The teenager wrote with such passion and conviction, and she was clearly worried worried that a world racked by climate change wouldn’t be able to sustain her, or her dreams. Her letter to me, the leader of an oil and natural gas trade association, was part of a class project. It was well-researched but also sharp, accusatory and, frankly, depressing.
The young woman was a good writer and a good thinker, a wonderful combination that will carry her far into life. But, sadly, it seemed as if she couldn’t see too far into that future. Her letter spoke of “mass extinction” and “entire ecosystems crumbling,” and also spoke of her own personal suffering as she watches the “destruction of the world.”
The legislation would have forced the Public Employees’ Retirement Association to ditch about $1.5 billion in fossil fuel securities from its roughly $60 billion portfolio of mostly globally traded equities and fixed-income securities. Legislative budget analysts said the move would rack up $21.6 million in fees to divest and reinvest.
The strike against climate change, however, would be mostly symbolic, based on what I heard from Amy McGarrity, PERA s chief investment officer.
If Colorado gets rid of its fossil fuel stocks, someone else will just buy them, she said. If the goal is to send a message about cleaning up the air, though, Colorado would have a louder voice as a shareholder than a bystander.
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coverage of the climate story.
As Don Schreiber stands in the front yard of his ranch near Farmington, New Mexico, he no longer counts cattle he counts gas wells. And he sees 10.
“That’s just the ones that you can see,” he says. There are more nearby, but they are hidden by trees.
Schreiber’s ranch sits on 5,760 acres in the middle of the San Juan Basin, the smaller of the state’s two oil and gas producing regions. Smaller, but not small. There are more than 22,000 oil and gas wells there, and 122 of those are on his land, all of them pulling up natural gas. There are 30 wells within a mile of his house.
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