The phrase refers to Fossil Free Yale, a social and environmental justice group on campus that is advocating for the University’s swift divestment of its endowment from the fossil fuel industry, on the basis that the companies involved in this business are the primary contributors to the world’s current climate crisis. “[It] is a movement that attempts to raise awareness around what we see as the most urgent issue of this era, namely climate change,” Hannah Nesser, BR ‘16, said.
Though their efforts are varied and extensive, one central component of the Fossil Free Yale campaign is an open petition to the Trustees of the Yale Corporation, in which the organization condemns investment in this industry as being “socially irresponsible.” The petition asserts that Yale’s current portfolio supports the continued human consumption of fossil fuels and emission of harmful, heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, factors that combine to form “a serious threat to the environment and human welfare.” Ariana Shapiro, BR ’16, another member of Fossil Free Yale, remarked how these effects are becoming extremely visible to us here in the Northeast. “Climate change is an issue that affects every single person,” Shapiro said. “We’re seeing it more and more. Things like Hurricane Sandy and Nemo are showing that climate change isn’t just reserved to island countries and warm parts of the world, but that even people in affluent parts of the world are going to feel the effects of it.”
Yale’s local campaign arrives as part of a larger, national divestment movement that began last fall and has now spread to over 250 college campuses across the U.S. This rapid escalation in activism stems primarily from the work of Bill McKibben, a leading environmental advocate, and his organization 350.org, which focuses on building grassroots movements globally to solve the climate crisis.
In July 2013, McKibben authored a landmark article in Rolling Stone that communicated three things in startlingly simple terms: there is impending grand-scale danger associated with the Earth’s changing climate; there is a threshold for future carbon emissions beyond which human life is unsustainable; and, finally, that the fossil fuel industry has every intention to burn far past this threshold. “We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn,” McKibben writes in the piece. “We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.”
Seeking to embody that intervention, college students in every corner of the United States have set their sights on a tangible goal: endowment divestment. The excitement and momentum of this movement can be felt in dorm rooms, dining halls, and courtyards in every region of this country. “I think the rapid spread of the divestment movement indicates there’s lots of passion,” McKibben wrote in an email to the Herald. “Everywhere I go I see young people who are fired up to make a difference.” He noted that a great virtue of the campaign is that it reduces the potentially paralyzing global challenges of our generation down into a context that college-aged individuals can approach confidently. In his mind, this is why divestment is so interesting: “It’s suddenly made American colleges a key front line in the climate crisis.”
* * *
Divestment is a strategy that been used to push for policy change in past, most notably during the 1970s and ’80s, when apartheid South Africa was at the center of discussion and controversy on many university campuses in this country. Students staged protests all over the nation, including some at Yale during 1986 and 1987 that involved over 300 participants. Demonstrators also constructed a mock shantytown on Beinecke Plaza, and local authorities intervened and made several arrests when activists resisted the administration’s demand that the “eyesore” be removed. Nationally, 155 universities had fully divested from all companies complicit in apartheid by 1986. However, while Yale did adhere more closely to ethical investing standards during this period of student pressure, the University did not join these 155 institutions in complete divestment.
Legacy is an important motivation for many who do social and environmental justice work, and the students of the modern movement are eager to be on the right side of history. “Last summer the Arctic melted,” McKibben said. “In 50 years the only question they’ll ask about our time is: ‘So, the Arctic melted, and then what did you do?’ And for students in particular—if you’ve got 70 years left on this planet, the bulk of them are going to be spent dealing with this crisis.” In a resounding note of urgency, he finished by saying, “We get on top of it now, or it’s going to be on top of you most of your life.”
Students involved with the divestment movement have internalized this message, expressing that institutions like Yale are here to construct and maintain a healthy, sustainable world for future humans. “We do have this stake in the future, that’s why we exist,” Shapiro said. “Universities are here to train and educate this next generation of leaders… that’s why I think, as a university, we have a role in divestment.”
Yet while thinking decades ahead, Shapiro and the other members of Fossil Free Yale are working intensely in the present. After a fall semester of brainstorming, networking, drafting, and research, the community has entered the spring term with force, hosting a kickoff event in early February that drew over 80 students and included a Skype-in appearance by McKibben. They have been distributing flyers, tabling in some of the areas of campus, and flooding Yale’s online social networks with statuses and updates about the local campaign and the greater national movement. They have sent representatives to large, student climate convergences at peer institutions like Brown University and Swarthmore College, as well as the Presidents’ Day “Forward on Climate” rally in Washington DC, which saw the attendance of over 40,000 Americans protesting and urging President Obama to reject the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, a project that has been deemed “game over for the climate” by NASA climatologist James Hansen.
Most recently, on Mon., Mar. 4, the group held an event on cross campus as part of a nationwide, student-organized “March 4th on Climate Justice” day. For half an hour in the afternoon, the members of Fossil Free Yale recorded videos and took photographs of Yale students showing their support of divestment and their solidarity with other environmental justice groups around the U.S. Members of Fossil Free Yale have been extremely excited by the initial response of the population. “It’s been overwhelmingly positive,” said Shapiro. “From my personal experience petitioning, I would say that 85 percent of people are receptive, and most of them sign the petition.” She believes that this trend of approval comes from both an “awareness of a national divestment movement” as well as “people being generally supportive of environmental issues here.”
