Today I read two letters written by companies which impressed me.

The first is by Kickstarter. Some asshole was trying to raise money to produce a “seduction guidebook” which advocated sexual assault of women, and though many people asked Kickstarter to cancel the project before the funding period completed, they didn’t. Then today they wrote a (seemingly) sincere letter of apology to their users, and by way of compensation have donated $25,000 to RAINN, an anti-sexual assault organisation.

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I am, to the best of my abilities, divesting myself of fossil-fuels, monetarily. I don’t have any money invested anywhere (or much full stop), but that doesn’t mean that what little money I do have can be used by others for ill.

So far I have cancelled my bank accounts at Halifax, Natwest and Lloyds (which is particularly bad), and moved completely over to The Co-Operative, which is the only high-street bank which has an explicit policy of not investing money in “any business or organisation whose core activity contributes to global climate change”.

The next step is to check what USS invests its money in, and remove any of mine which is supporting malign corporate interests.

I am more-or-less following The Guardian’s ongoing series on personal divestment.

I’ve been looking for suggestions of individual actions one can take to reduce CO₂ emissions. In particular, ones which actually make a big difference (unlike, e.g., switching to LED lightbulbs). Everywhere I look, all I see is “have one fewer child” dwarfing all other actions by effectiveness. It’s all anyone talks about.

The Web is full of figures like this one. It shows the one-fewer-child recommendation being equivalent to about 60 t/y, where the next-best options like “sell your cars”, “stop flying” or “be vegan” are mostly in the 1–2 t/y range. So high, they had to clip and compress the range on the graph so you could even see anything else. That looks pretty stark. That figure is so high, it seems as if nobody could ever hope live sustainably if they had even one child. They might as well be taking a long-haul flight every 10 days for the rest of their life! Now, we definitely shouldn’t discount conclusions just because they are surprising or uncomfortable, but we should scrutinise them. That feeling of “…really?” is the first hint something might not be right.

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