If people keep rapidly extracting and burning fossil fuels, there’s no hope of meeting the 2015 Paris Agreement climate change commitments. To ensure a healthy, hopeful future for humanity, governments must stick to their pledge to limit global warming to 1.5 or 2 C above pre-industrial levels by 2050. Many experts agree that to meet that goal, up to 80 per cent of oil, coal and gas reserves must stay in the ground. That makes fossil fuels a bad investment — what analysts call “stranded assets.”

Putting money toward things that benefit humanity, whether investing in clean energy portfolios or implementing energy-saving measures in your home or business, is better for the planet and the bottom line than sinking it into outdated industries that endanger humanity.

Because we still live in a fossil-fuelled world, avoiding investments in dirty fuels and infrastructure is difficult. For individuals who use mutual funds, finding viable plans with no fossil fuel holdings is challenging, but not impossible, especially as demand increases. But while individual investment choices coupled with growing demand for fossil-fuel-free options make a difference, the real momentum is in institutional investments. Even there, public pressure and campaigns have a huge impact.

Many banks and investment advisers are warning clients about the dangers of fossil-fuel-related portfolios, noting that climate agreements, government regulations, reduced demand and market volatility make them risky. Some, such as HSBC, suggest divestment as one route, but note some investors may just want to pull their money from the riskiest sectors, such as coal and oil, or keep investments so they can influence company decisions.

McGill University’s board of governors touted the latter as one reason for rejecting a widespread call to withdraw about $70 million in fossil fuel money from its $1.3-billion endowment fund. But the university appears blind to the problem. In a report to the board, the McGill Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility wrote, “The Committee is persuaded that the beneficial impact of fossil fuel companies offsets or outweighs injurious impact at this time.” In response, many McGill alumni, including David Suzuki Foundation Quebec and Atlantic Canada director-general Karel Mayrand, returned their degrees.

The inability of students, faculty, staff and the public to convince boards at McGill, the University of British Columbia, Concordia University, Dalhousie University and the University of Calgary to divest shows how entrenched the fossil fuel industry is when it comes to large investors. But it also shows that individuals play a major role in getting institutional money out of the industry. Although these campaigns haven’t convince those boards to divest — yet — they’ve raised awareness about fossil fuel investments.

The divestment campaign has also won numerous successes. A growing number of universities, banks, pension funds, unions, churches, cities, insurance companies, individuals and even the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper have pulled funds — which makes fossil fuel investments even shakier. The David Suzuki Foundation works with Genus Capital to ensure that none of its endowment fund is invested in fossil fuel-related funds, and to develop strategies for ethical investing — which hasn’t harmed returns. In fact, Genus reports, “fossil fuel free investing is proving more profitable than conventional investing.”

According to 350.org, the major force behind the divestment movement, “more than 500 institutions representing over $3.4 trillion in assets have made some form of divestment commitment” as of late 2015.

Divesting is just the start. As 350.org notes, reinvesting in “renewable energy, energy efficiency, and climate mitigation and adaptation infrastructure” not only helps the world shift away from fossil fuels, but is also financially wise. One option besides stock portfolios is to reinvest in initiatives that help the climate and the bottom line, such as making buildings more energy efficient. According to the Guardian, “One conservative report calculated that investing $400,000 on efficiency in a 100,000 square-foot building would deliver $1.50 per square foot in reduced energy costs over a similar building without the efficiency” — for an annual saving of $150,000!

Wastefully exploiting and burning fossil fuels is outdated. There’s no reason to put money into industries that destroy the natural systems that make human life possible. But there are many reasons to stop giving them money. It’s time to invest in a healthier future.

Written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation Senior Editor Ian Hanington.

Learn more at www.davidsuzuki.org.

Image: Jack Haskell/Flickr

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About this time I became aware of the fossil fuel divestment movement. Students from over 20 universities across the country are attempting to convince their schools to divest their endowment funds from the top 200 fossil fuel companies within five years, and immediately freeze any new investments in those companies. And I thought, hey, I have a couple of university degrees, maybe I can help.

But first you might be wondering why exactly these students and I are so worked up about climate change and fossil fuel companies. The answer boils down to 3 numbers:

2 DEGREES CELSIUS

Every country in the world has formally agreed to limit the Earth’s temperature rise to two degrees, and recently agreed in Paris to aim even lower.

900 GIGATONS

The amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) scientists estimate is the maximum amount we can burn to have a decent chance of keeping warming under 2C.

2860 GIGATONS

The total CO2 contained in the proven reserves of fossil fuel companies. So if we’re serious about keeping warming under 2C, most of that needs to stay in the ground.

BUT not only are fossil fuel companies committed to burning all of those reserves, they’re spending billions looking for new ones. New UNBURNABLE reserves. So by investing in fossil fuel companies you’re essentially placing a bet on how long they can fool people.

This “carbon bubble” is openly acknowledged by big players in the financial community, including Bank of England (and former Bank of Canada) governor Mark Carney, the IMF, the World Bank, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, and a coalition of 70 investors worth $3 trillion.

But this isn’t just a financial issue, it’s a moral one.

New investigations (available here and here) have concluded that ExxonMobil (and other fossil fuel companies) understood the science of climate change and its implications by the mid-1980s, and then spent decades systematically funding climate denial. That’s some soul-boggling evil right there.

Exxon is now being investigated by New York’s attorney general, and it could be the start of years of lawsuits like those against the tobacco industry after they were caught covering up the health effects of their product.

The fossil fuel industry is not some benevolent group of companies competing on a level playing field to make an honest buck. It’s heavily subsidized, subverts democracy by blocking laws that protect the environment, and funds climate denial lobby groups (there’s lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of evidence for this).

