Fossil Free updates

• Our full November launch schedule is now available. Check the list for details of launches in Cape Town (Nov 12), Bloemfontein (, Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban. Please tell your friends in those cities.

• Our Thundafund campaign fundraising to support our work over the next year is now live. Please consider contributing and forwarding to friends. And watch the video we created.

• Our first ever 'divestment dinner' was held on Wednesday 22 October. Seven guests watched Do The Math, and then discussed the divestment strategy. A template letter for writing to investment managers requesting fossil free investments was distributed. Participants were invited to register support for Fossil Free SA. Salad was eaten.

• We've published an in-depth rationale for UCT divesting on this site. Many of the points hold good for divestment in general. This document has also been circulated to the UCT council. (No responses as yet.)

• Open Democracy (24 October 2014) has given Fossil Free UCT a mention: 'After inspiring fossil fuel divestment, will South Africa's own campaign succeed?'

• Divestment is now under attack from the fossil fuel lobby: this is good news, because it means the industry is starting to feel threatened. Here is Exxon's view: it thinks that technology and shale gas will fix the climate problem – but does not map out how this approach could hold warming below two degrees. Alex Lenferna, a South African divestment analyst living in the US, responds.

• The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has said that the 'vast majority of reserves are unburnable' if global temperature rises are to be limited to below 2C.

• Patrick Bond of UKZN has sent us a meaty paper on the formidable extent to which the extractive industries are embedded in the SA state.

• Lastly, for some light entertainment on a serious subject...