to fight climate change, college students take aim at the endowment portfolio - nytimes
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12/5/12 To Fight Climate Change, College Students Take Aim at the Endowment Portfolio - NYTimes.com
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Bill McKibben, a writer turned advocatefor carbon reduction, is on a nationaltour to build support for the divestment
To Stop Climate Change, Students Aim at CollegePortfolios
Stephen Maturen for The New York Times
Students in Minneapolis, seeking steps to cut atmospheric carbon levels to 350 parts per million, known as the safe level.
By JUSTIN GILLISPublished: December 4, 2012
SWARTHMORE, Pa. — A group of Swarthmore College students is
asking the school administration to take a seemingly simple step to
combat pollution and climate change: sell off the endowment’s
holdings in large fossil fuel companies. For months, they have been
getting a simple answer: no.
As they consider how to ratchet up
their campaign, the students suddenly
find themselves at the vanguard of a
national movement.
In recent weeks, college students on
dozens of campuses have demanded
that university endowment funds rid
themselves of coal, oil and gas stocks.
The students see it as a tactic that
could force climate change, barely discussed in the
presidential campaign, back onto the national political
agenda.
“We’ve reached this point of intense urgency that we need
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12/5/12 To Fight Climate Change, College Students Take Aim at the Endowment Portfolio - NYTimes.com
2/4nytimes.com/2012/…/to-fight-climate-change-college-students-take-aim-at-the-endowment-portfolio.html
campaign. to act on climate change now, but the situation is bleaker
than it’s ever been from a political perspective,” said
William Lawrence, a Swarthmore senior from East Lansing, Mich.
Students who have signed on see it as a conscious imitation of the successful effort in the
1980s to pressure colleges and other institutions to divest themselves of the stocks of
companies doing business in South Africa under apartheid.
A small institution in Maine, Unity College, has already voted to get out of fossil fuels.
Another, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, has adopted a broad investment policy that
is ridding its portfolio of fossil fuel stocks.
“In the near future, the political tide will turn and the public will demand action on
climate change,” Stephen Mulkey, the Unity College president, wrote in a letter to other
college administrators. “Our students are already demanding action, and we must not
ignore them.”
But at colleges with large endowments, many administrators are viewing the demand
skeptically, saying it would undermine their goal of maximum returns in support of
education. Fossil fuel companies represent a significant portion of the stock market,
comprising nearly 10 percent of the value of the Russell 3000, a broad index of 3,000
American companies.
No school with an endowment exceeding $1 billion has agreed to divest itself of fossil fuel
stocks. At Harvard, which holds the largest endowment in the country at $31 billion, the
student body recently voted to ask the school to do so. With roughly half the
undergraduates voting, 72 percent of them supported the demand.
“We always appreciate hearing from students about their viewpoints, but Harvard is not
considering divesting from companies related to fossil fuels,” Kevin Galvin, a university
spokesman, said by email.
Several organizations have been working on some version of a divestment campaign,
initially focusing on coal, for more than a year. But the recent escalation has largely been
the handiwork of a grassroots organization, 350.org, that focuses on climate change, and
its leader, Bill McKibben, a writer turned advocate. The group’s name is a reference to
what some scientists see as a maximum safe level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, 350
parts per million. The level is now about 390, an increase of 41 percent since before the
Industrial Revolution.
Mr. McKibben is touring the country by bus, speaking at soldout halls and urging
students to begin local divestment initiatives focusing on 200 energy companies. Many of
the students attending said they were inspired to do so by an article he wrote over the
summer in Rolling Stone magazine, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”
Speaking recently to an audience at the University of Vermont, Mr. McKibben painted the
fossil fuel industry as an enemy that must be defeated, arguing that it had used money
and political influence to block climate action in Washington. “This is no different than
the tobacco industry — for years, they lied about the dangers of their industry,” Mr.
McKibben said.
Eric Wohlschlegel, a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, said that continued
use of fossil fuels was essential for the country’s economy, but that energy companies were
investing heavily in ways to emit less carbon dioxide.
In an interview, Mr. McKibben said he recognized that a rapid transition away from fossil
fuels would be exceedingly difficult. But he said strong government policies to limit
emissions were long overdue, and were being blocked in part by the political power of the
incumbent industry.
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12/5/12 To Fight Climate Change, College Students Take Aim at the Endowment Portfolio - NYTimes.com
3/4nytimes.com/2012/…/to-fight-climate-change-college-students-take-aim-at-the-endowment-portfolio.html
A version of this article appeared in print on December 5, 2012, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: TheDivestment Brigade.
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Mr. McKibben’s goal is to make owning the stocks of these companies disreputable, in the
way that owning tobacco stocks has become disreputable in many quarters. Many colleges
will not buy them, for instance.
Mr. McKibben has laid out a series of demands that would get the fuel companies off
350.org’s blacklist. He wants them to stop exploring for new fossil fuels, given that they
have already booked reserves about five times as large as scientists say society can afford to
burn. He wants them to stop lobbying against emission policies in Washington. And he
wants them to help devise a transition plan that will leave most of their reserves in the
ground while encouraging lowercarbon energy sources.
“They need more incentive to make the transition that they must know they need to make,
from fossil fuel companies to energy companies,” Mr. McKibben said.
Most college administrations, at the urging of their students, have been taking global
warming seriously for years, spending money on steps like cutting energy consumption
and installing solar panels.
The divestment demand is so new that most administrators are just beginning to grapple
with it. Several of them, in interviews, said that even though they tended to agree with
students on the seriousness of the problem, they feared divisive boardroom debates on
divestment.
That was certainly the case in the 1980s, when the South African divestment campaign
caused bitter arguments across the nation.
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Brent Summers contributed reporting from Burlington, Vt.
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12/5/12 To Fight Climate Change, College Students Take Aim at the Endowment Portfolio - NYTimes.com
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