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To: Denver Employees Retirement Plan (DERP), Denver, Colorado

Divest the Denver Employees Retirement Plan from Fossil Fuels!

The Denver Employees Retirement Plan, of the City and County of Denver, Colorado should immediately freeze any new investments in fossil fuels, and divest from direct ownership and any commingled funds that include fossil fuel public equities and corporate bonds within 5 years.

Why is this important?

The retirement fund for Denver public employees has a responsibility to divest from an industry that’s destroying our future, and reinvest in solutions to climate change.

Denver and Colorado have been on the receiving end of many fossil fuel dirty extraction technologies:

-- From the 1914 massacre of Ludlow's coal mining families;
-- To the Project Rulison 1969 underground nuclear explosion intended to produce natural gas;
-- To oil shale's Black Sunday in 1982 - when Exxon pulled out of the Colony project - which sent the state economy into recession for years;
-- To the current fracking frenzy that has destroyed our citizens' health in Garfield, Weld, and other counties;
-- To Suncor's Denver refinery, to which the Alberta tar sands are pipelined, and which is right now contaminating ground and surface water at the Confluence of Sand Creek and the South Platte River;

The people of Colorado have suffered from all these fossil fuel tragedies, in the past and in the present. At the same time, Denver and Colorado has been on the forefront of green energy research and development, and home to scientists who continue to research and document our changing climate.

We have the solutions to turn away from increasing carbon pollution, 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 and governmental agencies, such as DERP, which is the guardian of Denver employees' pension funds. It is clear that in order to still have a world worth getting a pension for, we must quickly and decisively move as individuals, as a society, and as a world to use less fossil fuels. Continuing to invest in these companies, whose profit maximization only ensures our destruction, can no longer be seen as the action of a moral caretaker of our money.

Solving the climate crisis is the only practical choice for governments that care about the future of their current and retired members. Unless we act now, by the time today's new hires retire in 2040, 27 years from now, the globe will have heated even more, the Arctic ice caps will be gone, and everyone will ask why DERP couldn't have helped stem the tide by divesting back in 2013. It's time to divest from fossil fuels now!

Denver, CO

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2013-11-20 14:40:42 -0500

50 signatures reached