Why targeting U.S. college portfolios won’t stop climate change
The market reality is that it’s just not feasible yet to envision the end of fossil fuel usage any time soon.
In 2011, 350.org founder Bill McKibben and other environmental activists launched a divestment campaign that, over time, has expanded across university campuses and become part of the backdrop in the climate change conversation. The campaign often points to the “Carbon Underground” list of top 200 public fossil fuel companies based on the potential climate impact of their reserves.
I first heard about the list from a few Princeton University students who asked me for an opinion during a speaking engagement at the Princeton Club of New York. While my mind raced for a publicly acceptable answer, all I could think about was whether NRG Energy, the electric company I am CEO of, was on the boycott list.
Much to my relief, NRG was not; the list consisted of companies that produce fossil fuels (or at least own the reserves in the ground). This surprised me, given that while NRG is the second largest power generation company in the United States, it’s also one of the largest emitters of carbon. NRG, like virtually all electricity producers, principally converts thermal energy embedded in fossil fuels into electric energy — a process that directly causes the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions.
This led me to ask a broader question: why is the divestment campaign targeting oil, gas and coal companies only – and not electric companies or other industries, or businesses or even individuals who consume fossil fuels?
Part of the reason is because the valuations of fossil fuel stocks are based on fossil reserves and there is no real alternative to monetizing reserves other than to sell them for consumption. In contrast, electricity producers can (as we and others are beginning to demonstrate) diversify our asset base away from fossil fuels and still thrive. But perhaps the most compelling reason NOT to target consumers of fossil fuels is that it would mean targeting virtually everybody, including – presumably – the organizers of the divestment campaign themselves.
This logical flaw is one of several reasons why I don’t support the fossil fuel divestment campaign. With Global Divestment Day kicking off on Friday, it’s important to look closely at the divestment efforts. Simply, it’s just not feasible to envision fossil fuel usage ending any time soon, an unavoidable fact that blurs the desired outcome for the campaign and dilutes its potential material impact.
There’s also the issue of scale, since the justification for and against divestment both have their proponents. As of February, 16 colleges have divested from fossil fuels, most of which have small endowments. The most notable is Stanford University, which agreed to divert its $18.7 billion endowment away from direct investment in coal companies. Even if the sum seems impressive, it pales in comparison to the vast sums of investment capital ready, willing and able to invest in energy companies, regardless of whether they emit carbon. Unless divestment participation ramps up dramatically, the campaign won’t have much of a direct impact on the valuation or the business behaviors of the energy companies directly targeted.
Regardless of whether the campaign succeeds, what worries me as the CEO of a fossil fuel consuming energy company is that the vortex of the divestment campaign is university campuses. Today’s students are of the millennial generation – at 80 million strong, the largest generation in American history and the largest segment of the U.S. population – a generation that wants there to be a purpose and a social conscience embedded in every consumer decision they make. The last members of that generation will enter college around 2022 and leave campus in 2026. That means we have 12 more years of millennials in college and, for my part, I would hate to see those students exposed to campaigns about the evils of fossil fuel-consuming energy companies. After all, these students are NRG’s future customers.
In business, where there is risk, there is opportunity. And while the divestment effort may or may not succeed in bringing about a symbolically punitive action against fossil fuel companies, it cannot help but succeed in creating a negative perception against those companies in the minds of students. This may foreclose the chance we have right now to take the awareness it raises and turn it into an opportunity to connect with this generation and galvanize them, as consumers, into the type of action – and answers – to which American business will be highly responsive.
Climate change is, to be sure, an intergenerational issue but it belongs to the millennials more than any other. They will suffer the brunt of the consequences and, unfortunately it appears that if we don’t get going now, they will have to implement the solutions.
I focus on implementation because most of the solutions exist today. A suite of large-scale and distributed clean energy technologies have reached the maturity, and the price point, that makes sense for large-scale commercial deployment. What is lacking is the market catalyst for that comprehensive deployment.
I’m betting on the millennials to be that catalyst.
David Crane is CEO of NRG Energy.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated that 350.org publishes the Carbon Underground list. The list is created and published by Fossil Free Indexes. The article has been updated.
Obama to encourage companies to share cyber threat data
President plans an executive order that he hopes will help combat a steady stream of hackings against U.S. companies.
(Reuters) – President Barack Obama is set to sign an executive order on Friday aimed at encouraging companies to share more information about cybersecurity threats with the government and each other, a response to attacks like that on Sony Entertainment.
The order sets the stage for new private-sector led “information sharing and analysis organizations” (ISAOs) – hubs where companies share cyber threat data with each other and with the Department of Homeland Security.
It is one step in a long effort to make companies as well as privacy and consumer advocates more comfortable with proposed legislation that would offer participating companies liability protection, the White House said.
“We believe that by clearly defining what makes for a good ISAO, that will make tying liability protection to sectoral organizations easier and more accessible to the public and to privacy and civil liberties advocates,” said Michael Daniel, Obama’s cyber coordinator, in a conference call with reporters.
