Tuesday, January 7th - 2025
Terry Mollner is one of the pioneers of socially responsible investing as a new asset class in the professional investment community. He is a founder and member of the board of the Calvert Family of Socially Responsible Investment Funds, the largest such family of funds with over $7 billion under management.
Dr. Mollner is founder and chair of Stakeholders Capital, Inc., a socially responsible asset management firm in MA and CA and the Massachusetts-based Trusteeship Institute, Inc., an economic and social policy think tank since 1972. He is a founding member of the Board of Directors of Calvert Social Investment Funds and Calvert Impact Capital. In 2000, he also took the lead that resulted in Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc. being bought by Unilever, Inc. so it legally sustained its ability to be a socially responsible company and afterwards served on its board for eighteen years.
He is the author of 12 Self-Evident Truths About Truth: And, Recommended Priorities for 2020 US Presidential Candidates, Common Good Capitalism Is Inevitable, and The Love Skill: We Are Each Mastering the 7 Layers of Human Maturity. He is a Fellow of the World Business Academy and a member of the Social Venture Network.
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In a 6-1 ruling, the Montana Supreme Court affirmed their constitutional right to a “clean and healthful environment.”
Montana’s Supreme Court has ruled that the 16 youth who sued the state in a landmark climate change lawsuit have a constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment.”
The 6-1 decision upheld a lower court ruling in Held v. Montana, in which the plaintiffs argued that the state violated that right, enshrined in the state constitution in 1972, by limiting analysis of greenhouse gas emissions during environmental review of fossil fuel projects. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Mike McGrath rejected a spate of arguments against the plaintiffs — including that they lacked standing to bring the suit and that Montana’s contribution to climate change is negligible in a global context.
“Plaintiffs showed at trial — without dispute — that climate change is harming Montana’s environmental life support system now and with increasing severity for the foreseeable future,” McGrath wrote in a 48-page opinion handed down December 18. Declining to regulate the state’s emissions because they are negligible would be like declining to regulate its mining pollution into Lake Koocanusa simply because 95 percent of the total pollution reaching the lake originates in Canada, he wrote.
Lead plaintiff Rikki Held, the only plaintiff who was 18 when the suit was filed in 2020, hailed the court’s decision in a statement as “a victory not just for us, but for every young person whose future is threatened by climate change.”
“We have been heard,” she added.
The suit was brought by Our Children’s Trust, a nonprofit public interest law firm based in Eugene, Oregon. In a statement, lead attorney Nate Bellinger called the ruling “a victory for young people and for generations to come. The court said loud and clear: Montana’s Constitution does not grant the state a free pass to ignore climate change because others fail to act — this landmark decision underscores the state’s affirmative duty to lead by example.”
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte denounced the ruling, arguing in a statement that it would lead to “perpetual lawsuits that will waste taxpayer dollars and drive up energy bills.” The Montana Department of Justice, which represented the state in the lawsuit, called the ruling “disappointing, but not surprising,” according to the Montana Free Press.
Held v. Montana made history last year when it became the nation’s first constitutional climate case to go to trial. Experts have said it could lay a foundation for, or bolster, similar lawsuits — especially in states that, like Montana, have a constitutional guarantee to a clean and healthful environment.
One of those states, Hawai’i, settled a youth climate lawsuit last June, requiring its transportation department to develop a “concrete and comprehensive statewide plan” to achieve emissions reduction targets for 2030, 2035, and 2040, before reaching zero emissions in 2045. The plaintiffs had argued that Hawai‘i’s transportation system wasn’t decarbonizing fast enough and that its outsize emissions were eroding their right to a clean and healthful environment.
“We will use the Montana case and the settlement agreement in Hawai’i as models for other states,” Phillip Gregory, an attorney with Our Children’s Trust, told the State Court Report in July. Other states with so-called “green amendments” to their constitutions are Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. More than a dozen other states are considering adding them.
In New Mexico, whose constitution does not yet include a green amendment but still says it is “of fundamental importance” to protect the state’s “beautiful and healthful environment,” a trial court last June denied defendants’ request to dismiss a lawsuit arguing against the approval of future oil and gas production.
Some legal experts have argued that, while the Held decision is “noteworthy,” the unique circumstances of the case make it unlikely that a wave of similarly successful lawsuits will follow. It’s also unclear how far other court rulings based on a constitutional green amendment can go toward mitigating climate change beyond blocking an overtly anti-climate policy. Michael Gerrard, founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told Grist that “push will come to shove when there are efforts to use these amendments to block major [fossil fuel] projects.”
On the other hand, it’s possible that other suits — including those not invoking constitutional rights — could cite the factual findings of Held v. Montana, like those establishing climate change’s unique effects on children.
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By Nicola Jones
Producing energy from waves and tides has a stop-and-start history. But with a new U.S. testing site opening in 2026, recent federal investment, and accelerating efforts to reach net zero emissions, developers aiming to harness the vast power of the sea are feeling optimistic.
he ocean is one of the planet’s biggest untapped sources of renewable energy, and for decades people have been trying their best to harness its power. The amount of energy available is huge: Theoretically, the waves off the West and East Coasts of the United States could provide more than 60 percent of U.S. grid electricity generation. Australia’s wave energy has the potential to generate more than 1,300 terawatt-hours per year, nearly five times the nation’s energy requirements.
