As You Sow began our Breaking Up with Fossil Fuels campaign with the twin goals of, first, debunking the fossil fuel industry’s self-serving myths about the impossibility of achieving a clean energy economy and, second, moving public opinion toward the realization that ending our reliance on fossil fuels is feasible, possible, beneficial and, in fact, the low carbon economy is well under way and will be dramatically implemented in the U.S. in the next 15 years.

Our strategy was to play off the industry’s rhetoric of dependency, echoing familiar pop culture memes around romantic relationships—“you need me,” “you can’t live without me,” “breaking up is hard to do” —in a playful, engaging way. [READ_MORE} Our plans included building an interactive website and creating a video contest that could serve as a tool to engage and educate the public, including, in particular, college students who will help lead the way and build a clean energy future. We moved forward with excitement and with the support of the ITP community. Our first round of funding enabled us to convene a marriage counselor, filmmaker, clean energy expert, and our energy team to explore the approach and begin developing the materials that would provide real information about the success and growth of the low carbon economy, and empower people to use social media to “Break Up” with fossil fuels. The idea resonated with test audiences. With our second round of funding we conducted research that would help de-bunk the myths of the fossil fuel industry—from job loss, to improbably high costs of renewables, to arguments that renewables technology was decades away. We also brought together extensive information on how quickly and widely renewable technologies are being adopted across the globe and across the U.S.  

At the same time, in another of our Energy Program projects, we were expanding our work to communicate the growing risk of investing in companies whose product—fossil fuels—cannot be burned without taking the world’s climate beyond the breaking point. The inescapable futility of continuing to invest in a deadly energy system and of drilling in the farthest corners of the earth for costly reserves whose use will only seal the destruction of our climate was clear. In juxtaposition, clean energy costs are rapidly declining, use of renewables is growing across the globe, governments are increasingly adopting efficiency and GHG standards, and the economics of fossil fuel extraction is rapidly declining, for good. As the work progressed, it became more and more clear that pulling these fundamentals together to present to the financial markets, investors, business leaders, and governments was timely and critical.  

In discussion with Maggie Kaplan, founder of Invoking the Pause, Maggie noted that in fact our investment risk focus had a theme consistent with our original project: it was still “Breaking Up with Fossil Fuels,” but was tailored for a different audience—a financial decision-making audience rather than the general public. She offered creative, thoughtful, and helpful feedback, and asked how we could best use our ITP grant to create the most impact on climate change and to accelerate the transition to a clean energy future. After our meeting with Maggie, and with her support, we determined that our next steps will continue the theme of busting fossil fuel industry myths, but in a way that plays to our strengths in communicating climate imperatives to the investors, bankers, financial analysts, and advisors. We will use the remaining ITP funding to hire expert analysts to assist in finalizing our report and to widely disseminate this critical financial information, which we believe will make a major difference in the financial sector’s decision making about investing in the fossil fuel industry. We intend to share our forthcoming work on this issue with the ITP community, and with the world, as the COP21 Paris conference approaches.