Page 195 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

15 AN INTERVIEW WITH ALAN RUSBRIDGER … 189

BB: Would you say that one of the most relevant goals of the cam-
paign was to see divestment of big foundations and corporations from
fossil fuels, or else to trigger a serious and more informed debate
about climate change and global warming?
AR: Both. We did one to try and get people to divest … and that it seemed
to be an important thing. But in the act of doing something that noisy and
unusual and persistent in a newspaper, we hoped [it] would make people
sit up and think about something in a way that just writing more news
stories wasn’t necessarily going to do.

BB: So far, more than a year after the campaign, are you happy with
the results? Do you think you were expecting more?
AR: I think the results are amazing… I think the place where it struck
home was the city, where people hadn’t thought about this whole ‘stan-
dard assets’ issue. It looked amazing when the Bank of England was
interviewed by the BBC and used language that was almost identical to the
language we had been using, and essentially he was waving a big red flag in
the air and saying, “Okay, this is not going to be something that’s going to
affect your investment portfolio this month or maybe next month but at
some point in the medium term these companies are not going to be
allowed to burn the assets that they have, and that is going to have financial
implications.” And I think there were quite a lot of people who hadn’t seen
it in that light before who began to think differently about the issue
afterwards.
BB: And so, for example, you feel the Gates Foundation started lis-
tening more?
AR: The Gates divested a very large sum of money out of Exxon. They did
it quietly about a year later, but they did divest and it had to coincide with a
time when oil prices were extremely low and that sort of cut both ways.
The valuation of oil companies was looking rocky anyway so people were
thinking, “Is this the greatest investment in the world?” But also, I think it
wasn’t great for the renewables that oil suddenly became so cheap.

BB: As a media reformer and scholar, I see how the lack of action on
climate change can also be due to failure of the media. Do you agree?
AR: Yeah… I think it’s part of the big question about the current
financing… I mean, it’s not just financing… this was the biggest problem