Colleges are keeping their fingers crossed when they tell students they’ll divest in fossil fuels.
Climate change is a priority issue for students and colleges, but schools aren’t totally willing to commit to divestment, reports Bloomberg. Most of the time, it’s all about the semantics. The $1.5 billion Georgetown Univeristy endowment says it wants to tackle climate change through divestment. But the amount it’s taking out for direct coal investments is negligible. Oxford University in the U.K. made a similar pledge to purge its $2.6 billion endowment of direct coal and oil-sands companies, but it didn’t even have any such direct investments. The 10 wealthiest schools that have pledge to divest since last April manage more than $30 billion total in assets. Their divestment commitments total little more than $25 million.
“These efforts are pure window dressing,” said Frank Wolak, an economics professor who directs Stanford’s energy and sustainable development program. “And, much to my surprise, the student groups are complicit in this deception.”
Six of the 10 richest schools have limited their divestment by only ridding themselves of direct investments, not money run by outside managers. Some only focus on coal, leaving oil and gas investments. The universities defend themselves saying they “encourage” outside managers to divest, and their promises are part of a bigger carbon-cutting effort. Besides, it’s their “legal duty” to the schools to still invest with the intent of getting returns, they say. Harvard, Yale, and other schools use the latter defense to keep from divesting at all. Writes Bloomberg:
“The concerns of the students are understandable but the message from the divestment movement is fundamentally misguided,” said Robert Stavins, the director of Harvard’s environmental economics program. “We should be focusing on actions that will make a real difference.”
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