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 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 e-mail.
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 grass-roots 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 sold-out 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.
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 lower-carbon
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.
The issue then was whether divestment, potentially costly, would have
much real effect on companies doing business in South Africa. Even today,
historians differ on whether it did. But the campaign required prominent people
to grapple with the morality of apartheid, altering the politics of the issue.
Economic pressure from many countries ultimately helped to force the
whites-only South African government to the bargaining table.
Mr. Lawrence, the Swarthmore senior, said that many of today’s
students found that campaign inspirational because it “transformed what was
seemingly an intractable problem.”
Swarthmore, a liberal arts college southwest of Philadelphia, is a
small school with a substantial endowment, about $1.5 billion. The trustees
acceded to divestment demands during that campaign, in 1986, but only after a
series of confrontational tactics by students, including brief occupations of
the president’s office.
The board later adopted a policy stating that it would be unlikely to
take such a step again.
“The college’s policy is that the endowment is not to be invested for
social purposes” beyond the obvious one of educating students, said Suzanne P.
Welsh, vice president for finance at the school. “To use the endowment in
support of other missions is not appropriate. It’s not what our donors have
given money for.”
About a dozen Swarthmore students came up with the divestment tactic
two years ago after working against the strip mining of coal atop
mountains in Appalachia, asking the school to divest itself of investments in a
short list of energy companies nicknamed the Sordid 16.
So far, the students have avoided confrontation. The campaign has
featured a petition signed by nearly half the student body, small
demonstrations and quirky art installations. The college president, a
theologian named Rebecca Chopp, has expressed support for their
goals but not their means.
Matters could escalate in coming months, with Swarthmore scheduled to
host a February meeting — the students call it a “convergence” — of 150
students from other colleges who are working on divestment.
Students said they were well aware that the South Africa campaign
succeeded only after on-campus actions like hunger strikes, sit-ins and the
seizure of buildings. Some of them are already having talks with their parents
about how far to go.
“When it comes down to it, the members of the board are not the ones
who are inheriting the climate problem,” said Sachie Hopkins-Hayakawa, a
Swarthmore senior from Portland, Ore. “We are.”
No comments:
Post a Comment