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Saturday, March 9, 2013

Rolling Stone: The Case for Fossil Fuel Divestment

On the road with the new generation of college activists fighting for the environment

Bill Mckibben is interviewed by Ira Glass on his bus tour. Photo: Steve Liptay

by Bill McKibben, Rolling Stone Magazine, February 22, 2013

It's obvious how this should end. You've got the richest industry on earth, fossil fuel, up against some college kids, some professors, a few environmentalists, a few brave scientists.
Oh, and remember – this is supposed to be an apathetic college generation. The veteran leader Ralph Nader, in a speech in Boston last year, said kids today were more passive than any he'd seen in 45 years. "Nothing changes if you don't have fire in your belly," he said. "You are a generation without even embers in your belly." [he doesn't get around much, does he?]
I had a front row seat to watch this explosion – actually, I was up on stage, on a nationwide tour that sold out concert halls across the country early this winter. With a bevy of progressive heroes (author Naomi Klein, indigenous activist Winona LaDuke, filmmaker Josh Fox, Hip Hop Caucus founder Lennox Yearwood) and with Rolling Stone as a media sponsor, we took our biodiesel tour bus from Seattle to Atlanta, Maine to Utah, trying to spark a new front in the climate fight. Unknowingly, we'd timed this DoTheMath tour pretty well: post-Sandy, as the hottest year in American history was drawing to a close, we had no trouble finding allies. In fact, we were serving less as a virus then as a vector, letting activists glimpse their emerging strength. Every night, kids from a dozen local colleges would shout out their resolve, and then gather in "Aftermath" parties to get down to organizing.
bill mckibben naomi klein
Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein present during the bus tour.
Steve Liptay

The logic of divestment couldn't be simpler: if it's wrong to wreck the climate, it's wrong to profit from that wreckage. The fossil fuel industry, as I showed in Rolling Stone last summer, has five times as much carbon in its reserves as even the most conservative governments on earth say is safe to burn – but on the current course, it will be burned, tanking the planet. The hope is that divestment is one way to weaken those companies – financially, but even more politically. If institutions like colleges and churches turn them into pariahs, their two-decade-old chokehold on politics in DC and other capitals will start to slip. Think about, for instance, the waning influence of the tobacco lobby – or the fact that the firm making Bushmaster rifles shut down within days of the Newtown massacre, after the California Teachers Pension Fund demanded the change. "Many of America's leading institutions are dozing on the issue of climate," says Robert Massie, head of the New Economics Institute. "The fossil fuel divestment campaign must become the early morning trumpet call that summons us all to our feet."
And it's that simple truth that, over the next few semesters, will help students overwhelm boards of trustees and reluctant presidents. This movement didn't come out of nowhere, after all – despite Nader's pessimism, if you knew where to look, you could see the pot boiling for several years. On hundreds of campuses, students had persuaded their administrations to build green buildings and bike paths; tens of thousands of students had traveled to Washington for giant PowerShift conventions to learn how to lobby on global warming. And since there's no longer anything theoretical about climate change, this movement's not going to dissipate – with each new storm and drought, it will gain tragic power.
In fact, if you sit down and game out the future, you start to realize that students, faculty, and engaged alumni have a surprisingly good hand. Trustees and presidents may resist at first – they are, almost by definition, pillars of the status quo. But universities, in the end, are one of the few places in our civilization where reason still stands a good chance of prevailing over power (especially since students are establishing some power of their own as they organize). And here's where reason inevitably leads:

