Roughly a decade ago, the first student-led fossil fuel divestment campaign launched at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania with a simple strategy: Expose the unethical political and social impact of fossil fuel companies. In the years since, divestment has evolved from a fringe effort to a vast movement sweeping the country and the globe.
In the past few months alone, divestment campaigns have secured a number of historic victories for climate justice, including getting Harvard, the world’s richest and most prestigious university, to cut its fossil fuel investments.
The divestment movement now has nearly $40 trillion of assets committed to divestment and there is a growing recognition that the movement poses a material risk to the fossil fuel industry. Clearly, divestment is working; public opinion has turned overwhelmingly toward industry accountability and climate action. And, as a result, the industry’s iron grip on the nation’s centers of political power is finally slipping.
In 2021, climate activists made unprecedented progress in their quest to stigmatize fossil fuel producers. Now they are seeking to make 2022 the year in which we completely sever the remaining life support for this deadly industry.
This next level of organizing, sometimes called Divestment 2.0, involves a concerted effort to underline and dismantle the more insidious ways that the industry infiltrates higher education and the centers of public knowledge production, outside of just universities’ endowments.
Divestment 2.0 won’t be easy. Recognizing the divestment movement’s success, the fossil fuel industry and its accomplices are doubling down on their opposition. Rightwing lobbying group the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, is pushing states to enact laws that blacklist companies boycotting the oil industry under the guise of “energy discrimination.” (See companion piece by Jasmine Banks of UnKoch My Campus on page 49.) The industry has also led efforts to restrict fossil fuel protests.
Yet activists know what we’re up against. We must build on the immense momentum of divestment, and work against the lethal reluctance by policymakers including President Joe Biden to invest in a just renewable energy transition with the requisite haste. (Biden, a study by Public Citizen found, has actually approved more oil and gas drilling permits on public lands than Donald Trump.)
That’s why divestment campaigns across the United States and the United Kingdom have begun targeting the less visible links between higher education and the fossil fuel industry. For instance, at Harvard, one top university authority on climate sits on the board of a fossil fuel company, while its public policy school takes in millions of industry dollars for programming and research.
Universities in the United Kingdom, including Oxford and Cambridge, received more than £89 million from major oil companies in 2017–2021. This money stands at odds not only with the universities’ social goals, but also with their academic mission. Scholarly research has long shown that industry funding can warp research agendas and conclusions, jeopardizing academic independence. When deciding to accept this money—particularly for climate, environmental, and energy policy research—universities must choose: Will they stand by their principles and their students’ futures, or with an industry that has spent decades spreading misinformation, attacking academics, trying to silence critics, and engaging in blatant greenwashing?
Of course, divestment is only one-half of the equation. Just and sustainable reinvestment in renewable energy technologies must follow. Meanwhile, those institutions that have yet to take the crucial first step of divesting must continue to feel the heat. Student activists have filed complaints against Yale, Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, and Vanderbilt for their continued fossil fuel investments.
Already, divestment has redefined the bounds of political possibility for climate justice. Now, we all have a role to play in helping the movement to go the full distance and end the fossil fuel era.