American Charities May Legally Have to Divest from Fossil Fuels

- Adam Clare

industry

Student groups have long called for their educational institutions to divest from the destructive fossil fuel industry (and ideally reinvest in renewables). This passionate demand from students has seen success at various schools around the world, and their fight in the USA may have gotten easier thanks to a change in law by the Biden administration. Large schools in the states tend to have a charitable arm to give out scholarships and collect donations from wealthy benefactors (who donate to dodge taxes, but that’s a separate issue). Charities in the states are obligated to serve the public interest, and investing in the destruction of the planet is not in the public interest according to the Biden administration. Let’s hope the divestment movement continues to grow!

Like other public charitable institutions, Harvard is legally bound to serve the public interest in exchange for privileges such as tax exemption. Harvard is also required to manage its endowment prudently, in order to further its mission of educating young people and creating a more just world.

Fossil fuel investments are incompatible with those obligations. Fossil fuels are not only the primary contributor to climate change; their extraction and refinement also emit toxic pollutants—often in Indigenous and low-income communities, where environmental racism is most acutely felt. For decades, fossil fuel companies have obscured the scientific reality of climate change and thwarted climate policy; in recent years they have also attacked climate scienceand funded research—including at Harvard—that tacitly furthers their agenda. Sea level rise caused by climate change even threatens Harvard’s campus.

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Keystone XL is Dead, For Reals This Time

- Adam Clare
Standing Rock #DAPL
Protesting works!

The absolutely foolish plan to make a massive pipeline to transport a heavily subsidized non-renewable energy source is dead. It is really dead. We’ve heard before that the project is over, only for it to come back to life. Obama and Trudeau both worked hard to ensure that future generations would have to suffer the ecological damage done by the project, yet in the end it was volunteer activists who won.

The pipeline was meant to open nearly a decade ago, and thanks to the efforts of so many groups it never will. The opposition to the project started small and now it’s a movement that is hoping to block other illogical gifts to the oil industry.

Keep protesting, never give up!

It’s easy to forget now how unlikely the Keystone fight really was. Indigenous activists and Midwest ranchers along the pipeline route kicked off the opposition. When it went national, 10 years ago this summer, with mass arrests outside the White House, pundits scoffed. More than 90 percent of Capitol Hill “insiders” polled by The National Journal said the company would get its permit.

But the more than 1,200 people who were arrested in that protest helped galvanize a nationwide — even worldwide — movement that placed President Barack Obama under unrelenting pressure. Within a few months he’d paused the approval process, and in 2015 he killed the pipeline, deciding that it didn’t meet his climate test.

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You Make Choices to Have a Good Life

- Adam Clare

steaming mug

How you think about the world around will influence what you do in the world, which in turn impacts how you react to what’s happening around you. It’s a cycle, and you can influence it. Positive thinking won’t work, instead you can use tried and tested ways to better your life through making educated decisions. Practice mindfulness, self-reflection and consider how you react to stimulus to help you make decisions in your life.

Facing what you don’t want to deal with is not easy at first. There is courage within us; we have to find and make friends with it. I found courage through prayer, asking for help, and digging deep inside my heart to find my courage. The heart knows what is right and can be our inner guidance system. The heart doesn’t care about the future or the past — it only cares about what is best for you and doing the right thing.

When we face a challenging situation, it’s often necessary to make hard choices, and sometimes to get what we want, we have to let go of something significant. For example, if you choose to leave a marriage with children, you know changing the structure of the family unit will be difficult, but the reasons to do so are more critical than keeping it intact. That is not an easy decision.

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Attempting Harmless Fashion

- Adam Clare

beards

The concept of sustinable fashion is more of a goal than something that can be put into practice. One company, Asket, is taking a different spin on making the fashion world better by adding accountability through traceability with the spin off effect of sustainability. Asket educates consumers on the supply chain of their products so people can make informed choices about what they wear. Nobody wants to financially support the factories in China using Uighur slave labour or the factories wasting 100 billion items of clothing each year. There’s a lot of work to be done in the fashion industry so it’s good to see a company tackling issues head-on.

As always, the most fashionable choice is to reduce your consumption by wearing what you already own or buying vintage wear.

We believe it’s crucial that the customer knows and understands the journey of a garment and the massive amount of resources and work that is put into them, because that’s the only way for someone to appreciate them and make sure that we turn them from disposables into investments; and that we then, in turn, actually start taking care of them and minimize our consumption.

I guess the disclaimer would be that traceability in itself doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily more sustainable. It just means that we’re aware where it’s made and how, and then you can start working on lowering your impact based on that. But of course, if you’re working with traceability and disclosing that, I would say you are working more responsibly, otherwise you wouldn’t put that [information] out there. If you’ve got nothing to hide, then you can do that.

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G7 Nations Agree on Minimum Corporate Tax

- Adam Clare
money

Corporations love keeping their shareholders money instead of contributing to society, and it’s the role of governments to ensure that corporations do their part. Usually this comes in the form of taxation. Multinational corporations create multiple subsidiaries to obfuscate and obstruct the ability of governments to collect tax, it’s the corporate equivalent of dining and dashing.

A recent G7 meeting revealed that the largest economies in the world are going to enact a global minimum taxation rate for corporations. Having an agreed-upon minimum will remove the incentive to corporations to create subsidiaries to avoid taxation, while increasing the wealth of nations.

The rules on making multinationals pay taxes where they operate – known as “pillar one” of the agreement – would apply to global companies with at least a 10% profit margin. 

Twenty percent of any profit above that would be reallocated and taxed in the countries where they operate, according to the G7 communiqué. 

In the case of the UK, for example, more tax revenue would be raised from large multinationals and would help pay for public services.

The second “pillar” of the agreement commits states to a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15% to avoid countries undercutting each other.

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