How Will Divestment Help?

The goal of divestment is to revoke the social license of an industry whose business model is not compatible with a liveable climate. Divestment activists are simply saying “It is immoral to profit off of climate change. Period. Exclamation mark.” BUT…

• Isn’t divestment hypocritical since we all use fossil fuels every day?
• Isn’t divestment pointless if it doesn’t bankrupt fossil fuel companies?
• Isn’t shareholder engagement the best way to drive change?

All reasonable questions, and all answered by The Guardian in this handy article.

Even a former CEO of Shell called divestment a “rational approach,” and it must be at least somewhat effective since the industry feels threatened enough by the movement to attack it.

Over 500 Institutions Valued at $3.4 Trillion Have Divested

These include colleges and universities, churches, charities, cities, and others. However only one Canadian university — the University of Ottawa — has joined the fossil free movement. (Congrats to the hardworking students of Fossil Free uOttawa!)

And some have explicitly refused, including Dalhousie, Queen’s, UBC and U of T.

In their reasoning for their decision, the Dalhousie Board of Governors cited their “fiduciary duty to generate reasonable risk adjusted returns from a diverse portfolio of investments.”

But is the primary duty of a university to “generate reasonable returns?” They claim to be preparing students for the future, but how can they claim to do that while profiting from an industry that is actively working to make that future uninhabitable?

Easy, they pretend, and hope the calls for change grow quieter. But in fact, the calls are only growing louder by the day.

And here's where you can help.

A university’s most valuable asset is its reputation, and its alumni network is a crucial part of that reputation. As alumni, you have the power to influence the behaviour of your alma mater if enough of you act together.

THE ASK: ADD YOUR VOICE TO THOSE CALLING FOR DIVESTMENT

Sign a petition to urge your alma mater to divest from fossil fuels, and send the message that you will withhold any donations until they do.

School-specific petitions: McGill University University of Toronto Dalhousie University Queen’s University Mount Allison University

(UBC’s is being finalized and I will post here when it’s up)

Create a new alumni petition for your alma mater, or send any existing ones, to divest@gofossilfree.ca to add it Fossil Free Canada’s list of alumni petitions: gofossilfree.ca/alumni.

You can also sign Fossil Free Canada’s alumni pledge to withhold donations.

I’ve put my degrees where my mouth is and ripped up my Dalhousie and Queen’s degrees to protest their refusal to divest (watch below). Thanks for reading, I hope you’ve been inspired to help!

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At this time last year, building on the momentum generated by Climate Week and the New York People’s Climate March, divestment advocates made an ambitious announcement: a plan to triple the $50 billion in assets individuals and organizations had pledged to divest from fossil fuels by the time of the 2015 Paris UN climate negotiations.

That was an ambitious plan.

But in the year since, according to a new report from Arabella Advisors, the divestment movement exploded in scope and scale increasing fifty-fold, bringing the total combined assets of those divesting to an incredible $2.6 trillion.

It’s safe to say that no one, not even the most optimistic divestment dreamers, could have anticipated this outcome.

So what’s behind the global momentum for divestment?

Climate Change Means Financial Risk

This exponential growth has, in part, to do with the increasing awareness that climate change means financial insecurity.

The risk to investment comes mostly in the form of what are called stranded assets: those fossil fuel reserves that will not be exploited due to efforts to limit climate change.

As Arabella Advisors notes in its new report, concerns about stranded assets and the devaluation of fossil fuels in a carbon constrained world, has been a focus of powerful financial institutions such as Citigroup, HSBC, Mercer, the International Energy Agency, the Bank of England as well as the respected Carbon Tracker Initiative which pioneered analysis on “unburnable carbon.”

HSBC warned investors the movement of investment dollars to the clean energy sector could mean fossil fuel companies will be worth much less in the future.

It turns out investors are realizing that divestment doesn’t mean financial losses. Thanks in part to plummeting global oil prices and the booming clean energy economy, divested portfolios have been outperforming those with investments in fossil fuels.

Climate change also increases the risk to investments by destabilizing the climate, meaning more extreme weather bringing storms or wildfires that, in turn, flood cities or destroy homes. Many international insurance groups have also warned that climate change threatens the value we hold in all kinds of assets.

A large 'carbon bubble' on Wall Street during the 2014 Flood Wall Street event. Photo: Zack Embree.

Divestment Movement Full of Unusual Suspects

If you think divestment is for dogged climate activists, think again.

What the explosion of the divestment movement shows is, far from attracting a small group of political lefties, divestment has been taken very seriously by pension funds and private companies.

At this time last year, Arabella notes the divestment movement relied on the support of NGOs, foundations, student-led movements on university campuses, and other “mission-driven organizations” like climate advocacy groups.

Now, amazingly, over 95 per cent of the assets committed to divestment are held by large pension funds and private-sector businesses like insurance companies.

But that doesn’t mean those original divestment groups aren’t still growing the movement.

In June 2015 Pope Francis released his encyclical, making a strong moral argument for climate action. Faith organizations represent $24 billion in divestment assets.

Universities are also steadily joining the divestment movement. In the last year university divestments have tripled and major institutions, like the University of California, which holds a $98 billion portfolio, are joining on.

In addition, local governments and public pensions are also building the divestment movement. For example, earlier this month the California General Assembly voted to divest its $476 billion public employee pension fund from companies generating 50 per cent or more of their revenue from the coal industry.

Finally, major foundations from around the world are also divesting, recognizing redirecting their investments can be used as a powerful tool for achieving their organization’s mission. So far, Arabella reports 116 foundations have pledged to divest a shared $10 billion in assets.

