Universities should keep leading Australia's push to divest from fossil fuels
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Version 0 of 1. In the UK, Archbishop Desmond Tutu has demanded that his alma mater – King’s College London – sell off its fossil fuel shares and Oxford’s former finance director threw his weight behind calls for divestment by helping to take over a university administration building. In the US, Harvard alumni – including Star Wars actress Natalie Portman – have backed student calls for civil disobedience later this month. At historic Swarthmore College near Philadelphia, 44 students have been occupying the president’s office since mid-March. Related: Top academics ask world's universities to divest from fossil fuels And in Australia, on 22 April, students, staff and faculty will rally at universities across the country to say the time has come to step away from investments in yesterday’s technology. The fossil fuel divestment movement – which one study found to be the fastest growing such anti-corporate campaigns in history – has won over dozens of cities across the world. Last week the Paris City Council voted to divest, just as news came that wind turbines were being installed on the Eiffel Tower. Philanthropies and charities around the world are doing the right thing too. Arguably the most symbolic moment of the whole campaign came when the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the family that is heir to the world’s original fossil fuel fortune, decided last September that it was neither prudent nor moral to own coal, oil and gas shares and voted to divest. Religious communities ranging from the Uniting Church in Australia and America’s United Church of Christ to the World Council of Churches have divested. In March, Anglican bishops from around the world joined the call. The divestment fight has been made easier by the fact that fossil fuel investments are increasingly risky: in fact, fossil-free portfolios have handily outperformed market indexes over the last years. But even with all that, the battle has been hard fought at universities around the world. Many major colleges joined in quickly – world-leading schools from Stanford to Sydney to Scotland to Stockholm are somewhere in the process of divesting, and often their calls have been loud and powerful. The University of Dayton, in the US state of Ohio, for instance, divested its $600m endowment last summer when the university’s president said: We cannot ignore the negative consequences of climate change, which disproportionately impact the world’s most vulnerable people. It’s never easy, though, because so many of the richest and most powerful university donors and trustees come from the fossil fuel or finance industries, and they are working hard to stop the campaign. That’s because they know it’s effective – nothing has done as much to spread the essential truth about our climate change predicament, which is that the world’s fossil fuel companies have four times as much carbon in their reserves as scientists say we can safely burn. These aren’t normal companies – if they carry out their business plan, the planet tanks. You can tell how important this fight is when you look at reactions to divestment efforts: when the Australian National University divested some of its shares from seven resource companies, Australia’s mining elite – and even the prime minister, Tony Abbott, and treasurer Joe Hockey – did all they could to undermine their effort and scare off any would-be divestors: there were dozens of articles in the Australian Financial Review attacking the move as a threat to the future of the richest people in the country. That’s why it’s so important that universities lead in this fight. Because they understand where the real threats to our future lie. It’s in their labs that we learned the facts about global warming, and it’s their engineers who have helped lower the costs of solar panels by 90% in the last decade, to the point where they can replace the burning of coal on which we once depended. Not only that, but our universities are crowded with young people who are learning for the lifetime ahead of them. A lifetime that will be increasingly impossible as the temperature warms. Look at what’s happened to Australia with 1 degree of global warming; now imagine a further 3 or 4 degrees in the lifetimes of those currently studying for their degrees. Related: The Wellcome Trust’s polite business chats won’t save the Earth | John Sulston The normal order of things at a university is that the young learn from the old. This is time-honoured and appropriate; elders have learned things in the course of their lives that are worth passing on. The physics of climate change upends that traditional order – in this case, the moral and practical claims of the young must take precedence. Knowledge – maybe even wisdom – are the theoretical stock-in-trade of a university. It’s time for their leaders to prove that they understand the science, the economics and the ethics at play in this greatest of human crises. Divestment is the test of our time. |