Money talks. That’s perhaps the most important thing Blair Palese has learned during 30 years as an environmental campaigner and writer.
In her last role, founding and heading the Australian operation of 350.org, and her current endeavour as climate editor at Climate & Capital Media, Palese and her colleagues have spearheaded one of the most effective strategies yet against climate change – convincing investors that putting their money behind fossil fuel companies is a bad idea.
And the impact of that has been swift, despite the best efforts of the fossil fuel lobby to make climate and the environment a political, rather than scientific, issue. “The economics are so clear,” Palese told The Brilliant. “Even three years ago, you couldn’t have said that the world would flip so fast on renewable energy and battery storage and other innovative technologies just because it makes financial sense.”
Palese’s original focus after university in New York was nuclear disarmament. She was head of communications for Greenpeace internationally, which at the time was the flag-bearer for environmental issues, and, in 1998, moved to Australia where she helped Greenpeace ensure the 2000 Sydney Olympics were the greenest ever.
But, she says, Greenpeace’s star began to fade due to circumstances outside its control.
The September 11 attacks in New York were a game-changer in terms of what it takes to get people’s attention,” Palese explains. “That and the complete change of the media landscape to online meant that communicating our stories and actions has become harder and harder.”
Greenpeace continues to be a significant organisation, and environmental issues are more important than ever. But it was the work of fellow writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben and his 350.org movement that attracted Palese’s attention. In 2008, she launched the Australian arm of the organisation.
“The number 350 refers to the safe level of carbon in the atmosphere – 350 parts per million (ppm),” she says. “The point was to get people to understand that this is not too complicated. All you need to know is we’re at 411 ppm now and we need to get back to 350; the question we should ask our leaders is ‘how are you going to get us there?’.”
In 2009, the group coordinated what CNN called the biggest day of climate action protest in history, with more than 3,500 events worldwide posting the number 350 everywhere – the Eiffel Tower, the Alps, the pyramids, the Sydney Opera House. Palese was one of the small team that coordinated the Sydney events – 187 in all. “That big day was so inspiring – not because it looked visually incredible, although it did, but because it was such a simple idea. It could be 10 people with a banner in their local neighbourhood. Researchers did an event in Antarctica, and we had military personnel in Afghanistan holding up 350 banners. It was just so inspiring.
“It was a good start in realising that people can be activated on something that initially seems really hard for them to get their head around.”
In 2012, McKibben wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine that turned a spotlight on the financial enablers of climate change and sowed the seeds for the next phase of Palese’s career.
“The money machine is just rolling along to take us to climate disaster,” she says of 350.org’s campaign focussing on the enablers of climate change. “Initially, the idea for the fossil fuel divestment campaign was that it would be driven by the moral argument, like the South African apartheid boycotts. People would say in their hearts, ‘I can’t have my money in this because it just is the wrong thing to do’,” Palese explains. “We focused on universities and churches at first, but what surprised everyone was the number of financial institutions that started to divest, such as the US$900 billion Government Pension Fund of Norway, which divested from coal in 2015. At that point, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times stopped in their tracks to say that’s it – that’s the signal. When a fund that size, the biggest sovereign wealth fund in the world says, ‘We’re out of coal’, that creates an aura that investment in fossil fuels is financially dangerous. It started turning the divestment machine so fast that all of us were absolutely floored.”
Globally, there is now a commitment to US$18 trillion of divestment from fossil fuel extraction. Meanwhile, investors are increasingly backing renewables and battery storage. “It’s fascinating that for big tech and the climate issue the solution is the same for both,” Palese says.
The message successfully conveyed by Palese, McKibben, philanthropists like leaders at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and others is that the stakes are high – not just in terms of the effects of climate change, but also for investment risk. Palese sums up the message: “It’s your dollars, folks – your pension fund, your bank, your insurance company – that will be impacted by this.
People started to see the financial impact of incidents such as Hurricane Katrina and unprecedented wildfires. Everyone’s asking what they can do on climate. We say you can divest. Does your bank, your retirement fund, your church or your university invest in fossil fuels? Here are the alternative options of those who have already made a commitment to get out of fossil fuels.”
In Australia, Palese teamed up with an organisation that exposes institutions financing environmentally destructive projects called Market Forces, to examine pension funds, calling them to account and confronting them when they were bad on climate. “They hated it,” she says. “We had hundreds of people emailing them, calling them, asking for meetings. And we started some institutional pushes. We did a tour with [Oxford economist] Ben Caldecott, who coined the phrase ‘stranded assets’. We had him meet every bank, every super fund, institutional investors, and do public talks in Australia, and his message was that if their money is in fossil fuels it will be stranded, and if you’re not thinking about moving now, you’re in real trouble.”
One flashpoint for divestment in Australia has been who will back Indian mining giant Adani’s building of a colossal new coal mine in Queensland? “Climate organisations are tracking every company Adani tried to work with – engineering, transport, insurance,” Palese says. “Adani has been made a pariah project, as it should be – much like the tar sands projects out in North America. Their brand has been demonised to a point where they are untouchable.
“That is the point of these campaigns. Once we worked out what the global carbon budget is, it’s clear that we simply can’t build any new Adani or tar sands projects. It’s that black and white – new new fossil fuel projects.”
Palese left 350.org in 2018 – although she remains on the board – to help set up Climate and Capital Media, a new, online company helping speed up and simplify climate change information with a focus on how it will impact people’s investments and business. “The problem in our sector is not that the news isn’t getting out, it’s that there’s too much of it, and it’s too difficult for normal people to navigate and follow the speed of change and trends,” she says.
We can see and write about trends that you won’t hear about for months in the mainstream media. I’ll tell you that if you’re looking at where to invest your money, you might want to know about green hydrogen, for example. You’re going to want to know where the trends are and think ahead. If you’re going to read five stories this week about climate, these are the ones you’re going to need to know, because this is what’s going to impact you.”
It’s not easy to be a climate campaigner in a country like Australia where the federal government steadfastly refuses to acknowledge the evidence supported by science. “Anybody who is at all interested in where we’re going and the positives of where climate innovation can take us has got to be absolutely shaking with frustration in this country,” she says. “We have every opportunity under the sun, literally, to make a fortune as an economy, as a country, from renewable energy and low carbon innovation.
“It’s not a radical statement to say that financially speaking, coal, oil and gas are now untouchable as an investment. But when you have a federal government that won’t see beyond where our economy will go after fossil fuels, we don’t have a single thing to bank on. We’re not funding universities where innovation is coming from. We’re not funding renewables. We should all be grateful for the states and cities and councils who are vastly better and moving very quickly. But every one of them would say, ‘Gee, imagine what we could do with a national roadmap’. Instead, we’ve got a roadmap that said, ‘this way to gas’ – it breaks your heart.”
Better avenues of communication will be essential for the next stage of the conversation, Palese insists. “We’re not helping the public understand science in a way that is critical to how we steer our planet from climate disaster. Whether it’s climate change or COVID, surviving requires an understanding of science and an ability to listen to experts,” she says. “Government itself must set an example for how to gather expertise. And we should be galvanizing people to be involved in consensus conferences. We are all responsible for all of this. We can’t afford to leave it to a few people.
“We need smart people in government who can help us navigate the very difficult climate change transition. That’s going to require education and communications, and we don’t have that in place, and we don’t value it.”
For her part, Palese sees the battle as a daily one.
“I get up every day and think ‘what are the most effective things I can do today to have an impact on climate change?’.” she says. You have to be able to scrap what you thought you needed to do last week, because things change fast. That’s what keeps me engaged and motivated.”
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Article by Iain Scott
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