Green Stock Index Rejects Natural Gas Along With Oil and Coal

[xchrom]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-05-02/green-stock-index-rejects-natural-gas-along-with-oil-and-coal.html

Since U.S. climate legislation failed in 2010, environmentalists and like-minded investors have begun campaigning to get investors to avoid fossil-fuel stocks. It’s worth putting the scale of that challenge in perspective.

The Natural Resources Defense Council this week announced a partnership with the FTSE Group, a leading creator of stock indexes, and BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. They will develop a global stock index for climate-minded investors that excludes coal, oil and natural gas companies, and any others that profit from extraction, a first, according to NRDC.

Investors will be able to use the index to build their own fossil-free funds, and thus avoid risks they see from "unburnable carbon." The phrase, which was popularized by the U.K.-based Carbon Tracker Initiative, refers to fossil fuel reserves that can't be burned if the atmosphere is to stay within a low level of warming.

Holding fossil-fuel stocks could put investors at risk, as society starts to leave carbon in the ground, the thinking goes. Some environmentalists have taken the Carbon Tracker research as a cue to dump fossil fuel investments altogether, rather than as a tool to consider portfolio risk. Its next research report comes out May 8.

[hunter]

1. I've rejected the name "Natural Gas."

Yes, it started as a way to distinguish it from gas manufactured from coal (which contains deadly carbon monoxide) but now it's just a nasty marketing term.

Frackin' Gas, Friggin' Gas, Filthy Gas, or just gas, but never "natural" gas.

This idea of filthy gas as a "transition" fuel is marketing propaganda too.

I can't say much about stock indexing schemes. My own energy schemes would probably ruin multiple markets, which is why they will never be implemented. The markets will be ruined one way or another anyways, probably in ways that will hurt much more than conscientiously shutting down this unsustainable high energy consumer economy would.

It would be better everyone work twenty hours a week and find rewarding low energy recreations, than some people work overtime to support a failing consumer economy, as a few people get very much wealthier, but more and more people suffer hopeless poverty. The failure of our consumer economy is not something that will happen in the future, it is something that is happening now, and it's a direct consequence of climate change, resource depletion, and overpopulation.

[Champion Jack]

2. Well said