But the challenges are as big as the opportunities. Ocean waters can corrode electrical components and rust mechanical parts, and they are often destructively violent. In November, for example, a “bomb cyclone” battered a marine energy testing site in Oregon with 19-foot-high waves coming from two different directions, according to Burke Hales, an oceanographer at Oregon State University. “There’s lots of power in those kinds of waves,” he says, “but also lots of risk.”
Recently, though, the accelerating push for net zero emissions, along with slow but steady technological improvements and new investments, have sparked fresh optimism in the marine energy field. In September, the Biden Administration announced $112.5 million in funding for prototypes from the Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office — the largest-yet U.S. investment in wave energy. In November, that office also issued cash prizes of $10,000 to each of 20 startup companies. Key to these investments is a new testing site in Oregon, developed by the Department of Energy, Oregon State University, and local stakeholders, with four “parking stalls” for wave energy prototypes. PacWave South, with Hales as its scientific director, plans to host its first companies in the summer of 2026, joining a handful of other testing sites globally.
Hales and others think the field is at an inflection point that will finally spawn commercial successes, with a handful of designs eventually emerging that can survive the brunt of both the ocean and fiscal reality. “It’s expensive and it’s challenging, but I think the opportunity is just so great,” says Lindsay Bennett, executive director of the Fundy Ocean Research Centre for Energy (FORCE) in Nova Scotia, Canada, which researches tidal energy. She sees the marine-energy field “making really significant headway in the next three to five years.”
About half of the planet’s renewable energy today comes from hydropower; wind turbines and solar panels together make up most of the other half. According to the International Energy Agency, the ocean’s tides and waves in 2020 generated a mere 0.2 percent of the world’s renewable electricity. While the IEA predicts that marine energy’s contribution will stay small, it is one of the fastest growing renewable energy sectors. In the agency’s 2021 Net Zero by 2050 Roadmap, marine energy electricity generation grows more than sixtyfold by 2050. Ocean Energy Systems, the IEA’s technology collaboration program for ocean energy, has charted an ambitious course where the world could, by 2050, ramp up from today’s roughly 1 gigawatt of ocean energy to an impressive 300 gigawatts — an effort that they reckon will involve 200 projects with a total price tag of $1.5 billion.
“People often ask, why wave energy instead of solar? It’s really wave energy and solar,” says University of Western Australia offshore engineer Hugh Wolgamot. “It is presently more expensive than other renewables. But the key thing is the value of its persistence.”
“It will definitely be a small piece of the pie,” says Wolgamot. But to get to net zero emissions, “we need to pull all the levers, and we need to move extremely quickly.”
History suggests it will be a rough road. The European Marine Energy Centre in Orkney, Scotland, which opened in 2004, is perhaps the longest-running testing site for modern marine energy projects, offering to hook prototypes up to the grid and ease permitting paperwork. EMEC hosted the earliest wave project to transmit energy to a grid: the Pelamis Wave Energy Converter, trialed from 2004 to 2007. The device looked like the sea snake it is named after, with long, floating metal tubes that flexed against each other to drive hydraulics. It produced power and was followed up by several more versions of the machine at several sites, but the company buckled under financial strain in 2014.
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A growing body of research shows the nation’s coral reefs protect $1.8 billion in economic assets each year and should be protected for our sake and their own.
Days after hurricanes Irma and Maria tore through Puerto Rico in 2017, Ernesto Diaz formed a team to survey what the Category 5 storms had done to his home. Touring coastal areas, Diaz, then an assistant secretary with the commonwealth’s Department of Natural & Environmental Resources, saw rooftops poking out from floodwaters, forests stripped bare, and windows and doors floating by. As a marine scientist who knew the shoreline ecosystems intimately, he also noticed something that intrigued him: Communities near coral reefs sustained less damage.
That became the genesis of a first-of-its kind project when, in 2022, the Federal Emergency Management Agency gave Puerto Rico $38.6 million to shore up its ailing reefs. It’s the first time the agency has tapped its Hazard Mitigations Assistance Grants program, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year to help communities rebuild after disasters, to fund such restoration. Diaz has since moved to Tetra Tech, the contractor implementing the first phase of the effort. “I hope this is the pilot project for what I believe should be the way we protect coastal communities, infrastructure, and beaches,” he said. “Everybody sees it. Everybody knows that’s our guardian.”
It’s not an exaggeration to say coral reefs face an existential threat from climate change. An average global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) would by one estimate likely wipe out 70 to 90 percent of them. In November, scientists said overheating seas, pollution, disease, and other abuses have already pushed some 40 percent of coral species to the edge of extinction.
