Dear Fossil Free SA supporter,

Gosh, you still had the energy after this very challenging year to open this email? Thank you. As we near the end of the year, a few updates from us. 

UCT inches closer to divestment

The UCT Council was set to at last vote on divestment on 4 December.

The latest petition to UCT, from students in the Green Campus Initiative urging Council to adopt the divestment recommendation of the University Panel on Responsible Investment made in August, had drawn over 5,400 signatures. We'd sent an open letter to Council urging them to support the UPRI’s recommendations, and raised the issue in the media.

But instead of opting for divestment at its 4 December meeting, the UCT Council only noted that it is “not opposed to fossil fuel divestment”. It deferred a final decision for three months, saying it now wants the advice of the university’s investment committee and foundation trustees – who in the past, at least, have been extremely conservative.

We will of course be re-engaging and re-strategising come January to help persuade Council to make the right decision in March. Yes, for now, we're pretty disappointed.

Our #InvestFossilFree campaign is close to igniting

We’re excited that this slow-burn campaign we launched nine months ago is close to maturing: We now have a list of 85 clients of Allan Gray who want their asset manager to give them a fossil-free fund! Signatories to our letters to other campaign targets – Old Mutual, Ninety One, the GEPF, etc – average around 30 each.

We’re looking to what will likely be an extremely interesting engagement with Allan Gray early in the new year. We want just five more signatures before we engage. We’re encouraged that 70% of our campaign supporters indicate they’re willing to protest peacefully in support of our demands if need be. Thank you so much for your support. If you haven’t yet done so, please forward our campaign to your friends – here’s that link again: http://bit.ly/invest-fossil-free.

COP26

We’re not going to add much to the reams that have been written about COP26 elsewhere. It was progress – but not nearly enough progress: The world is now heading for 2.4C of warming, or 5C if you’re South African.

If you are looking for an extremely authoritative and detailed breakdown of what happened, we recommend Carbon Brief’s COP 26 analysis. 

We lean towards Bill McKibben’s view (and sorry, we lost the link for this), that the COPs are in a sense best seen as score cards, not contests. What happens there is far more a measure of the world’s progress on climate than what determines our progress on climate.

One thing that was clear during the COP that the influence of the fossil fuel industry on how the climate conversation is framed remains all too undimmed – which is why our divestment focus on ending that industry’s influence is so vital. If you’re feeling anxious about the lack of substantive progress, we also recommend’s Rebecca Solnit’s Guardian article, Ten ways to confront the climate crisis without losing hope.

For now, on COP 26, we agree with those who argue that are many reasonable grounds for feeling despair – and yet we cannot and should not despair. 

Shell

The recent wave of public focus on Shell’s seismic blasting plans is unprecedented and most welcome – but we have to point out that this is not a new form of bad behaviour from Shell, a company which has long abused human rights and manipulated governments. Nor is Shell's attitude or exploration methodology unique amongst fossil fuel companies – they all do this.

Shell’s current chief executive claims his company is now really, really, really determined to change – but there have been so many waves of past empty PR from this industry that – as with Sasol – we now need hard evidence of rapid progress on decarbonisation before these assurances can be trusted.

We have been asking our asset managers whether Shell is part of the offshore components of our personal retirement annuities, and to date have received few satisfactory answers.

The relative toothlessness of citizens when faced with the destructive intransigence of companies like Shell underlines the importance of our divestment movement.

We support Clean Creatives SA

On the subject of fossil fuel industry PR... we’re very happy to announce we will now be working to stymie this influence on a new front: Clean Creatives, a new effort to block the fossil fuel industry’s access to advertising and PR talent, which we are supporting here in South Africa, and are likely to make this a spin-off campaign of FFSA.

Global divestment now spans funds worth $40 trillion

We have other positive news. When we started working on building a fossil fuel divestment movement here in South Africa, the global pool of capital that had committed to removing fossil fuels was less than $200 million. Only a handful of institutions had made the commitment. In the letter to UCT that launched our campaign, we could point to only six US universities that had taken this step.

We are delighted to report that eight years later, institutions worth a collective $40 trillion (take a look) have now undertaken various forms of divestment.

For a more reflective update on the divestment movement, please see this article in the New York Times by Bill McKibben, one of the movement’s founders and leading lights.

It’s worth remembering that divestment is now recognised by social scientists as being a key “social tipping dynamic” for climate stabilisation. 

Our engagement with China

Following the September announcement by China’s Premier Xi Jinping that China would no longer finance new coal power abroad, we wondered about the implications of that announcement for the giant, very dirty coal-fired power plant proposed for the China-financed Musina-Makhado Special Economic Zone.

We wrote to the Chinese Embassy in Pretoria asking for clarification.

Somewhat to our surprise, they replied – and confirmed that China’s end-to-overseas-coal-funding policy applies now in South Africa. More here.

Sasol goes green[wash]

Many of you may have seen the recent news/spin that Sasol has gone “green” and now “supports the Paris agreement”. 

We’re not so convinced, and have written a detailed briefing explaining our scepticism. In a nutshell, for Sasol’s targets and policy to be credible, it needs to increase ambition, bring forward capital expenditure, acknowledge that fossil gas is not a climate solution, start listening to shareholders and stakeholders, and demonstrate that it is capable of meeting targets as well as of setting them. 

We participated in the soul-deadening Sasol AGM on 19 November, where we asked questions like these, without receiving any satisfactory answers:

• Does Sasol agree that global heating caused by human GHG emissions amounts to being a climate emergency, as the UN describes it? 
• Given its enormous historical debt to South Africa, and the immense danger climate change poses for our country, which is warming at a rate twice the global average, why is Sasol not committing to a pace and scale of transformations that matches the scale of the crisis we face as South Africans? 
• To put it another way, global emissions must be halved in the next decade for the world to have a chance of meeting the 1.5C target. So why don’t your plans at least don’t reflect that stark reality and go beyond to reflect the particular dangers faced by South Africa? Without immediate year-on-year emissions cuts, your plans lack both vision and credibility.

Help us rebuild our management committee

Our FFSA governance team has shrunk a little over the past two years, and we want to renew it with around three new appointments to our Management Committee (board). So we welcome nominations for our ManCo, and expect to hold elections at our next AGM before the end of February.

We are looking for people with expertise in these three areas:

• climate and activism,
• finance and responsible investment,
• organisational management and non-profit governance.

Please take into account race, age and gender diversity in making your nominations. You can, as always, just hit reply right now to do so.

Our very best wishes to you and our battered planet in 2022,

David, for the FFSA team