Cara Augustenborg
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Divestment by any other name would smell as sweet

1/28/2017

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https://www.facebook.com/peoplesclimateireland/
Two years ago, I joined the first divestment march in Dublin calling for the Irish government to remove fossil fuel assets from our Strategic Investment Fund. It was a bitter cold Valentine’s day, and I felt guilty dragging my 4-year-old out on a march. With less than 50 people in attendance, Ireland’s likelihood of “breaking up with fossil fuels” as a result of our efforts seemed improbable.  ​
While I agreed completely with the premise of divestment, the word and concept failed to capture the public’s imagination so I questioned the value of campaigning on the issue. We were struggling as it was to get people to take any action on climate despite its effects becoming more urgent and obvious by the minute. How could we expect people to act on a poorly understood concept involving money most people would never see? 
I was reassured when I met Bill McKibben a few months later. At a conference hosted by Trocaire and University of Maynooth, he told the audience divestment was already a major national movement in the USA. By 2016, more than $3.5 trillion worth of fossil fuel investments had been withdrawn due to U.S. divestment campaigning, making fossil fuel divestment the fastest divestment movement in history.
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L to R: Trocaire's Lorna Gold, 350.org's Bill McKibben, Green Party's Eamon Ryan & Cara Augustenborg at Trocaire's 2016 conference on Climate Justice
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https://www.facebook.com/peoplesclimateireland/
This divestment movement was born on U.S. college campuses. The “youth” of today continually impress me – They have led the charge against toxic free trade deals like TTIP and CETA and now they lead on divestment, neither of which are topics for the faint of heart. 
Following Trocaire’s conference, Ireland’s university divestment campaigns blossomed, with students at Maynooth University, Trinity College Dublin, NUI Galway, and our neighbors at Queens University Belfast all leading the charge. Trocaire deserves tremendous credit for fostering an Irish divestment movement, particularly as an organisation whose mandate focuses primarily on global and national poverty rather than environment. 
Just less than two years after my daughter and I joined the Valentine’s day march to encourage Ireland to break up with fossil fuels, something super sweet just happened. Ireland actually did it!

This week, the Dail voted 90 to 53 to move forward with legislation to divest the Irish Strategic Investment Fund from all fossil fuels. If passed into law soon, this legislation would make Ireland the first country in the world to divest state assets fully from fossil fuels. While financially this effort is relatively small, it sends a strong message to the rest of the world that Ireland is preparing to transition to a low carbon economy where fossil fuels will become stranded assets for those who hold them. 
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https://www.facebook.com/peoplesclimateireland/
In addition to the hard work of campaigning organisations like Trocaire, other Stop Climate Chaos members and tireless university students, Ireland’s divestment success is also due to the unique political situation we find ourselves in today. The divestment legislation passed in spite of our dominant political party’s opposition because all other parties and independents supported it. Our electorate’s disruption of the traditionally bipartisan power base in Ireland’s last election has led to more progress on climate action today than ever before. The election of several small parties and independents has created the perfect storm to finally get stuff done, not just divestment but also a national fracking ban scheduled to become law in October and hopefully more climate action to come.
Yesterday, I heard news commentators complaining that the lack of a majority Irish government was preventing big policy reform to address our healthcare, housing and education crises. However as long as I’ve lived here (14 years), I’ve never seen any significant reform of those problems even when there was a majority government. Instead, today I see voting small works. In spite of being sandwiched between two countries whose political systems are leading to extremism, Ireland is in the midst of a great political experiment in compromise. When it comes to climate action, this experiment seems to be working. 
This week’s divestment success is not only a victory for climate action, but also one for democracy. No matter how elusive the term may seem, “divestment” by any other name would smell as sweet! 
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Keep fighting the good fight!
​-Cara    
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Tomorrow provides hope on Inauguration Day

1/20/2017

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Today is the day Donald Trump will be inaugurated as America’s 45th president. I planned to wake this morning and tweet, “I'm embarrassed to be an American for the first time in my life”. I even contemplated changing my blog from 'Verdant Yank' to 'Verdant Paddy' or even 'Verdant Viking', in keeping with my Scandinavian roots!

