Guest blog: Divesting from Climate Change
This post was written by one of the 2050 Climate Group's Young Leaders, Sophie Baumert. Sophie is a Politics and Philosophy graduate and has involved in the University of Glasgow Divestment Campaign, working as a research coordinator.
Addressing climate change is an enormous challenge requiring global efforts and fundamental changes to how we live. Faced with this difficult task, any person may feel powerless, seeing their own changes in personal lifestyle as inadequate compared to the magnitude of the issue. How can my recycling, cycling to work, and reducing consumption, have a valuable impact on the reduction of carbon emissions humanity as a whole needs to achieve? The question is even more pressing as individual action seems dwarfed by emissions caused by corporations and governments continuing business as usual, producing and consuming fossil fuels whilst profiting. For instance, in 2013, a study found that two thirds of carbon dioxide and methane emissions can be traced back to merely 90 fossil fuel companies.
Here is where the fossil free movement and its divestment campaign come in. The argument is simple: climate change leads, besides other issues, to human suffering. Companies like BP, Shell, or Exxon directly exacerbate climate change through their inherent business practices, namely the extraction, production and burning of fossil fuels, thereby raising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere further and further. Therefore, it is unethical for institutions to financially profit from the fossil fuel industry. Hence, the divestment movement, which demands that institutions remove investments from the fossil fuel industry, i.e. ‘divest’.
However, the argument continues. Reasons for divesting are not merely of moral nature. Holding shares in fossil fuel companies cannot be financially viable in the long run. Predicted costs of climate change rise with our failure to decrease CO2 emissions in the near future. Thus, any profits made from fossil fuel companies now will be overshadowed by impeding costs of dealing with severe weather events, food shortages, diseases, and mass migration. Humanity will have to move beyond fossil fuels, as there is only a limited amount of coal, oil, and gas left which we can safely burn, after which point the value of fossil fuel companies will crash.
This is the basic rationale of the divestment campaign which originated in the US and swept to the UK in 2013, when the Glasgow Uni Climate Action Society (GUCA) started their divestment campaign, supported by People & Planet, a student-led organisation coordinating the national fossil free campaign. On October 8th 2014, after one year of dedicated campaigning, the University of Glasgow decided to divest from fossil fuel companies, the first university of the UK to do so.
Since then, many more institutions and individuals in the UK and worldwide, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, British Medical Association, and World Council of Churches, made the same decision, divesting an estimated amount of $3.4 trillion. Although the direct effect of the University of Glasgow divesting from fossil fuel companies is arguably minimal, its effects go beyond the financial impact. Every decision to divest further validates the narrative that investing in fossil fuel companies is unethical and potentially financially threatening, as is increasingly the case with the coal industry, although the divestment campaign is only one of many factors in this decline.
More importantly, the divestment campaign proved to a group of students that their small-scale actions can make a large impact. Some of GUCA’s members now started a new campaign that raises the stakes by demanding that the Strathclyde Pension Fund divest its investments worth £752 million from fossil fuel companies. Compared to asking the University of Glasgow to divest £18 million, this is a big leap and a considerable challenge. Taking on such a task would have been unimaginable, I believe, without the campaigners learning that their concerted efforts can make a change beyond the individual sphere. After all, they managed to influence the financial management of a major university in the UK.
The divestment campaign gives people ways of organising at a local level and bringing about a visible impact in their immediate environment. This is inspiring and, if many such initiatives connect worldwide, has potential to help alter the reputation and value of fossil fuel companies. This way the divestment campaign can serve as a bridge between personal and private responses to climate change, which we often struggle to make in our daily lives.