11/01/2018

New York City Plans To Divest $5bn From Fossil Fuels And Sue Oil Companies

The Guardian - 

Mayor Bill de Blasio: ‘It’s up to the fossil fuel companies whose greed put us in this position to shoulder the cost of making New York safer and more resilient’
Lower Manhattan was hit by a power cut during Superstorm Sandy in 2012. Photograph: Afton Almaraz/Getty Images
New York City is seeking to lead the assault on both climate change and the Trump administration with a plan to divest $5bn from fossil fuels and sue the world’s most powerful oil companies over their contribution to dangerous global warming.
City officials have set a goal of divesting New York’s $189bn pension funds from fossil fuel companies within five years in what they say would be “among the most significant divestment efforts in the world to date”. Currently, New York City’s five pension funds have about $5bn in fossil fuel investments. New York state has already announced it is exploring how to divest from fossil fuels.
“New York City is standing up for future generations by becoming the first major US city to divest our pension funds from fossil fuels,” said Bill de Blasio, New York’s mayor.
“At the same time, we’re bringing the fight against climate change straight to the fossil fuel companies that knew about its effects and intentionally misled the public to protect their profits. As climate change continues to worsen, it’s up to the fossil fuel companies whose greed put us in this position to shoulder the cost of making New York safer and more resilient.”
De Blasio said that the city is taking the five fossil fuel firms – BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell – to federal court due to their contribution to climate change.
Court documents state that New York has suffered from flooding and erosion due to climate change and because of looming future threats it is seeking to “shift the costs of protecting the city from climate change impacts back on to the companies that have done nearly all they could to create this existential threat”.
The court filing claims that just 100 fossil fuel producers are responsible for nearly two-thirds of all greenhouse gas emissions since the industrial revolution, with the five targeted companies the largest contributors.
The case will also point to evidence that firms such as Exxon knew of the impact of climate change for decades, only to downplay and even deny this in public. New York’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, is investigating Exxon over this alleged deception.
New York was badly rattled by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and faces costs escalating into the tens of billions of dollars in order to protect low-lying areas such as lower Manhattan and the area around JFK airport from being inundated by further severe storms fueled by rising sea levels and atmospheric warming. De Blasio’s office said climate change is “perhaps the toughest challenge New York City will face in the coming decades”.
New York’s lawsuit echoes a similar effort on the west coast, where two California counties and a city are suing 37 fossil fuel companies for knowingly emitting dangerous levels of greenhouse gases. One of those firms, Exxon, has complained that it has been targeted by a “collection of special interests and opportunistic politicians” as part of a “conspiracy” to force the company to comply with various political objectives.
The legal action and the divestment draw perhaps the starkest dividing line yet between New York and the Trump administration on climate change. Under Trump, the federal government has attempted the withdraw the US from the Paris climate accords, tear up Barack Obama’s signature climate policies and open up vast areas of America’s land and waters to coal, oil and gas interests.
De Blasio and the city comptroller, Scott Stringer, have come under pressure for several years from activists to rid New York’s pension funds of any link to fossil fuels, with some environmentalists claiming the city has been too slow to use its clout to tackle climate change.
Stringer admitted the divestment will be “complex” and will take some time but said the city’s pension funds could promote sustainability while also protecting the retirement of teachers, police officers and other city workers.
“New York City today becomes a capital of the fight against climate change on this planet,” said Bill McKibben, co-founder of climate group 350.org.
“With its communities exceptionally vulnerable to a rising sea, the city is showing the spirit for which it’s famous – it’s not pretending that working with the fossil fuel companies will somehow save the day, but instead standing up to them, in the financial markets and in court.”
Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief and architect of the Paris climate agreement, added: “The exponential transition toward a fossil-fuel-free economy is unstoppable and local governments have a critical role to play. There is no time to lose.
“It’s therefore extremely encouraging to see NYC step up today to safeguard their city and exercise their role as investors to protect their beneficiaries from climate-risk.”
New York joins cities such as Washington DC and Cape Town in divesting, along with universities such as Stanford in California and Oxford in the UK. The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, notable for its links to the past oil wealth of John D Rockefeller, has also sought to divest.

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China, Moving To Cut Emissions, Halts Production Of 500 Car Models