Global Divestment Movement. Image: Arabelle Advisors.

Divestment Has Gone Global

Divestment is no longer a U.S. preoccupation.

In 2014, 78 per cent of divesting institutions were based in the U.S., according to Arabella. Today only 57 per cent of these institutions are based in the U.S. with divestment hot-spots popping up all over the globe.

Notably Canada is second after the U.S. as a leader in divestment.

Altogether, the estimated 436 groups supporting divestment represent more than 646 million individuals worldwide.

Signage from the 2014 Flood Wall Street event. Photo: Zack Embree.

Clean Energy is All the Rage

Divestment doesn’t just mean pulling your investments from fossil fuel holdings — it also means redirecting investment dollars to alternatives like clean energy, green tech and climate solutions.

In 2014, investment in clean energy skyrocketed to $310 billion globally.

That number is expected to continue growing with an estimated $785 billion in divested assets being pledged to finding climate solutions.

Bill Gates personally pledged to invest $2 billion in renewable technologies, saying “in addition to mitigating climate change, affordable clean energy will help fight poverty.”

Although companies like the coal monolith Peabody Energy argue fossil fuels are necessary to bring electricity and opportunity to developing nations, the divestment movement is working to bring clean and renewable energy directly to these places in a move that skips right over highly-polluting energy sources (this is known as leapfrogging).

And this makes a lot of sense, given renewable energy is now cost-competitive with fossil fuels and much more popular. Renewable energy is seen as the most effective way to both reduce and alleviate poverty in many countries while simultaneously working to cool the climate.

Arabella concludes that the divestment movement shows political leaders that the world is more ready for meaningful climate action than perhaps previously realized.

In December nations will meet in Paris to sign a global climate agreement. The Arabella report shows that leaders have the political cover needed to take bold steps at this important meeting.

But also, perhaps most significantly, the report shows that despite what the top leaders of the world decide, the momentum behind the divestment and climate movement is likely to continue on regardless. 

All photos by Zack Embree.

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At least 75 per cent of known fossil fuel reserves must remain in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change, but not only are fossil fuel companies committed to burning all of those reserves, they’re spending billions searching for more. Wrecking the climate in exchange for money is officially the worst business model. Truck Nutz, you’re off the hook.

Every time we read another bowel-loosening article on climate change it’s easy to feel powerless because fossil fuel companies are so deeply entrenched in our economy and politics. But one way people are pushing back is divestment. If institutions remove their investments from fossil fuel companies, it sends the industry a message in a language it understands — money — that its business model is no longer acceptable. We don’t like you anymore. You’re losers.

And if you’re an institution that claims to serve the public interest, it’s immoral for you to invest in fossil fuels. It’s not in the public interest to wreck the climate, so you shouldn’t be profiting from that wreckage. The goal isn’t to bankrupt fossil fuel companies, it’s to disgrace them. And as with tobacco companies, the eventual goal is to force them to pay for some of the damage they’ve caused.

Tens of billions of dollars have already been divested by colleges and universities, churches, charities, cities, and others. But Canada — shockingly — is lagging. In fact, no Canadian university has fully divested. But it just so happens that I have degrees from two of those universities.

So to Dalhousie President Richard Florizone: You announced last fall that Dalhousie wouldn’t divest, citing your “fiduciary duty to generate reasonable risk adjusted returns.” If you want to generate reasonable returns for a living, go work at a bank. Your job is to prepare students for the future, so you need to stop profiting from an industry that is actively working to make that future uninhabitable.

I’ve started a petition for alumni. The signatories commit to withholding any donations to Dalhousie until you commit to divest. And further, if there’s no change to your position, this fall I’m going to rip up my degree on camera and I invite others to join me.

I’ve started a similar petition for Queen’s alumni. To Queen’s Principal Daniel Woolf: You signed a Climate Change Statement of Action recognizing that Queen’s has an “obligation to demonstrate leadership in areas of community, national and global importance.”

Now’s your chance to demonstrate that leadership. Queen’s has formed an advisory committee that’s currently deliberating on divestment and they’ll announce their opinion in the fall. If at that time you choose to side with the fossil fuel industry, I’m throwing a degree-ripping party and you won’t be invited. 

Petition for Queen’s alumni: https://campaigns.gofossilfree.org/petitions/queen-s-university-alumni-for-fossil-fuel-divestment

Petition for Dalhousie alumni: https://campaigns.gofossilfree.org/petitions/dalhousie-alumni-for-fossil-fuel-divestment

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This is a guest post by Cam Fenton, Canadian tar sands organizer with 350.org.

Last week the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions released a report criticizing the fossil fuel divestment movement. While the report came as a surprise, the arguments didn’t, especially given that they were based more on building a straw man to support the report’s conclusions than actually understanding the movement.

At best the report fails to accurately reflect the demands and the theory of change of fossil fuel divestment movement, and at worst it fails to understand the true role and power of organizing, action and social movements.

The report gets a lot wrong and a little bit right, but most of its problems are undercut by three assumptions at the core of its argument – assumptions which seem to have been cherry-picked by the authors to support their own conclusions rather than reflecting those articulated by the movement. In fact the divestment movement has only ever been founded on one assumption that “if it’s morally wrong to wreck the climate, it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage.”

The movement has been helped along by financial developments related the carbon bubble, the advent of reinvestment as a strategy and a slew of others. Still the core demand of the divestment movement remains for public institutions to divest from the top 200 fossil fuel companies.

