Breaking News: Rockefellers to Kick the Oil Habit

(See video below) By the time the Ball drops in Times Square on December 31st, The Rockefeller Brothers Fund–a private charitable foundation established in 1940–committed to reducing their exposure to coal and tar sands investments to less than one percent of their total portfolio. Could be a great way to end the new year, or "the end of the hydro carbon age" as Deborah Burke of the Fund's Sustainable Development team quoted Bill McKibben from yesterday's People's Climate March. Would father, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the philanthropist who founded the fund, approve? Perhaps. According to the fund's Sustainable Development Guidelines, the fund already supports global stewardship that is ecologically based, economically sound, socially just, culturally appropriate, and consistent with intergenerational equity. The Fund encourages government, business, and civil society to work collaboratively on climate change, to acknowledge the moral and ethical consequences of in…
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Renewables Continue to Outpace Conservative Global Projections

by Stephen Lacey, Greentechmedia The International Energy Agency is out with its latest medium-term outlook for global renewables. And once again, projections for installation and energy production have been revised upward. According to the IEA's analysis, renewable electricity will surpass output from natural gas and double generation from nuclear by 2016, becoming the second-most important source of electricity behind coal. Those projections for generation are 90 terawatt-hours higher than last year's medium-term renewable energy market report. The IEA now says that renewable electricity will make up one quarter of gross power generation in 2018, with non-hydro renewables accounting for 8 percent by that date. Although the IEA has always been outspoken about the need to deploy more low-carbon technologies and address climate change, the organization has been known for its conservative analysis about the future growth of renewables. For example, in 2003, it …
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