that the amount of effort & energy going into this tour could be best spent finding real solutions to the challenging and potentially intractable problems we are facing together, and that getting a handful of university endowments to divest isn’t likely to solve this problem. For example, the WRI recently reported over 1000 new coal plants are in the works in China & India alone.

This is a global problem requiring a globally coordinated solution as US efforts alone will likely not be sufficient no matter what we do. I would agree that raising awareness among students is useful - however, we should be expending our energy on a global transition plan that has some chance of actually happening. I am similarly critical of the fact that we even had meetings in Rio let alone those happening in Doha as we speak. Much expended energy heading in directions that aren’t working - at some point, recognize when something is failing, step back and find another way. This will be hard, but we are running out of time and we need to be serious, realistic, focused and systemically global.

3) I am not naïve to the enormous challenge this suggests - hence I am teaching a class on this to try and figure this out - I do not pretend to have easy answers and am convinced that there aren’t any - but that this is the sort of conversation we need to be having, hence again, thanks for your comments and interest.

4) On the benefits of Gas vs. Coal vs. Oil in all of the varying manifestations these occur and are exploited, let alone the rest of Environmental Impacts measurement, I would beg to differ that these have been quantified definitively. I remain convinced that this is an important gap waiting to be filled.

Many assumptions often go into environmental impact calculations, and much as there has been significant progress especially by firms such as Trucost and Bloomberg, there’s more of this sort of recent study by the Haas School at Berkeley

http://lmas.berkeley.edu/public/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/packaging_com...

This study suggested vast differences remain between LCA tools that analyze the footprint of the same product. This is concerning not only from an accuracy perspective, but also if you are trying to measure the same thing over two points in time, where do you start, and if we can’t find reliable reductions using measurement, then where are we?

Other studies show an overrating of the reduction conversion to gas from coal results, such as this recent Think Progress piece
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/08/07/651821/shale-gas-and-the-fai...

Other pieces suggest methane leaks from fracking gas can more than offset benefits. At minimum we need best practice enforcement on natural gas to ensure its potential benefits are realized, and that we go into this understanding there really is a benefit. This is an ongoing current subject of much lobbying as you would imagine. I am just scratching the surface here, as there is much more really happening on the ground across coal, oil & gas, and the real point is to simplify this and to say its all done & dusted misses what is important situational nuance. This is complicated stuff that requires detailed focus, sophisticated understandings, and a real plan that encourages efficiency, innovation and more than anything, a path to sustainability that we still frustratingly lack.

All of our efforts should go to finding this path - it should be our day’s Manhattan Project. There is a great natural instinct we all have for us to go on with Business as Usual. That is the definition of unsustainable, and that needs to change. But to get there we need to have the right conversation. Again, I stress that this won’t be easy, but we need to start having very serious conversations and move to action - I think we all fear that we have no more time to waste. Andrew, I take your point very seriously and share it - constancy in action is now what we very much require. I hope the Obama administration and other global governments and interests are realizing this is where we all now actually are. If the solutions were crystal clear, we wouldn't be stuck at Doha, or am I missing something?

This article among some other things from greenbiz these days suggest a troubling trend away from acknowledging the absolutes we face concerning climate change.

The solution(s) are already crystal clear, we either take significant global action, with leadership from the United States in the form of a carbon tax and dividend (see Hansen et al.), or we don't and we focus our energies on adaptation and geoengineering. There is really no middle road. I'm not suggesting McKibben's route is the right one, but at least he's called a spade a spade and identified a 'plausible' course of action for his constituents. Let's not pretend we still need to 'roll up our sleeves to understand what's to be done.' I applaud McKibben from getting of the fence and taking action against the largest industry impacting our climate--when our global leaders won't. Quite simply energy companies should be taxed appropriately for any environmental and quality of life parameters they impact--this would quickly cause a shift in their portfolios. Someone from Trucost knows this to be true.

Terrible Article.

Title should read, "How I use trending headlines to talk about myself & my foundations." I mean seriously do you know anything about the subject matter? "Do we really know how much of an environmental savings best practice natural gas could be versus oil and coal -- and if not, why haven’t we done this homework?" Are you kidding me? Try using Google for 2 seconds before you spit out crap like this. Have you ever heard of the EPA, IPCC, NOAA, NASA Climate, eGRID factors, CDP (Carbon Disclosure Project), World Bank, or any other of the countless organizations that are involved in climate science? Here is the link to NASA Climate for kids- this may be a good starting point for the lack of knowledge you professed.
http://climatekids.nasa.gov/

I can't believe GreenBiz sunk to this level and allowed such a poorly thought out and written article. A loss of credibility to all contributors.

Sounds familiar...

Cary, in a recent election, I heard one candidate repeatedly trash his opponent's ideas and time and again conclude with "I have a plan that can fix this." I kept listening, but I never heard that plan. He lost.

You sound much like that candidate. Though you acknowledge the problem, you are not offering a solution, rather shooting down a creative one that's out there. With all due respect: too easy. You're obviously capable of giving us something to really chew on.

You finish your piece with a call to "roll up our sleeves". Oh how I wish that's how you started.

There are no solutions that work for all stakeholders.

To get to a stable climate, their will be winners and losers. Big time. The sooner we recognize this and not that "It is time for practical, well-thought-through solutions that work for all stakeholders", the closer we get to a realistic conversation about the size of the challenge and the radical solutions required.

Your article raises some good points, but comes across as "can't we just talk this through and come up with a solution that works for everyone". That would be nice, but it is essentially what we have been doing for decades and it's not working. The time for action is getting short, very short. It's time for different approaches. McKibben's approach is one of these different approaches, and it seems to be getting some traction. Good for him.

I take issue with your premise that we can "safely" burn 20% more - the warming planet is beyond the limits of "safe" already! ("Carbon Tracker Initiative, where I’ve been one of the founding directors, has determined that we can burn only about 20 percent more of the coal, oil and natural gas still in the ground and remain within a safe degree of global temperature increase")

Cary, I attended the "Do the Math" tour event in New York City two weeks back. It was part variety show, part arithmetic class, and part revival meeting. McKibben's new mantra that "we need an enemy"' is sort of odd coming from a Sunday School teacher, but he's trying to create urgency and focus attention, which is certainly needed. And he has a point - simply put, it is the fossil fuel industry's business model to make CO2 concentrations exceed 1000 ppm by the end of this century. There is no price on carbon in the U.S. largely because they have led the distortion of science about climate change for decades. In your course at Columbia when you discuss transformational change, I hope you will mention the importance of constancy of purpose. Without it there is no transformation, and thanks in large part to this industry there is no constancy of purpose towards de-carbonizing energy.

Watch and share this: youtu.be/pznsPkJy2x8
We are an interesting species but Nature still outwits us and will win any battle we can bring if we don't adhere to the science around carbon. Too many investors prefer wealth to Nature and think they can bend science, and the rest of us will pay the price if we don't wake up. Lost over 90% in Vestas Wind - good company but governments aren't interested - kept the stock in good faith for the future.
We're too late (maybe even McKibben is too late) for portfolios - we need big action now or portfolios won't matter anyway.