Three faulty assumptions about divestment

1. The first “assumption” the movement is charged with is that divestment alone will keep carbon underground. Will one institution divesting do this? No, but dozens of public institutions refusing to do business with the world’s biggest fossil fuel giants will help build the political and moral will for governments and others institutions to leave fossil fuels in the ground.

Take New Jersey based utility company NRG for example. NRG built itself on coal and in late in 2014 announced that it was seeking to cut 90 per cent of its carbon emissions because they “don’t relish the idea that year after year we’re going to be graduating a couple million kids from college…that come out of college with a distaste or disdain for companies like mine.”

This one single shift, a direct result of the divestment movement, will keep three billion metric tons of carbon in the ground.

Energy Information Agency map showing retired coal plants in the U.S. 

This is just one example from a campaign that an Oxford University study found to be the fastest growing divestment movement in history. The same study, which looked at past divestment efforts found that “in every case [they] reviewed, divestment campaigns were successful in lobbying for restrictive legislation.”

In other words, that while divestment may not itself leave carbon in the ground, it’s a tactic that will play an integral role in forcing policy change to do just that.

2. PICS’s second assumption is that one can simply replace high carbon investments with low carbon alternatives. This is not a demand of the UBC divestment campaign, which the report uses as its case study. UBC’s campaign recognizes the divestment is not simple, which is why UBC campaigners are demanding first a freeze of new investments, then a five year divestment phase.

Even with this, many divested institutions have chosen to move faster and in doing so are driving fundamental shifts in the investment market. Investment managers like Canada’s Genus Capital are already managing tens of millions in fossil fuel free funds because their clients asked them to replace high carbon investments with low carbon ones. The Divest/Invest coalition the report cites is driving a new wave of impact investment into climate solutions alongside grassroots reinvestment efforts supporting frontline impacted communities to develop and build resilient climate solutions.

Banks worldwide are rolling out fossil fuel free investment options because of popular demand (in part driven by the divestment movement). This undermines another of the report’s objections – the lack of easily divested options. The divestment movement is overcoming the very barriers the PICS authors claim to impede its success.

3. Finally, and falsely, the authors assert that the primary goal of divestment is to protect investors from the risk of the carbon bubble. Divestment is about organizing, building power and about bankrupting the reputation of the fossil fuel industry in order to revoke its political and social power.

That said, when the top 200 fossil fuel companies were taken out of Standard & Poor’s S&P 500 and tested back over 10 years, it showed that the divested portfolio outperformed by an average of 30 basis points.

Does this mean that divesting protects from the carbon bubble entirely? No, but it does point out that divesting from fossil fuels reducing an investor’s exposure to the volatility of the fossil fuel market, something the carbon bubble is sure to exacerbate.

Of course, that’s just a bonus.

Getting divestment all wrong

So why did they get things so wrong?

The main reasons is probably that report demonstrates a near complete lack of understanding of social movements. While the report pays lip-service to the symbolic power of divestment, it shuffles it to the side failing to grasp that throughout history people powered social change has routinely been won through symbolic action.

Take the Civil Rights Movement as an example. The overwhelming majority of campaigns were symbolic – were they to boycott buses, sit-in at lunch counters or take freedom rides across state lines. No one expected any campaign alone to achieve the visionary goal of ending racial oppression in the United States, but understood that with each campaign won the movement got one step further on the path to victory.

Even in past divestment movements it was never the goal of campus divestment to bankrupt the South African Apartheid regime, but rather to morally bankrupt it in the eyes of the public to pave the way for greater change.

Representatives from the University of Waterloo's divestment movement at the People's Climate March in New York City. Photo by Zack Embree.

Divestment organizers recognize that this campaign is just one piece of a greater whole, another thing the report fails to grasp.

Student divestment organizers believe so fervently that divestment alone is not enough than many spend hours working in other parts of the climate movement. They engage in electoral strategies, they support frontline communities, they intervene at international climate negotiations, they fight infrastructure projects near their homes and work to build renewable energy. Students organize iconic mass civil disobedience actions, like the student led XL Dissent action.

Last September student divestment organizers recruited over 50,000 of their peers to march in New York City at the Peoples Climate March. In fact, the only people who seem to think that divestment exists in a bubble are the movement’s detractors.

The bottom-line is: if the strategies the PICS report outlines were going to work in a market and a political system controlled by the fossil fuel industry they would have already.

Ignoring this fact is like trying to play checkers while your opponent is using a chess board. The game has been stacked against us and so we need to change the rules. To do that we have to take on cultural, political and economic power of the fossil fuel industry through organizing, mass action and campaigning. The fossil fuel divestment movement is one part of a climate movement that is finally doing just that and emerging with people power leading ahead of policy pontification.

Hundreds of thousands of people around the globe are organizing and fighting for divestment because we need to rapidly and fundamentally change our energy system – and that’s something only a movement can do.

This article originally appeared on gofossilfree.org.

Image Credit: Zack Embree

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Ditching fossil fuel stocks and replacing them with green energy investments will have little effect on greenhouse gas emissions until there are government and institutional policy changes, according to a new report.

The white paper, written by two University of British Columbia (UBC) researchers working with the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, finds that even if divestment campaigns – now being waged at more than 30 Canadian universities – are successful, there will be minimal impact on emissions, partially because governments, rather than shareholder companies, control the vast majority of the world’s oil reserves. If conventional energy companies were serious about avoiding surpassing the 2 degrees Celsius temperature limit recommended by scientists and policy makers, that would require "deep structural changes," the authors, Hadi Dowlatabadi and Justin Ritchie, argue.