New York Times - Hiroko Tabuchi

Smog on a main thoroughfare in Harbin, China, in November. Officials are under intense pressure to rein in dangerous air pollution. Tao Zhang/Getty Images
China is suspending the production of more than 500 car models and model versions that do not meet its fuel economy standards, several automakers confirmed Tuesday, the latest move by Beijing to reduce emissions in the world’s largest auto market and take the lead in battling climate change.
The government-affiliated China Vehicle Technology Service Center said that the suspension, effective Jan. 1, would affect both domestic carmakers and foreign joint ventures.
The move was expected to affect a small share of car manufacturing in China, where 28 million vehicles were produced in 2016. China has dozens of small-scale automakers — some producing just a few hundred cars a year — and the central government has tried to consolidate its auto industry, a factor that most likely also played a role in the suspension. Model versions — for example, different combinations of an engine and transmission — are constantly being deregistered.
Cui Dongshu, the secretary general of the China Passenger Car Association, said that the ban would affect at most 1 percent of the Chinese market. But the government’s decision to cite fuel economy in the deregistration of so many versions at the same time is nonetheless a signal of the government’s commitment to fuel economy.
The country, which for years prioritized economic growth over environmental protection and now produces more than a quarter of the world’s human-caused greenhouse gases, has emerged as an unlikely bastion of climate action after President Trump’s rejection of the Paris climate agreement.
Chinese leaders are under intense pressure to rein in dangerous air pollution, a hot-button issue in China, where thick smog has at times forced schools and businesses to temporarily shut down. Late last month, China said it was going ahead with plans to create the world’s largest carbon market, giving Chinese power companies a financial incentive to operate more cleanly.
“They’re sending a signal to everybody — that this is for real,” said Michael Dunne, president of Dunne Automotive, a Hong Kong-based consultancy on China’s clean car market. “This shows their emissions standards have teeth.”
The Chinese government has already become the world’s biggest supporter of electric cars, offering automakers numerous incentives for producing so-called new energy vehicles. Those incentives are set to decrease by 2020, to be replaced by quotas for the number of clean cars automakers must sell. That has spurred global automakers to pick up the pace in their shift toward battery-powered cars.
An assembly line at the FAW-Volkswagen plant in Chengdu, China. The country produced 28 million vehicles in 2016. Goh Chai Hin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By contrast, the United States is considering relaxing tailpipe emissions standards and very nearly killed off a tax credit for electric vehicles during its latest tax overhaul.
The fact that Chinese automakers like the state-run giant Dongfeng Motor Corporation did not appear to be spared “shows that the government is not playing favorites in trying to meet their goals,” said Bruce M. Belzowski, managing director of the Automotive Futures group at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute.
The Chinese government had long held back from aggressive emissions standards to allow its own automakers to catch up with the latest clean car technology. But that is changing, with the government setting increasingly stringent tailpipe rules.
The latest development “is a testimony to how quickly their own automakers have evolved,” Mr. Dunne said. “They’re saying: We’re ready to play this game.”
Foreign automakers were still tallying the effect of the suspension on Tuesday. Volkswagen, General Motors, Honda and other foreign automakers in China referred queries on specific numbers to their Asia offices. Rebecca Kiehne of BMW, which runs the BMW Brilliance joint venture in China, said the company was not yet prepared to comment.
Han Tjan, a spokesman for Daimler, said production would not be affected at its Beijing Benz joint venture with the Chinese car manufacturer BAIC Motor Corporation. The only car covered by the suspension was a high-end E-Class model the venture has not manufactured since 2016, he said.
The United States regulates cars by model years, and also approves various versions of each model. Each version may no longer be sold in the new car market if it was built to meet a previous model year’s regulations and the regulations are different for the new model year.
By contrast, China relies on a system of assigning a number to each version of a model. When an automaker tweaks a car’s design to improve its appeal or improve its regulatory compliance, whether annually or at some other interval, the new version receives a new number. China deregistered 553 of these numbers effective Dec. 31.
Global automakers will have no choice but to meet the increasingly stringent government policies in China, said Michelle Krebs, an analyst at the AutoTrader Group.
“The simple fact that China is the biggest market means automakers will be accommodating,” she said.

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More Than Half Of New Norway Car Sales Now Electric Or Hybrid

Reuters - Alister Doyle | Camilla Knudsen

An electric car is charged at a parking lot in Oslo, Norway, June 1, 2017. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins

Summary
  • Norway tops global sales of electric cars
  • Electric, hybrid cars make up 52 pct of 2017 sales
  • Big subsidies have aided shift from fossil fuel cars
OSLO - Sales of electric and hybrid cars exceeded half of new registrations in Norway in 2017, a record aided by generous subsidies that extended the Nordic nation’s lead in a shift from fossil-fuel engines, data showed on Wednesday.
Pure electric cars and hybrids, which have both battery power and a diesel or petrol motor, accounted for 52 percent of all new car sales in 2017 in Norway against 40 percent in 2016, the independent Norwegian Road Federation (OFV) said.
“No one else is close” in terms of a national share of electric cars, OFV chief Oeyvind Solberg Thorsen said. “For the first time we have a fossil fuel market share below 50 percent.”
Norway exempts new electric cars from many taxes and road tolls and owners often get free parking and charging. Norway also generates almost all its electricity from hydropower, so the shift helps to reduce air pollution and climate change.
Last year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said Norway was far ahead of other nations such as the Netherlands, Sweden, China, France and Britain in electric car sales.



By the IEA yardstick, which excludes hybrid cars which only have a small electric motor that cannot be plugged in, electric car sales in Norway rose to 39 percent in 2017 from 29 in 2016, when the Netherlands was in second on 6.4 percent.
“The shift has gone faster than we’d thought, and the big car makers say they’re going all in to produce non-fossil cars,” Thorsen told Reuters. Norway’s electric car policies contrast with its big offshore oil and gas production.
Christina Bu, head of the Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association which represents owners, said it was too early to reduce incentives for electric cars, noting that parliament has set a goal of phasing out sales of fossil fuel vehicles by 2025.
“It’s an ambitious goal only seven years away,” she told Reuters.
A plan last year by the right-wing government to trim electric car incentives in the nation of 5.3 million people, dubbed a “Tesla Tax”, was dropped in negotiations on the 2018 budget.
Norwegian car sales in 2017 were topped by the Volkswagen Golf, BMWi3, Toyota Rav4 and Tesla Model X. The Tesla is pure electric and others have electric or hybrid versions.
Overall, sales of pure electric cars in Norway rose in 2017 to 21 percent from 16 in 2016.
Sales of diesel cars fell most in 2017, to 23 percent from 31 in 2016. Some regions in Norway have started to charge higher road tolls for diesel cars than for petrol-driven vehicles.

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