Skip to main content

To: Town of Framingham Meeting Members

Divest Framingham from Fossil Fuels!

We want the Framingham Town Meeting to urge its Retirement Board and Town Treasurer to review their investment portfolios in order to identify any holdings that include direct or indirect investments in Fossil Fuel Companies, defined for purposes of this Resolution as any of the two hundred publicly-traded companies with the largest coal, oil and gas reserves (as measured by the gigatons of carbon dioxide that would be emitted if those reserves were extracted and burned) such as those companies listed in the Carbon Tracker Initiative’s “Unburnable Carbon” report.

We want the Retirement Board and the Town Treasurer to adopt policies to divest from such existing public equities, corporate bonds, or other direct holdings in Fossil Fuel Companies within five years and to preclude any new direct investments in Fossil Fuel Companies in the future.

Why is this important?

Our local government has a responsibility to divest from an industry that’s destroying our future, and reinvest in solutions to climate change.

We can not count on the federal government, even as extreme weather events like the record rain fall in the Duluth area last Spring overwhelm local budgets. We have the solutions, but we won’t see any political progress on the issue until we can weaken the power of the fossil fuel industry.

The bottom line is this: divestment is the only moral choice for governments that care about their citizens. Solving the climate crisis is the only practical choice for governments that care about their solvency. It's time to divest from fossil fuels now!

Framingham, MA 01701, United States

Maps © Stamen; Data © OSM and contributors, ODbL

Links

Updates

2015-01-25 00:03:16 -0500

25 signatures reached

2014-01-21 08:35:20 -0500

10 signatures reached