ticking louder ....just a matter of time

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2 ... COa6Et1ZicBig business steals the show at New York climate talks
17:33 24 September 2014 by Fred Pearce
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Maybe it was because the UN's big climate summit was being held within a couple of kilometres of Wall Street. Tuesday's summit of world leaders, hosted by UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, was upstaged by corporate leaders pledging to cut carbon emissions from their operations and investment portfolios.
Finance houses led the way. A group of investment institutions, including pension funds and corporate asset managers, promised to "decarbonise" their investment portfolios by $100 billion by the end of next year. This means pulling out of funding coal mines, oil wells and oil-palm plantations in rainforests, for instance.
"Climate change is more and more recognised as a financial risk," said Mats Andersson, CEO of AP4, a Swedish pension fund. Both AP4 and the Dutch Bank ASN promised to make their entire investment portfolios carbon-neutral by 2030.
A price on carbon
Meanwhile, an even larger group of 340 financial institutions – who claimed to be managing $24 trillion in assets – joined other corporations and many governments in calling for a global system of carbon pricing to reflect the environmental cost of carbon emissions. Such a system would push their investments out of fossil fuels and towards low-carbon energy, they said. But it would have to do better than the European Union carbon trading system, which is plagued by low carbon prices that provide little incentive.
Competing for attention with the finance houses were big companies that plant or trade in agricultural commodities grown on cleared rainforests. In recent months a slew of them – including Unilever, the world's biggest supplier of supermarket products, and major palm-oil suppliers Wilmar and Cargill – have committed to ban crops grown on newly deforested land from their supply chains.