Harvard Feels the Heat on Fossil-Fuel Divestment

[marmar]

from In These Times:


Harvard Feels the Heat on Fossil-Fuel Divestment
It’s not Al Gore’s movement anymore. Student activists are bringing a new militancy to the fight against climate change.

BY KATE ARONOFF


“Push back. Use social media, use the Internet.”

That was the advice on climate change that former Vice President Al Gore gave to a packed auditorium at South by Southwest this March.

Gore’s Oscar-winning 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, sparked a new sense of urgency with its no-nonsense look at the bleak science of global warming. His advice in 2015, though, seems less than adequate. Almost a decade after An Inconvenient Truth’s release, the climate fight is focused less on raising awareness than on building grassroots power, and college students—using social media, the Internet and more—are leading the way.

On March 19, in the early hours of the morning, 43 students and alumni of Swarthmore College filed into their school’s Finance and Investment Office and plopped themselves on the floor in front of a few anxious administrators. They say they will remain there in rotating shifts until their demand for good-faith negotiations toward fossil fuel divestment is met. More than 1,000 faculty and alumni have expressed support, including UN Climate Chief and Swarthmore alumna Christiana Figueres, who wrote a letter to administrators and students urging divestment.

Swarthmore's occupiers are among the thousands of students across an estimated 400 U.S. campuses calling on their institutions to sell off stocks in the top 200 publicly traded coal, oil and natural gas companies. Divestment goes beyond simply sounding the alarm about climate change to naming a culprit: the fossil fuel industry. The goal is not to hurt companies’ bottom lines—which a loss of shareholders won’t readily accomplish—but to shift popular opinion against the fossil fuel industry and, ultimately, remove its social license to operate. ................(more)

http://inthesetimes.com/article/17812/harvard_fossil_fuel_divestment