However, the good news for those fighting for divestment, is that, with the right policies in place, divestment could speed up the change to a low carbon economy and change social norms when it comes to investing, the researchers concluded.

“Divestment movements are socially significant, but currently exert little influence on financing transition to sustainability," Dowlatabadi said.

“A lot of very well-meaning people put a lot of energy into the divestment campaigns and they are our friends – we believe that the symbolic value of their activities is significant,” Dowlatabadi told the Globe and Mail. “But for that symbolic value to be translated into progress towards decarbonization of the economy, all sorts of supported policies are needed.”

One of the reasons divestment may not be enough to tackle climate change is that fossil fuel energy is integrated into multiple areas, including low carbon industries.

“This means that divestment may end up being greenwash, when money is taken away from fossil fuel companies and reinvested, for example, in banks, which, typically, fund such companies anyway,” Dowlatabadi said.

Among policy changes suggested for municipal and provincial governments are the creation of an energy transition bank that could offer bonds and help ease investors into the low carbon economy while supporting B.C.’s green tech sector, a low carbon transition investment tax credit and support for public fund managers.

Universities and other institutions should set timelines for divestment, review their goals and screening of investments and use in-house expertise to come up with divestment strategies.

Those working on divestment campaigns should consider launching a separate low carbon or fossil free endowment fund so the performance can be compared to traditional funds, possibly with crowdfunding help, and explore how investment returns fit with broader campus sustainability goals, the paper says.

The University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University are circulating student and faculty-led divestment petitions and more than 200 UBC professors recently voted for the university to divest from the 200 most polluting companies over the next five years. The UBC Faculty Association is currently voting on whether the endowment fund should divest.

In December, Concordia University committed to divest itself of $5-million of fossil fuel investments and has plans for a new sustainable investment fund.

Image Credit: Daily Collegian via Flickr

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Pressure is mounting on the University of Victoria Foundation’s board to rid itself of investments in fossil fuel related stocks, but, for now, the board is continuing to gather information and is sticking with the investing approach it fine-tuned last year.

Divestment supporters turned out in force Monday evening for a forum on climate change and divestment, organized by UVic and Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, with speakers ranging from Suncor Energy Inc. vice-president Steve Douglas to Malkolm Boothroyd, a spokesman for Divest UVic, and wild applause for those in favour of immediate divestment showed where the sympathies lay.

If it’s wrong to wreck the Earth’s climate, it is wrong to invest in fossil fuels, Boothroyd said.

“Responsibility means leaving those fossil fuels in the ground. We can’t have it both ways. UVic has got to make a decision and I believe it is UVic’s responsibility to divest from fossil fuels,” he said to a standing ovation from some of the audience.

For panel member Crystal Lameman of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation, the basic question comes down to taking any possible action, including divestment, to stop problems caused by “extreme resource extraction” in the Alberta oil sands.

“If you breathe the air and drink the water, this is about you,” she said.

But supporters of divestment already have it both ways as petroleum products are in everything from lipstick and Lycra to cell phones and paint said Douglas, emphasizing that divestment does not solve climate change. He argued 90 per cent of oil reserves on the planet are controlled by governments so reducing investments in the small percentage of private companies will not help.

The conundrum is that there is no doubt that climate change is real and burning fossil fuels is one of the culprits, but fossil fuels are essential to modern life, he said.

“How do you reconcile those two ideas?” he asked.

“How do we transition our energy system to meet the energy needs of the future in a climate challenged world? … We have to transition in a way that doesn’t dislocate our economy and our social system.”

Last year, UVic professors and other groups demanded that all new investment in companies whose primary interests are fossil fuel extraction, processing and transportation should be frozen and that the administration should initiate a three-year divestment plan.

However, the University of Victoria Foundation, which manages the $370-million endowment fund – used for scholarships, bursaries and research –  wrote to the university’s board of governors in September saying that it would maintain its current responsible investment policies that incorporate environmental, social and governance considerations. As part of the Foundation’s efforts to explore direct involvement in organizations that promote responsible investing, the board voted to become a signatory to the United Nations Principals for Responsible Investment.

Last September $39-million of the endowment fund, or about 10.5 per cent of its assets, were invested in energy sector stocks.

The lack of action is infuriating some of the UVic students, who were gathering names on a petition Monday evening.

“I don’t think the university students are going to stand for anything less than divestment,” said Ida Jorgenson.

“I think this is an issue that is not going to go away. In the end they are going to have to confront it.”

The divestment movement is taking root at universities throughout North America, with active campaigns at about 30 Canadian universities including Simon Fraser University and the University of B.C, where faculty is currently voting on whether to ask the board of governors to change its policy on responsible investment.

However, while some herald it as a positive step to address climate change, others believe it is misguided.

The moral high ground is in climate solutions, not in the drop in the bucket represented by university divestment, said Cary Krosinsky, a Yale University lecturer and co-founder of the Carbon Tracker Initiative.

“If we are serious about (addressing climate change) we need a global initiative. We need a really big action. Divestment doesn’t even come close,” he said.

However, divestment does not necessarily mean a loss for the endowment fund and portfolios that have divested from fossil fuels performed well during the last year, he said.

But for panelist and Vancouver Sun columnist Stephen Hume, the issue is trying to address climate change in a polarized environment.

“Among the delusions is that there’s a them and us. There is no them, only us,” he said.

“This isn’t a theatre. It’s a canoe and we are all in that canoe and we had better start paddling in the same direction or we’re going to tip over and we are all going to drown,” he said.

That means the involvement of government, said Hume, exhorting students to get out and vote.

The theme was picked up by PICS executive director Thomas Pedersen, who challenged the audience to take action on climate change by voting.

