by Walter Brasch
Long before the price of gas and oil began
to plummet, socially conscious churches, universities, non-profit
organizations, and local governments began to divest themselves of fossil fuel
stock and shock the fossil fuel industry to understand the environmental and
public health concerns.
The World Council of Churches, which represents
about 590 million Christians in 520,000 congregations, decided in July that to
continue to hold fossil fuel stock would compromise its ethics, and recommended
that the 349 member denominations consider divesting oil and gas stock.
Six of
the eight Anglican dioceses of New Zealand and Polynesia, and four dioceses in
Australia divested their portfolios of fossil fuel stock.
In the United States, the United Church of Christ and the
Unitarian Universalist churches became the first denominations to begin
to divest themselves of fossil fuel stock. Both denominations have a long
history of fighting for social justice.
Also
divesting are Quaker, Episcopal, and several other denominations. Several
synods of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America have passed resolutions
asking the national board and local churches to divest themselves of fossil
fuel stocks.
The Union Theological
seminary, with a $108.4 million endowment, became the nation’s first seminary
to divest itself of fossil fuel stock. The Rev. Dr. Serene Jones, the
seminary’s president, explained the decision: “It is ever clear that humanity’s addiction to fossil
fuels is death-dealing—or as Christians would say, profoundly sinful.”
Several
religious groups that have shares in Chevron asked the corporation in 2011 to
go “above and beyond regulatory requirements” to protect the
environment and public health. Chevron flippantly dismissed the request. The
corporation claimed, it “is already committed to meeting or exceeding all
applicable laws and regulations [and the suggestions] would merely duplicate
Chevron’s current efforts and thus would be a waste of stockholder money.”
College
students, staff, and faculty have been active in pushing their institutions to
eliminate fossil fuel stocks from their portfolios. The result has been an
awareness of a social issue that was not seen since students pressured their
colleges to divest funds in tobacco companies and in corporations that dealt
with the apartheid government of South Africa.
“If we don’t
deal with climate change now, we consign our grandkids to an unlivable planet,”
said Unity College president Dr. Stephen Mulkey. Unity, which became the
nation’s first college to divest its endowment portfolio of fossil fuel stock,
specializes in environmental and natural sciences.
Among three
dozen colleges and universities that have committed to divesting their
portfolios of fossil fuel stock are Foothill–DeAnza Community College, Green
Mountain College, Humboldt State University, San Francisco State University, the
University of Dayton, and Hampshire College, which in 1977 in protest of
apartheid policies, was the first U.S. college to eliminate all stocks related
to South Africa.
Pitzer
College, a liberal arts college in Southern California, divested about $4.4
million of its $5.5 million in fossil fuel stock in December, and pledged to
work to eliminate most of the rest of the stock in fossil fuel industries. The
college has about a $124 million endowment.
Stanford
University announced in May it would no longer hold stock in the coal industry,
but did not include divesting oil and gas stock in its $18.7 billion endowment
fund. About 300 Stanford University professors published an open letter to the
administration this month to request the university divest itself of all fossil
fuel stock. Among the signers were Drs. Elizabeth A. Hadley, senior associate
vice-president; Donald Kennedy, former Stanford president; Roger Komberg, Nobel
Prize winner in chemistry; and Douglas Osheroff, Nobel Prize winner in physics.
However,
Harvard University, whose $32.7 billion endowment is the largest among
educational institutions, doesn’t plan to eliminate fossil fuel stocks from its
portfolio. Harvard President Dr. Drew Gilpin Faust told the New York Times that in spite of
wide-scale student protests, eliminating fossil fuel stocks is not “warranted
or wise,” and that the university’s portfolio is “a resource, not an instrument
to impel social or political change.”
David Crane, CEO of NRG, one of the nation’s
leading energy providers, said he didn’t “relish the idea that year after year
we’re going to be educating a couple million
kids from college, who are going to be American consumers for the next 60 or 70
years, that come out of college with a distaste or disdain for companies like
mine.”
The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, founded on
income from oil exploration and development, declared in October it would
divest fossil fuel stock. Stephen Heintz, president of the $860 million
philanthropic foundation, said his executives had already divested its
portfolio of coal and tar sands stocks. Heintz said the Foundation will invest
in more renewable energy companies.
Several dozen U.S. cities and counties, as
early as 2012, have begun the process to divest themselves of fossil fuel
stocks and to urge their independent pension boards to divest. San Francisco in
April 2013 began divesting about $580 million of fossil fuel stock, and by 2019
will stop purchasing stock of any company associated with fossil fuel
exploration and development. Seattle, Wash., Mayor Mike McGinn in December
2013, a month before leaving office, asked the city’s pension board, which
oversees a portfolio of about $1.9 billion, to “begin exploring options for moving
existing investments from fossil fuel companies.” The city had $17.6 million
invested with ExxonMobil and Chevron.
Investing in renewable energy, especially
with the increase in jobs in those industries and the rapid decline in the
costs of solar and wind energy to consumers, appears to be the better
investment strategy—and one that sends a message that protection of public
health and the environment, combined with stopping the destruction of the ozone
layer, is far more important than destroying the Earth.
[Dr.
Brasch, an award-winning social issues journalist, is author of 290 books,
including Fracking Pennsylvania, an
in-depth look at the effects of high volume horizontal fracturing.]
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