EcoWatch: Warren Buffett Rejects Calls for Climate Change Report
Warren Buffett‘s Berkshire Hathaway shareholders voted overwhelmingly against a shareholder proposal to create a report citing the climate-change risks for its insurance companies.
Buffett, the so-called “Seer of Omaha” for his company’s S&P-beating returns, said he doesn’t think climate change creates serious risks for Berkshire’s insurance business and also refused to make a public statement in favor of reducing fossil-fuel use.
Bloomberg: Funds Ignoring Climate Risks Rose Last Year Despite BOE Warning
The number of big investors ignoring climate-change risk increased last year despite a stark warning from Bank of England Governor Mark Carney about the potential for “huge” losses from a sudden shift in regulation designed to curb global warming and fossil fuels.
Almost half of the world’s top 500 investors are failing to act on climate change -- an increase of 6 percent from 236 in 2014, according to a report Monday by the Asset Owners Disclosure Project, which surveys global companies on their climate-change risk and management.
St. Louis Business Journal: SunEdison Brings In Turnaround Expert for Restructuring
Maryland Heights-based renewable energy developer SunEdison on Monday announced that John Dubel, CEO of restructuring services firm Dubel & Associates, is its new chief restructuring officer, a new position for the company following its bankruptcy filing last month.
Dubel will be in charge of the management of all aspects of the financial restructuring of the company, evaluating all aspects of the company’s operations for cost reduction measures during the pendency of the bankruptcy proceedings and implementing such measures, directing the efforts of the company’s management, employees and external professionals in bankruptcy-related matters and transactions, directing the development of a Chapter 11 plan, and managing the obligations owed by the company to its significant creditors.
New York Times: Researchers Aim to Put Carbon Dioxide Back to Work
The X Prize Foundation has created an incentive, a $20 million prize for teams that by 2020 come up with technologies to turn CO2 captured from smokestacks of coal- or gas-fired power plants into useful products.
But perhaps the ultimate goal of researchers in this field is to turn the waste product of fuel-burning into new fuel. In theory, if this could be done on a large scale using renewable energy or even sunlight, there would be no net gain of emissions -- the same carbon dioxide molecules would be emitted, captured, made into new fuels and emitted again, over and over.
MIT Technology Review: Republican Attitudes on Climate Change Thaw
Subtly but steadily, Republican attitudes on climate change have been changing. That evolution was confirmed this week by a Yale University/George Mason University poll that found that 56 percent of Republicans nationwide believe that the climate is warming (although many still dispute the idea that human activity is the cause). Five years ago that figure was less than 40 percent.