The Guardian, UNFCCC Join Global Push for Fossil Fuel Divestment

One of the world’s most influential newspapers, The Guardian, is joining with 350.org to call on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust to divest their fossil fuel assets.

“Your organizations have made a huge contribution to human progress and equality by supporting scientific research and development projects,” The Guardian writes. “Yet your investments in fossil fuels are putting this progress at great risk, undermining your long-term ambitions.”

Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger commented Monday that “the argument for a campaign to divest from the world’s most polluting companies is becoming an overwhelming one, on both moral and financial grounds,” explaining that “divestment serves to delegitimize the business models of companies that are using investors’ money to search for yet more coal, oil, and gas that can’t safely be burned.”

He adds: “The usual rule of newspaper campaigns is that you don’t start one unless you know you’re going to win it. This one will almost certainly be won in time: the physics is unarguable. But we are launching our campaign today in the firm belief that it will force the issue now into the boardrooms and inboxes of people who have billions of dollars at their disposal.”

Earlier, The Guardian reported that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) secretariat was lending its “moral authority” to the fossil fuel divestment campaign ahead of the global climate summit in Paris in December.

“Everything we do is based on science and the science is pretty clear that we need a world with a lot less fossil fuels,” UNFCCC spokesperson Nick Nuttall told the Guardian. “We have lent our own moral authority as the UN to those groups or organizations who are divesting. We are saying ‘we support your aims and ambitions because they are fairly and squarely our ambition’, which is to get a good deal in Paris.”