The carbon bubble
Solar power-generating sidewalks in Tampa, Florida from Vancouver-based company Solar Earth Technologies. Photo credit: Tony Sica Photography.
It was the paper that launched a $40-trillion divestment movement. Ten years ago, Mark Campanale and his little team released “Unburnable Carbon,” a dense financial analysis showing that 80 per cent of the world’s fossil fuel reserves must never be burned.
The whole notion of “stranded assets” was so obscure, so alien to the financial world that Mark didn’t even bother going to the public launch. “I only thought maybe a handful of people would pay attention,” he told me last year. Instead, he went with his wife and kids to the Latitude music festival in Suffolk, England.
It’s a good thing he chose a career in finance rather than marketing. Fast-forward to today and Carbon Tracker’s concept of a “carbon bubble” is giving financial regulators heartburn and is broadly accepted by central bankers and even the biggest oil majors. Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben latched onto the report’s findings to launch the global fossil fuel divestment campaign.