Opinion | Divestment Is Pushing Money Away From Fossil Fuels – The New York Times

Source: Opinion | Divestment Is Pushing Money Away From Fossil Fuels – The New York Times

On Tuesday, a little less than a week before the start of the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, activists announced that the fossil fuel divestment campaign has reached new heights. Endowments, portfolios and pension funds worth just shy of $40 trillion have now committed to full or partial abstinence from coal, gas and oil stocks. For comparison’s sake, that’s larger than the gross domestic product of the United States and China combined.

It’s gone far beyond Unity College. Institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge (and more than half the public universities in the United Kingdom) have committed to divest; so have the University of California and the University of Michigan. Most of the Ivies are on board now, as are Catholic powerhouses like Georgetown; in the last couple of months, places as diverse as Harvard, Loyola University Chicago and Oregon’s Reed College have joined in.

…Since most people don’t have oil wells or coal mines in their backyards, divestment is a way to let a lot of people in on the climate fight, because they have a link to a pension fund, mutual fund, endowment or other pot of money. When we began the divestment campaign, our immediate goal was, as we put it, to “take away the social license” of Big Oil: It was a vehicle to let people know the essential truth about the fossil fuel industry, which is that its oil, gas and coal reserves held five times as much carbon as scientists said we could safely burn. Later this week, the heads of the big oil companies will testify before Congress about whether their companies misled the public about global warming and sought to stymie action on the problem.