All this means that climate is no longer a fringe concern. Seventy-four percent of Americans said global warming was affecting the weather.  On campus, opinion is near-unanimous. "For one of my classes I just did a poll," says Stanford freshman Sophie Harrison, a leader in the divestment fight. "Out of 200 people I only found three who didn't believe in climate change."
Meanwhile, the scientists keep pushing their research forward. Twenty-five years ago, they were predicting the trouble we're seeing now; when they look forward another quarter century, things get truly scary – and academics get much less academic. In the past, just a lonely few, like NASA's James Hansen, were willing to go to jail, but in November, the premier scientific journal, Nature, published a commentary urging all climate scientists to "be arrested if necessary" because "this is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species' existence." In December, at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union where most of the year's cutting-edge climate studies are released, one panel examined the question "Is Earth Fucked?" The scientist leading the session finished by saying probably – but "if a global environmental movement develops that is strong enough, that has the potential to have a bigger impact in a timely manner." Make of it what you will: The American scientist who has spent the most time on the melting ice of Greenland, Ohio State's Jason Box, took to the stage at our Columbus tour stop to demand OSU and other colleges divest.
So when, for instance, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust says "our most effective impact on climate change" will come from "what we do with our teaching, our research. . . the students who may be the heads of the EPA or all kinds of organizations," it's partly true – that scholarship is important. But it's also clearly not doing the job alone, since the temperature keeps going up.
Hence divestment. Sometimes, colleges can exert influence without selling stock – on many issues, like sweatshop labor, they may have been smarter to keep their stock, so they could use their position as shareholders to influence corporate decision-making. "But when we were talking about sweatshops, it wasn't because we were opposed to t-shirts. We just needed some changes in how companies operated," says Klein. Adds Dan Apfel, who as head of the Responsible Endowments Coalition has coordinated much of the emerging divestment furor, "If you're Apple, we want you to produce your computers in ways that are good. But we like computers. The fossil fuel industry, though – its existence is fundamentally against our existence. We can't change them by investing in them, because they're not going to write off reserves. There's no way they can be made sustainable, in the same way tobacco can't be made healthy."
(2) Universities understand math, and in this case the math about who's to blame is Q.E.D. clear. It points straight at the fossil fuel companies.
By now, most activists know the three numbers I outlined in this magazine last summer, in a piece that immediately went viral: If we're to hold planetary warming to the two degrees that the world's governments have said is the absolute red line, we can only burn 565 more gigatons of carbon – but the fossil fuel companies, private and state-owned, have 2795 gigatons of carbon in their reserves. That is, they have five times the coal and oil and gas needed to roast the earth, and they fully intend to burn it – in fact, a company like Exxon boasts about spending a hundred million dollars a day looking for more hydrocarbons, all the fracking gas and Arctic oil and tar sands crude they can find. "The math is so irrefutable," says Klein, the veteran anti-corporate activist who's been helping lead the fight. "The fossil fuel companies haven't even bothered to dispute it. And coming to the issue with numbers like that, putting them in an academic context, that's radical. It makes it hard for the boards of trustees – who after all are supposed to be numbers people – to deal with. Suddenly it's the students who are the number crunchers, and the idealistic fantasists are the bank presidents on the board who don't want to deal with the reality staring them in the face."
In the 1980s, 156 colleges divested from companies that did business in apartheid South Africa, a stand that Nelson Mandela credited with providing a great boost to the liberation struggle. "I remember those days well," says James Powell, who served as president of Oberlin, Franklin and Marshall, and Reed Colleges. "Trustees at first said our only job was to maximize returns, that we don't do anything else.  They had to be persuaded there were some practices colleges simply shouldn't be associated with, things that involved the oppression of people." Since then, colleges have taken stances with their endowments on issues from Sudan to sweatshops. When Harvard divested from tobacco stocks in 1990, then-president Derek Bok said the university did not want "to be associated with companies whose products create a substantial and unjustifiable risk of harm to other human beings." Given that the most recent data indicates fossil fuel pollution could kill 100 million by 2030, the coal, oil and gas industry would seem to pass that test pretty easily; it's also on the edge of setting off the 6th great extinction crisis, so everyone over in the biology lab studying non-human beings has a stake too. Here's how Desmond Tutu, Mandela's partner in the liberation of South Africa, put it in a video he made for the DoTheMath tour: "The corporations understood the logic of money even when they weren't swayed by the dictates of morality," the Nobel Peace Prize-winner explained. "Climate change is a deeply moral issue, too, of course. Here in Africa, we see the dreadful suffering of people from worsening drought, from rising food prices, from floods, even though they've done nothing to cause the situation. Once again, we can join together as a world and put pressure where it counts." Or, you know, not.
It's not like administrators, faced with global warming, are deciding for themselves. Carbon dioxide molecules stay in the atmosphere a century on average, which means, according to the modeling team at Climate Interactive, that "by the time a 55-year-old college president who insists today that a portfolio requires fossil-fuel investment reaches the age of retirement, only 11% of the CO2 released during the class of 2016's education will have left the atmosphere." In fact, says former college president Powell, such an analysis suggests trustees have a quasi-legal duty to do all they can about climate change: "The board is supposed to make sure that the endowment allows for intergenerational equity, that the students who are going to Oberlin in 2075 get as much benefit from it as those there now. But with global warming, you're guaranteeing a diminution of quality of life decades out."