“Make this an issue of key political importance in the federal election,” he said.

Image Credit: Daily Collegian via Flickr

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This is a guest post by Cameron Fenton, Canadian Tar Sands Organizer with 350.org.

This week, the cover of the Economist proclaimed "the fall in the price of oil and gas provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix bad energy policies." The article teased on the cover explains how low oil prices create the space for governments to make rapid leaps to change energy policy instead of "tinkering at the edges" urging policy makers to use this moment to "inject some coherence into the world's energy policies."

The article gets a lot of things right. Eliminating fossil fuel subsidies and forcing big polluters to pay for the mess they're making are crucial policy steps, but the piece also presents some more dubious proposals. The last paragraph of the Economist piece is the perfect example of the inherent dangers ahead.

After calling for policy measures to constrain climate change, the author encourages that "governments should be encouraging the growth of seamless global energy markets" through steps like approving the Keystone XL pipeline or lifting restrictions on energy exports. It's the logic of free-market economics laid out in Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine applied to the climate crisis – that moments of crisis be exploited to reduce regulations and open markets.

Without a big, bold and diverse climate movement these ideas may never have a chance, or worse could be transformed into policies that leave out or sacrifice those communities on the frontlines of climate change and extraction. If we've learned anything in the past decade about climate policy it's that just because policy makes sense, that doesn't mean it will happen.

It's now up to us to seize this moment, not to follow politicians but to push them and demand the kind of energy revolution that the best scientific minds on earth are saying we need. This is a moment build on the momentum of the Keystone XL fight to hold politicians to higher standard, to refuse to accept weak policy and empty commitments on climate.

According to the Carbon Tracker Initiative, $1.1 trillion of potential capital expenditure on fossil fuel projects, including $271 billion in tar sands developments, require a price of oil above $95 a barrel. With the current price hovering close to half that, Stephen Harper's government has been forced to delay the release of their 2015 budget until April. 

An eight year push to expand the tar sands is now coming face to face with the reality of the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel age, and it's something that neither Harper nor big oil are equipped to deal with.

The fossil fuel industry's business model, echoed in the policies of the politicians they prop up, is to extract every dollar and barrel they can before the bottom drops out. It's a model of business as usual that has set us on a crash course, both economically and climatically.

Like past crises, like the 2008 recession, it's unlikely that those truly responsible – CEO's and their political allies – will feel the biggest hit. Instead it's the workers, thousands of who have already been laid off, the communities and the people who will be left out in the cold.

Much of the time, movements move slow and steady, but sometimes we have a chance to sprint. This is one of those moments, and if we wait too long we might miss it. The good news is we don't have to start from scratch. The beginning of the end of the fossil fuel age has started at campus divestment campaigns, in frontline communities organizing against extraction, where local communities are stopping new fossil fuel infrastructure, and together in the streets at mass mobilizations like the Peoples Climate March.

This is the climate movement's moment to seize. It's a moment for the labour movement and climate movement to join together to demand investment in re-tooling and re-training workers to build the new economy.

It's a moment to divest from dangerous fossil fuels like tar sands and reinvest in the solutions that are here and growing, especially those being led by those communities most impact by extraction and climate change. It's a moment to recognize that climate justice needs racial, social and economic justice, and most of all, it's a moment to be bold.

Image Credit: Natural gas flaring in North Dakota by Tim Evanson.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This is a guest post by Andrew Gage, Staff Counsel and head of the Climate Change program at West Coast Environmental Law, and Michael Byers, the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. This article originally appeared in the Globe and Mail.

Climate change is no longer a distant threat. Peer-reviewed science has already linked climate change to drought in Texas and Australia, extreme heat in Europe, Russia, Japan, and Korea, and storm-surge flooding during Hurricane Sandy and Typhoon Haiyan.

Climate change is already causing about $600-billion in damages annually. Here in Canada, the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy estimated that climate change will cost Canadians $5-billion annually by 2020.

Canadian oil and gas companies could soon find themselves on the hook for at least part of the damage. For as climate change costs increase, a global debate has begun about who should pay.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu recently called on global leaders to hold those responsible for climate damages accountable. “Just 90 corporations – the so-called carbon majors – are responsible for 63 per cent of CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution,” Tutu said. “It is time to change the profit incentive by demanding legal liability for unsustainable environmental practices.”

So far, the fossil fuel industry has successfully opposed litigation for climate damages, brought in the United States by victims of hurricanes and sea level rise. But new areas of litigation often fail at first; in the 1980s, tobacco companies were still boasting that they “have never lost a case to a consumer, have never settled, and do not expect that picture to change.” As the tobacco industry learned, changes to the interpretation and application of laws sometimes occur quite rapidly.

Nor is litigation in the U.S. or Canada the only thing the fossil fuel industry should worry about. It is becoming increasingly likely that companies could be sued by victims of climate change overseas, in countries with quite different legal systems. There, they might face lawsuits based on constitutional rights to a healthy environment, strict liability for environmental harm, or any number of other legal principles that don’t currently exist in Canadian law.

Once a foreign court has ordered a Canadian company to pay for climate damages, that order is a debt – which Canadian courts can be asked to enforce. Chevron is currently fighting court actions in Canada, the United States and Brazil that seek to enforce a $9.5-billion award handed down by the supreme court of Ecuador – for pollution caused by oil spills.

Moreover, new laws could be introduced to facilitate climate litigation. When Canadian provinces encountered impediments to their ability to sue tobacco companies for public health costs, they eliminated those impediments by passing new laws. It’s not hard to imagine countries impacted by climate change enacting new laws to clarify the liability of greenhouse gas producers.

