Stockholm Just Announced It Will Pull All Investments in Coal, Oil & Gas

by Christina Sarich at undergroundreporter.org

Stockholm, Sweden — A citizen-led campaign has finally resulted in a big shift for Stockholm’s energy future. Following a one-and-a-half-year campaign, the Swedish capital has announced it is withdrawing all investments from coal, oil, and gas companies.

This means that more than $30 million Swedish dollars (approximately $3.5 million U.S. equivalent) will be divested from dirty fossil fuels. Everything from acid rain to oil spills, to endless war and damage to the environment from strip mining and water pollution, can be linked to our dying addiction to coal, oil, and gas.

It is for this reason that Malmö, Uppsala, Copenhagen, Oslo, Paris, and cities across the world — as well as billionaire inventors, such as Elon Musk — are declaring war on fossil fuels.

As the world removes its money from fossil fuel companies, we can support the growth of institutions more aligned with sustainable energy creation. We can also build our own solar and wind projects, as well as give voices to those who have offered alternative energy solutions in the past, only to be squashed by Big Oil and Big Gas.

A Breakthrough Energy Movement Conference slated for 2016, for example, has discussed the scientific viability of everything from the Casimir Effect, which uses a vacuum to create ‘free energy,’ to confirmation that Nikola Tesla’s inventions offer myriad potential for energy creation. Harold E. Puthoff, an American Physicist and Ph.D. from Stanford University and researcher at the institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, Texas, published a paper in the journal Physical Review A, atomic, molecular and optical physics that confirms this.

A global movement called Break Free helped to sway policy makers in Sweden to go gas and oil-free. Some 30,000 people on six continents have been campaigning to end the use of fossil fuels. They aim to close large polluters such as Australia’s Newcastle coal port, one of the largest coal plants; Pecém in Brazil; and Aliağa coal ash disposal site in Izmir, Turkey, which is a waste site for four power plants in one of the most polluted areas in the region, among others.

Successes by Break Free so far include:

• Stockholm’s recent announcement to divest from fossil fuels,
• A twelve-hour shut down of the UK’s largest open-cast coal mine in Ffos-y-Fran, Wales,
• A 10,000 person march in Batangas City, Philippines,
• And the successful blockading of Riccarton, Christchurch branch, of ANZ bank, that invests over $13.5 billion in fossil fuels.

First we should expect to see further divestment from oil and gas, then the build up of solar, wind, wave, and geothermal, energy, and perhaps finally, in the end, we’ll all enjoy zero point energy.

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