For decades, conservationists have begged to save these vibrant ecosystems, arguing it’s the right thing to do. Coral reefs nurture about a quarter of all marine life, drive coastal economies, and provide food and livelihoods to a wide swath of the population. Each year, public and private entities provide about $300 million for reef protection worldwide, a fraction of the billions their advocates long for. “For a long time it’s been a reliance on philanthropic dollars,” said Emily Kelly, blue carbon lead at the World Economic Forum. “There hasn’t been a business case for investing in coral reefs necessarily.”
Over the past decade, a small group of U.S. government and university scientists have compiled a body of work making just such an argument for their care. In rigorously modeled, peer-reviewed work, they’ve shown that coral reefs protect tens of thousands of people and billions’ worth of economic assets every year. They and others increasingly argue that if coral reefs are effectively high-performance seawalls, they should be maintained and strengthened with federal disaster funds — purses tens to hundreds of times larger than conservation budgets. Their math has already inspired pilot projects funded by FEMA, the Department of Defense, and insurance giants Swiss Re and Munich Re, each based on the logic that if we won’t protect corals for their sake, we’d better do it for ours.
“It’s kind of a selfish way to look at these ecosystems. We need to maintain them because they’re protecting people,” said Borja G. Reguero, a coastal engineer and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz who’s co-authored much of the relevant science. Such logic is compelling to the emergency authorities and insurance companies that wind up “paying for the Katrinas and Sandys,” he added.
That coral reefs, in addition to being majestic creations, shelter coastlines is an understanding embedded in the practices of many indigenous peoples. In Polynesia, for example, communities build closer to shorelines buffered by reefs than those that are not, said James Hench, a physical oceanographer and professor at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment who’s done extensive fieldwork there.
Scientists have long understood this as a general principle. Individually, corals are small polyps, but together they form wall-like structures with a porous, complex surface. In the right location — close to shore, or near the water line — a reef provides a speed bump for waves and storms, dissipating their energy. The effect is sometimes dramatic enough to see from land: Stand on a beach in San Juan, Diaz says, and you’ll easily spot the white froth of waves breaking 4,600 feet offshore.
Yet no one had ever precisely quantified the benefit of this, let alone at a level sufficient to change policy. About eight years ago Curt Storlazzi, a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, started chatting with Mike Beck, a marine scientist then employed by The Nature Conservancy, about how to change that. They felt that the little science available at the time was too general to grab the attention of the government and insurance companies. To win their support, Storlazzi said, they needed to show in excruciating detail how corals protect “dollars and lives.”
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By: Damian Carrington - The Guardian
Ports including in Saudi Arabia and the US projected to be seriously damaged by a metre of sea level rise
Rising sea levels driven by the climate crisis will overwhelm many of the world’s biggest oil ports, analysis indicates.
Scientists said the threat was ironic as fossil fuel burning causes global heating. They said reducing emissions by moving to renewable energy would halt global heating and deliver more reliable energy.
Thirteen of the ports with the highest supertanker traffic will be seriously damaged by just 1 metre of sea level rise, the analysis found. The researchers said two low-lying ports in Saudi Arabia – Ras Tanura and Yanbu – were particularly vulnerable. Both are operated by Aramco, the Saudi state oil firm, and 98% of the country’s oil exports leave via these ports.
The oil ports of Houston and Galveston in the US, the world’s biggest oil producer, are also on the list, as are ports in the United Arab Emirates, China, Singapore and the Netherlands.
The latest science published by the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI) shows 1 metre of sea level rise is now inevitable within a century or so and could come as early as 2070 if ice sheets collapse and emissions are not curbed. An even more catastrophic rise of 3 metres is probably inevitable in the next millennium or two and could arrive as soon as the early 2100s.
Sea level rise is already causing problems around the world even before it overtops coastline developments. The rise to date means storm surges are higher and significantly more likely to cause coastal flooding, while infiltration of saltwater into coastal land can corrode foundations, the researchers note. Cutting emissions sharply would not only slow the rate of sea level rise but also limit the ultimate rise.
Pam Pearson, the ICCI director, said: “It’s ironic these oil tanker ports are below 1 metre of sea level rise and need to have their eyes on these potentially higher rates of sea level rise, which themselves come from continued fossil fuel use.”
Sea level rise is the most profound long-term impact of the climate crisis, redrawing the map of the world and affecting many major cities from New York to Shanghai. But Pearson said government and corporate short-term interests meant it was being overlooked. “Basic information [from scientific assessments of sea level rise] don’t seem to have gotten into the consciousness of governments,” she said.
James Kirkham, the chief science adviser at ICCI, said: “Refusing to turn off the oil taps means keeping the taps on for sea level rise. Accelerated ice melt and ocean expansion has already caused the rate of sea level rise to double in the last 30 years. Unless leaders double down on transitioning away from fossil fuels, the terrible impacts of sea level rise will only increase further – affecting every country with a coastline, including those who continue to obstruct increased decarbonisation efforts.”
Aramco declined to comment.
Saudi Arabia has been accused of obstructionism at a series of recent global summits, including “wrecking ball” tactics at the Cop29 climate assembly, and of blocking progress at negotiations on a plastics treaty and on tackling drought and desertification. The latter talks were held in Riyadh and ended without agreement, with the Saudis refusing to include any reference to climate in the agreement.
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