In the face of logic like that, an increasing number of colleges seem determined to at least engage the debate. For instance, my employer, Vermont's Middlebury College, which always ranks in the top five liberal arts colleges in the country, has held a series of panel discussions and open debates this month and its trustees expect to make a decision in the spring. And since Middlebury was the first college in the country with an environmental studies department, its student body, faculty and ranks of alumni are filled with people who recognize the potential power of the gesture. Similar discussions are underway at Bates, Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr, Earlham, Pitzer. But it's not just small liberal arts schools. Students at the University of New Hampshire delivered a thousand signatures to the president before Christmas demanding divestment; at the neighboring University of Vermont, state legislators have begun pressing for action, at the urging of a big student campaign. At Cal, the student senate has backed divestment by a wide margin; UNC students outdid their Harvard counterparts, voting 77% for divestment.
So let's imagine for a moment that students and their allies are able to convince many colleges and universities to do the right thing. Especially for those who sign on fairly quickly, and with a minimum of rancor, there could be real advantages. "After we divested," said Mulkey of Unity College, "we started receiving donations online. We're seen an uptick in our inquiries from students. I think that will transform into an improvement in enrollment. That's not why we did it, but it's a fact." Powell, recalling the moment when Oberlin divested its apartheid stock, says, "I definitely feel it rallies people behind their alma mater.  Whenever there's change – abolishing fraternities, going co-ed – there's always the worry the alumni won't like change. We see over and over again that these claims are false – you may take a hit for a year or two, but in the end you're changing with the world." Some alumni, says Klein, "may be resentful. But for many more, it will be exciting. Suddenly the university they came from is not just a site of nostalgia, but a place where they can have an influence on the future."
That influence could be decisive, too. Less in financial terms, though the $400 billion in American college endowments is no small sum, than in political and cultural ones. A college is where a society thinks about itself, after all; if suddenly those collections of knowledge denounce the fossil fuel industry for what it is, a rogue force outlaw against the laws of physics, it will make a difference. Fossil fuel companies care a lot about image, after all – it's what makes it easy for them to exert their political control. It's why they run those back-to-back-to-back TV ads about "clean coal," [which exists nowhere] those endless commercials with the polar bears and the drilling rigs. Colleges could strip them of their social license, and if they lead, others will follow. "The speed at which this campaign has spread is causing ripples in the investment community," said Andy Behar, the CEO of As You Sow, a campaign partner that promotes environmental and social corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy. "We anticipate more 'carbon-free' investment options coming onto the market over the coming months for endowments, foundations, and other institutional investors who want to move investment dollars to build a clean energy future." Already, at least two major Christian denominations have announced they'll consider resolutions to withdraw their money. One could imagine the fossil fuel industry as the new tobacco, humbled enough that it actually has to come to the bargaining table in D.C. and a dozen other crucial capitals.
On other campuses, it will go less smoothly; in some places, doubtless, colleges will go to war with themselves, with trustees hunkered down against the increasingly strident demands of students and faculty. But even in those cases, the fight will be valuable, educating each new incoming class about the culprits behind climate change. It's hard to imagine that it's all just a short-lived fad. "Global warming is not going away in anyone's lifetime," says Powell – and from now on, each superstorm, each megadrought will become a moral challenge to the university brand, a reminder that one's education or one's salary is being paid for with the not-so-gradual extinction of the planet's possibilities. Students, I think, are determined to believe in the colleges they love – but they're also up to the fight. At Pennsylvania's Swarthmore, for instance, they've been demanding divestment for more than a year without luck. "Particularly at small liberal arts schools, students are conditioned to believe that college boards and administrators will always do what's right – that if we just dialogue with administrators enough, they'll come around," says Hannah Jones, who graduated from Swarthmore last spring. But in fact, even at a school like Swarthmore with a deep Quaker tradition, "the administration and the board are part of an institutional hierarchy designed to support the status quo," so "it's up to students, faculty, and alumni to build power and to apply pressure in a way that demands bold, swift action." And as students learn to build those campaigns, knowledge spreads quickly. Swarthmore students, for instance, are hosting a 'convergence' this week for activists from many campuses; for those who can't make the trip, has become a kind of clearinghouse for videos, manifestos, essays, updates.
It's not perhaps a militant generation – maybe that was what struck Nader, more used to the uprisings of the 1960s with their broad themes of cultural liberation. But in the wake of Occupy, many young people are drawing connections. "We want to make sure we don't just get divestment, but that we build real political power across wide coalitions," says Jones. And if you're a college administrator, you should probably fear folks who know how to use YouTube, Twitter and Facebook better than you do; "militant" sounds good, but "persistent," "organized" and "committed" are probably a deeper threat to the status quo. And you can prove it by watching the same students running divestment campaigns quickly joining the larger environmental movement: all of a sudden, they're helping run the opposition to the Keystone Pipeline, or working hard with their Appalachian allies in the fight against mountaintop removal coal mining.

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