Abigail Carney, JE ’15, explains that the collective passion and acceptance of the movement, both in these primary stages at Yale and also on a larger scale, arise at least partially because of the nature of divestment itself. “This is a really concrete thing that a lot of people can work toward together,” said Carney. “I think the environmental movement has been stuttering and struggling to find a cause to unite young people. It’s really hard to find ways to influence the big guys up top, and policy, but I think [the national divestment movement] really has the potential to do that, and that’s what’s so exciting about it.”
Bonnie Frye Hemphill, FES ‘13, a graduate student at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has been very encouraged by her experience with Fossil Free Yale. “What’s amazing to me is to see the unbelievable work coming from 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds….In three, four, five years, we’re going to have a whole new generation of professional climateers who are psyched and capable of dedicating their lives to solving climate change.”
* * *
Yet University administrations are not convinced by excitement and well-executed rallies, no matter how much momentum the campaign can muster. There are distinct protocols in place for making changes to the endowment portfolio, and Fossil Free Yale has worked just as hard within the lines of bureaucracy as it has outside of them. “[The group will] go through every legitimate channel [it] can before trying to move towards different tactics,” Shapiro said. “Again, the long-term goal is climate policy change, nationally, and the shorter-term goal is getting Yale to divest from the 200 top companies who hold the majority of fossil fuel reserves.” Hemphill sees the administration as Fossil Free Yale’s “best possible partner.”
Pursuing these “legitimate channels,” a small research team worked during the fall to compile a lengthy, comprehensive ethical analysis of Yale’s investment in fossil fuels. This document argues that the practice of investing in the fossil fuel industry, with all of our current knowledge about the perils of climate change, violates the Yale Corporation’s own guidelines for socially responsible investment, as stated in The Ethical Investor, a 1972 Yale report on University investment ethics. The team presented the document to the Yale Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR)—an advisory panel to the Yale Corporation Committee on Investor Responsibility, the body that makes binding recommendations to the investment office—at an open forum in early February. Using the language of The Ethical Investor, they argued that there is urgent need to divest, that Yale is close in proximity to the climate change problem, that divestment would have a sizable impact on reducing the effects of this problem, and that the economic move would not cause serious harm to the endowment.
Though the ACIR was impressed with the students’ presentation and assessment, the future of the proposal is still uncertain. Carney, a central member of the report team, voiced some concerns about next steps, saying that Jonathan Macey, chair of the ACIR and the Sam Harris Professor of Corporate Law, Corporate Finance, and Securities Law at the Yale Law School, “doesn’t think it’s plausible to divest from 200 [companies], and 200 still seems like an arbitrary number. So, the most difficult challenge, as they see it and we see it, moving forward, is how do you define which companies you want to divest from.” Macey corroborated this in an interview. “Fossil fuels make up a very important part of the world economy,” Macey said. “If reliance on fossil fuels continues, then divesting could impose a cost in the form of foregone investment opportunities and foregone growth of the endowment such that programs at the University, and the ability to provide financial aid would be less than it otherwise would be.”
Macey outlined what he believed to be the two primary challenges of this particular campaign. “One…has already been met,” he said. “I think the student group pushing for divestment has been successful in establishing that global warming is a serious and immediate problem. The second challenge is making the case that divestment from companies involved in fossil fuels will be likely to alleviate the global warming problem in some tangible or meaningful way.”
The members of Fossil Free Yale know they will have to work hard to maintain current levels of energy and interest while administrative and economic minds digest the proposal behind closed doors. Gabe Rissman, ES ’16, described a common response his report team has been receiving from members of the administration. “They have really emphasized to [us] how much time these things take; that for a decision like this, we have to get the entire university on board, and that we can’t afford to make any mistakes,” he said. “But that’s what worries me—we don’t have time.”
Yet amidst the calculations, rhetoric and politics of this divestment push, there is a distinctly human element that grounds everyone who is close to the movement. “Climate change isn’t just something that happens in graphs and tables and CO2 emissions,” Nesser said. “It’s something that happens to people, and even if I do not directly see the effects, there are people in my town, my region, in other regions of the world who are being affected on a daily basis.”
Shapiro commented on what lies at the core of the divestment movement: “The real goal is justice, and justice is something that affects people,” she said. “The way that climate change is happening… the people who are in marginalized communities, poor areas, are the people that are most affected by [it]. And that is an issue of justice. That is an issue that should affect all of us as human beings, as citizens of this country, and of the world.”
There is no way to know whether the administration will announce a decision tomorrow, a year from now, or not at all, but those concerned can take comfort in one divestment certainty on this campus: Fossil Free Yale is here to stay.
“I think this group gives people a moral calling to answer,” Hemphill said. “I think people are finding an identity in fossil freeing us, fossil freeing our community.”