Five companies traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange are among the “carbon majors” – Encana, Suncor, Canadian Natural Resources, Talisman, and Husky currently are collectively responsible for about $2.4-billion a year of global climate damages.

Canadians are broadly supportive of the “polluter pays” principle – the idea that those who cause pollution should pay for the harm. But because climate change has seemed far off, there has been relatively little discussion about who should pay. It has been assumed – by industry, politicians, even some environmental activists – that oil and gas companies can continue producing with impunity, at least until a global climate agreement is reached.

But rising climate costs cannot be born only by taxpayers and by those who suffer the impacts of climate change. We believe that a new global awareness of the moral and legal responsibilities of the carbon majors will lead to a wave of climate litigation. Foreign lawsuits – with damage awards that are potentially enforceable in Canada – will be difficult and expensive to defend.

Image Credit: Zack Embree

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Professors at the University of Victoria (UVic) are demanding the school’s administration freeze all new investment in fossil fuels and initiate a three-year divestment of all fossil fuel holdings.

The university endowment fund has approximately $21 million currently invested in fossil fuels.

In an open letter addressed to Lisa Hill, Chair of the University of Victoria Foundation and copied to university president Jamie Cassels, faculty members voiced concerns over the ethical and financial viability of fossil fuel investments, noting “the growing North American movement, led by students, to see their universities act as moral leaders for their communities by disinvesting from such companies.” The full list of signatories can be seen here.

Kelsey Mech, Divest UVic student organizer and chair of the UVic student society, said such strong faculty support for the campaign comes as a surprise. “I am floored. I am so blown away,” she told DeSmog Canada.

“Our goal was to have 100 faculty sign on by April 30th. We just blew that target out of the water as we are already at 160, representing just shy of 20 per cent of faculty,” she said. Nearly 2000 UVic students have signed a petition in support of the divestment campaign.

“I’ve been organizing on campus at the University of Victoria on various environmental issues for the past five years, and I have never seen something light up the campus like divestment has,” Mech told DeSmog Canada. “I’m beyond thrilled, and so grateful for everyone who is willing to take a public stand for our collective futures.”

In their open letter faculty members state “the science is clear” on human-caused climate change, which is expected to cost the Canadian economy $5 billion per year by 2020. The adverse effects of a warming planet, they note, has already killed thousands and creates vulnerable environmental refugees. The burning, transportation and refinement of fossil fuels, they add, perpetuates these negative impacts. 

“We should not support, let alone profit from, companies responsible for this suite of effects.”

The divestment campaign will be presented to the board of the endowment fund and the board of governors at UVic this summer.

Environmental studies professor and letter signatory Jessica Dempsey said faculty support for the initiative is growing: “everyday there are more signatories as more faculty become aware of the issue.”

“I think both students and faculty are looking for ways to seriously engage and confront the climate crisis, in a time when we have no governmental leadership, and no signs of it on the horizon,” she told DeSmog Canada.

Although there has been some resistance on campus, says Dempsey, the majority of it has not been against divestment in principle.

“There is pushback on campus, of course,” she said. “But what is surprising is how much of that pushback – at least so far – comes not in terms of outright disagreement, but rather is focused on the difficulty of implementation. A common refrain is that ‘it’s complex.’”

The UVic endowment and pension investments are managed by trustees with a fiduciary duty “that legally enshrines them to maximize returns,” Dempsey explains, leading to questions about how these and similar funds can account for ethical considerations as well as their legal mandate to maximize returns to the beneficiaries. Pensions, she notes, are governed separately from the university's endowment.

According to Kelsey Mech “the university has asked fund managers to consider environmental, social and governance factors when deciding on investments, but there is no formal or mandatory screening process to follow.”

These kinds of investment ‘complexities’ should be confronted, according to Dempsey, and the university is an ideal place to do so.

“Surely fiduciary duty needs to be revised, or reinterpreted so that we don’t retire to an increasingly uninhabitable planet,” she said.

And concerns surrounding investment in fossil fuels bring up a host of other considerations for Dempsey, especially in terms of employee pensions.

“If you can believe it, my faculty pension has no ethical screens. We can invest in arms, tobacco, and so on. It’s outrageous, really. But of all places in society, the university is well-positioned to lead, to find creative solutions to these complexities.” She clarified that her UVic pension is not, as far as she knows, invested in arms or tobacco, but there is no screen in place that would prevent the pension trustees from doing so.

She added, “who is better placed than UVic law faculty and students to innovate and propose concrete changes to currently unethical but legal mandates like fiduciary duty to maximize returns?”

James Rowe, another professor at the School of Environmental Studies and lead organizer for the campaign, said there is also a strong financial case to be made for divestment.

“The current valuation of oil companies includes huge reserves of fossil fuels that cannot be burned if humanity wants to avoid run-away climate change. When policy making inevitably catches up with the scientific consensus on climate change, share prices for oil companies will be negatively impacted, generating losses for investors,” he said.

Investment in fossil fuels “conflicts” with the university’s environmental leadership role on campus, the open letter states, including the housing of the influential Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions.

“As with the movement against apartheid in South Africa, students have challenged the university to fulfill its role as a leader on issues of justice. And as with the anti-apartheid movement, this movement will not retire until it has succeeded,” the letter reads.

Divestment, according to Mech, is not only practical, but gives institutions like the university a productive way to move the climate conversation forward.

“Divestment is an extremely impactful way to shift the narrative around our reliance on fossil fuels and to force people to recognize the urgency of the climate change crisis,” she said.