However, yesterday I previewed the French film “Demain” (Tomorrow) in preparation for Friends of the Earth’s Dublin screening event tonight and all my Yankee troubles seemed to fade away.  
I once said to a colleague that if I had the budget to create a split screen movie of what your day to day life would be in a world of climate action versus a world of climate chaos 20-30 years from now, the move toward climate action would be instantaneous. -All the co-benefits of what it takes to tackle climate change are so great we would all want that life if we could see it. I tried to paint that vision in words during my TEDxUCD talk last year, but nothing can compete with the power of film to capture the imagination. 
Directors Cyril Dion and Melanie Laurent must have been thinking along similar lines when they created Demain. It’s a snapshot of what a world of climate action would look like. From food to energy, education, economics, and politics, Demain shows us that if we take an ecosystem approach to all those systems we create happier, healthier communities while also decarbonizing society and tackling climate change. 
Demain takes my own split-screen concept one step further by showing such initiatives are already steaming ahead with great success and creating much more liveable communities. 

Demain’s producers are distributing the mostly English film to communities all over the world, encouraging you to host your own screening and providing great background materials to make it a truly impactful event. This is documentary distribution at its finest – not just designed to entertain but to make a long-lasting difference across the globe. More of this please!
Friends of the Earth Ireland timed our screening to coincide with U.S. Inauguration Day. This is a dark day for colleagues in the USA, marking the start of a steep uphill battle for protection of environment and public health. My heart goes out to all of them as signs so far indicate life and work in the USA will be extremely difficult under the Trump regime, but the rest of the world is still moving forward. U.N. climate negotiations still progress and China is chomping at the bit to take the leadership role in the world’s low-carbon transition. 
What I should have tweeted this morning was “I’ve never been happier to be Irish”, not just because I have the option of living outside the USA far away from that political mess, but also because some amazing things are starting to take place here politically and environmentally that are so counter to what’s happening with the “clowns to the left of us” and “jokers to the right”. 
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Here in Ireland, we have a political system moving left of centre while others speed to the far right, and we’re disrupting the power base of the old guard with a mix of independent elected representatives and small political parties. As a result, a majority of our parliamentarians recently committed to ban fracking across Ireland and drop fossil fuel investments from the Irish Strategic Investment Fund. 
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​These are huge victories in a country whose Prime Minister has opposed any kind of climate action over his six years of “leadership”. In a hodge-podge government we were told would result in chaos and inaction, we’re achieving more action on climate than we have in over a decade (if not longer). Funny how that works…
We’re privileged to exist at an incredible moment in time on the cusp of an evolution from our fossil fuel driven past to a world powered by clean energy. The last time humans witnessed such a technological transformation was more than one hundred years ago at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Fossil fuels deserve some credit for making humans the most dominant species on Earth. However, in the same way cave men came out of their caves and ditched their clubs for more efficient hunting tools, it’s time we moved on to something better. This time, it’s infinitely abundant, clean energy sources to drive the next phase in our evolution. 
Those who can’t see the change that’s coming are the last remaining dinosaurs – The Donald Trumps, Rex Tillersons, Scott Pruits, and Jim Inhofes of the world. They’re the dinosaurs who haven’t moved on from their 1980s ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ ambitions, and their obsession with burning carbon will eventually cause their extinction. -The last men standing with stranded fossil fuel assets will most certainly be the biggest losers.  
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The rest of us have already started to evolve. That’s clear when you watch Demain or witness what’s happening politically in places like Ireland, Iceland, Holland and even “oil country” Texas -which now produces more wind power than any other U.S. state! 

What I learned from ‘Tomorrow’ is we have no need to despair over one man today.
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Keep fighting the good fight!
-Cara
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