Washington Post: “A divestment movement is marching across U.S. college campuses, borrowing tactics from the 1980s anti-apartheid campaign and using them against oil, gas and coal companies to fight climate change. Students are teaming with investment advisers to convince universities, pension funds and institutional investors that they can take a stand against fossil-fuel companies without hurting their returns.”“We have a government that has been taken over by the fossil-fuel industry, so we’re going to pressure the fossil-fuel industry itself,” said Chloe Maxmin, a junior leading Divest Harvard. She added that students, spurred by forecasts of dire climate change in “a time frame well within my generation’s lifetime,” have organized divestment groups on about 400 campuses.
Eight small colleges and nearly two dozen towns and cities have pledged to sell their shares in fossil-fuel firms.
Yet many academic institutions are rejecting the divestment argument, including Harvard and Middlebury College, home to climate activist and professor Bill McKibben. They say that divesting shares of fossil-fuel companies would politicize universities and have little to no impact on the companies, or on society’s reliance on fossil fuels.”
Future Today