“When major institutes, like universities, choose to divest from these dirty industries it sends a strong message that we are no longer willing to accept the status quo and are demanding a transition to a clean energy future,” she said.

More than 300 other North American universities are currently home to a divestment campaign. Recently the Simon Fraser University Faculty Association voted to create a fossil fuel free option in their pension and the City of Seattle voted to divest from fossil fuels.

Image Credit: K8 via Flickr

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After years of economic crisis and the rise of social movements like Occupy Wall Street, the idea that there is something rotten in the financial sector has become commonplace. Banks that were too big to fail before the bailouts are bigger than ever, and investment in oilsands expansion, fracking, arctic oil exploration and deep-sea drilling continues at an alarming pace.

Financial activist Brett Scott describes the situation succinctly: “The financial sector right now is crap at social justice and crap at ecological sustainability.” But Scott believes there’s another crucial point that often gets overlooked in critiques of the financial system.

"Even if the financial sector was socially just and sustainable, there is still the sense that we actually have no democratic access to it," says Scott. "Politicians always seem fixated about how to make the sector into a more benign dictatorship, rather than focusing on how to increase people's sense of personal participation in it."

Reducing the sense of personal alienation that people feel in relation to the financial system was one of the goals that motivated Scott to write The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance, published last year by Pluto Press. The book explains the basic functioning of financial markets in language that’s easy to understand, and provides ideas to contest the power of big money in determining the shape of our collective future. Since the continued growth of the fossil fuel industry relies heavily on investment from major financial institutions, Scott’s work provides a much-needed critical counterpoint to the system.   

Compared to the popular portrayals of stockbroker decadence in films like The Wolf of Wall Street, Scott’s book doesn’t rely on a story of bad behavior to explain why the financial system produces such spectacularly negative effects. Speaking as someone who has worked in the financial sector, Scott insists that most traders bear little resemblance to exaggerated cinematic villains like Gordon Gekko. When it comes to character or moral bearing, “there’s nothing fundamentally different between the people in the financial sector and those in the rest of the world,” Scott says.

For Scott, both moral judgment and technical discussions about how the financial system could be better regulated are less important than figuring out how to make finance more democratic.

“I’m not actually that interested in the big battles over the regulatory stuff, or how good or evil some particular CEO is,” he says. “I’m more interested in the power dynamic between the person on the ground and the financial sector.”

It was the unequal power dynamic between financial insiders and outsiders that motivated Scott to find out firsthand what makes the world of finance tick. Hailing from a background in activism and NGO work in South Africa, Scott had grown frustrated with the fact that he was fluent in macro-level critiques of the financial system, but still didn’t really understand the details of how money gets invested in concrete projects like mines and oil and gas operations.

Intent on figuring out the game from the inside, Scott moved to London in 2008 to join a start-up derivatives brokerage firm, where he spent two years learning the ropes of high finance. While he was on the phone persuading clients to buy derivatives, Scott was also doing a kind of activist research, learning how different financial products work and studying the relationships between financial professionals.

One of the key take-home points from his anthropological foray inside the financial sector is that investment decisions are not just about business, but are always inherently political. “One thing I always try to get across to activists is that fund managers are making political decisions with their money,” says Scott. “You’re deploying resources that you could deploy somewhere else, in a way that benefits some people and not others, and that’s incredibly political.”

Decisions about where to invest are ultimately decisions about what kind of a world we want to live in. If the financial system functioned under democratic oversight, putting money into projects like building desperately needed renewable energy infrastructure would be a no-brainer.

But as it stands, investment decisions are made by a small moneyed aristocracy of bankers and their corporate and political allies—which is why money continues to flow into profitable but destructive dirty energy.  

As Scott sees it, the undemocratic power concentrated in the financial sector is reinforced through the vocabulary of economic rationality that shapes our everyday lives. “The pseudo-scientific language of the financial sector is one way that people distance themselves from thinking about the underlying exploitation,” Scott explains.

We’ve become so accustomed to hearing endless reports about economic growth, yield spreads and returns on equity that it’s easy to lose sight of the human and ecological reality underneath the jargon.

A useful strategy for waking ourselves up to the social relationships that actually constitute economic activity is to denaturalize the language we use. Instead of talking about money, Scott refers to “COGAS”: claims on goods and services. It’s a simple linguistic move, but one that can help to break the spell of finance and get us thinking about the fact that money is ultimately just a socially-constructed medium of exchange, not some magic totem with unquestionable power over our lives.

Scott views strategies such as the oilsands divestment campaign in much the same way. Rather than use divestment as a tool to actually starve companies working in oil and gas extraction of operating funds, Scott sees the campaign as a means of changing the cultural consensus around fossil fuels.

“That to me is a really key thing about divestment, is how do you start to make it increasingly socially unacceptable to assume that it’s normal to invest in destructive projects. I don’t think the divestment projects in themselves are going to stop it, but they challenge the notion that something is normal,” he says.

Both in his book and on his blog Suit Possom, Scott’s writing is full of ideas for how to challenge the daunting authority of the financial sector, and experiments that could help to create better systems of sharing, exchange and investment that can go beyond the logic of profit. Somewhere between radical activist and entrepreneur, Scott is informed by what he describes as a “hacker ethos.”

“A hacker approach involves exploring a system and developing an acute sense of how you’re connected into it,” Scott says. Whether you’re into cryptocurrencies like BitCoin or disruptive forms of shareholder activism, The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance offers some solid tools for taking control of the financial system.

You can find more of Brett Scott’s writings on financial activism and alternative economics on his blog, including plans for a London School of Financial Activism, due to launch this year.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.