Obama will sign the order at a day-long conference on cybersecurity at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley.
The move comes as big Silicon Valley companies prove hesitant to fully support more mandated cybersecurity information sharing without reforms to government surveillance practices exposed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Cybersecurity industry veterans said Obama’s anticipated order would be only a modest step in one of the president’s major priorities – the defense of companies from attacks like those on Sony and Anthem Inc.
Obama has proposed legislation to require more information-sharing and limit any legal liability for companies that share too much. Only Congress can provide the liability protection through legislation.
Businesses are unlikely to share a lot of timely and “actionable” cyber intelligence without liability relief, said Mike Brown, a vice president with the RSA security division of EMC Corp.
“Until that gets resolved, probably through legislation, I’m not sure how effective continued information-sharing will be,” said Brown, a retired Naval officer and former cyber official with the Department of Homeland Security.
Senator Tom Carper, the top Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security committee, introduced a bill this week that incorporates much of Obama’s plan. But Republicans control Congress, and they have yet to sign on to the idea.
“This is an urgent matter and we are working with anyone that we can up on the Hill to make that happen,” said Daniel, who had not yet reviewed Carper’s bill.
Getting a bill through Congress will require at least the support of big Silicon Valley companies such as Google GOOG 1.30% and Facebook FB -0.37% .
Those companies, however, have refused to give full support to cybersecurity bills without some reform of surveillance practices exposed by Snowden that have hurt U.S. technology companies’ efforts to win business in other countries.
“Obviously there have been tensions,” Daniel told reporters.
“But I think that’s the kind of thing where the only way to get at that is to continue to have dialog and to continue to engage, and the president has been committed to that,” he said.
Google, Facebook and Yahoo YHOO 2.25% are not sending their chief executives to the Stanford conference because of the rift, according to an executive at a major technology company. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook AAPL 1.27% will give an address.
Obama also will meet privately with some executives on Friday. They are expected to press again for surveillance reform and support for strong encryption, which some in the administration have faulted recently on the grounds that it enables criminals and terrorists to hide their activity.
Big technology companies and a host of startups have been beefing up encryption in Snowden’s wake to make blanket intelligence collection overseas more difficult.
How Facebook is trying to make death less complicated
It’s now easier for your loved ones to access your profile after you’ve passed.
This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com
Jack Linshi, TIME
Facebook’s latest announcement was big — and no, it wasn’t a “Dislike” button. Starting Thursday, you can designate a friend to manage your account after you die.
This “legacy contact” feature posits a question we rarely think about: What happens to your Facebook profile when you die?
It’s the kind of question that’s outwardly funny: “You don’t get as many likes,” one user tweeted in reply to me earlier in the day. “My ghost will check it after that to see who misses me,” said another. One user even extended a kind offer: “I’m designating Chris Rock. But happy to be the man for any of you out there.”
And then there was one joke that wasn’t so funny if you kept thinking about it: “Who cares, you’re dead?”
It’s a morbid thought, but after your death, your Facebook profile FB -0.37% suddenly becomes more valuable to those you leave behind. Your friends or family might want to archive your photos, wall posts, friends list—your virtual ashes. They might want to change your photos to turn your profile into a kind of digital memorial. Or they could use your account to post funeral details. These are requests that, before the legacy contact feature, would have required lengthy, taxing court orders due to privacy laws in many jurisdictions.
While the legacy contact feature provides a solution to some of these problems, death in the Facebook era remains complicated. There are some painful instances that Facebook’s new policy can’t prevent—like your friends finding out about your demise in the least intimate of ways. As one writer described that experience in the ChicagoTribune: “[You] stare in disbelief as heartbreaking news is disseminated to an iPhone or laptop, usually when one is on the bus, in an inane meeting at the office or in some other prosaic and inapt setting.”
For some, such an event permanently attaches a sense of tragedy to Facebook: The mother who learned via Facebook of her son’s death at a football game; the friends who read a suicide note posted by their classmate; a man whose auto-generated Year-in-Review photos featured his deceased daughter; a woman who rediscovered her chats with a friend who’d died and was overcome by guilt upon seeing each message she hadn’t answered.
But then there are ways Facebook can help us grieve, too. Just look at the classmates that started posting notes on the Facebook wall of a Rhode Island student who’d been killed in a car crash. And then there’s the story of Kimmy Kirkwood and her boyfriend, Sgt. Will Stacey, who left an “In Case I Die” letter on Facebook before his deployment. Months after Stacey was killed while serving in Afghanistan, Kirkwood visited his Facebook profile, rediscovered the letters and other forgotten love notes.“I sometimes go back and see if he wrote me something on this particular day or for holidays like Valentine’s Day or our birthdays,” she said.
And sometimes, there are moments when death in the age of Facebook is just as weird and funny as it sounds. Take, for example, that time when comedian Joan Rivers, two weeks after her death last September, “posted” on a rave review of the iPhone 6. The post was speculated to be a scheduled marketing deal that her publicist had forgotten to deactivate.
As one writer said of the blunder: “Something tells us Joan Rivers would laugh about this.”
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