We Won’t Speak at Your Commencement — and Hope No One Else Will Either
By Christiana Figueres and Bill McKibbenApril 12, 2019
To have any chance of mitigating climate change, we need all people doing what they can. We need engineers designing ever-better solar panels and economists figuring out how to get them up on roofs. We need farmers moving toward more-sustainable agricultural practices. In our everyday lives we need to be using less energy, and in our political lives we need to be exerting far more power. Even the little things count.
That’s why the two of us, in addition to our work on climate change, have begun doing something else: refusing to accept honorary degrees from colleges that won’t divest their endowments of fossil fuels. Each of us has already turned down these honors at institutions that remain committed to coal, gas, and oil.
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To have any chance of mitigating climate change, we need all people doing what they can. We need engineers designing ever-better solar panels and economists figuring out how to get them up on roofs. We need farmers moving toward more-sustainable agricultural practices. In our everyday lives we need to be using less energy, and in our political lives we need to be exerting far more power. Even the little things count.
That’s why the two of us, in addition to our work on climate change, have begun doing something else: refusing to accept honorary degrees from colleges that won’t divest their endowments of fossil fuels. Each of us has already turned down these honors at institutions that remain committed to coal, gas, and oil.
We’re under no illusion that our refusal to participate is a big deal. Of all the people at a college commencement, the honorary-degree recipient is the least important, but it is one more way for us to warn everyone that time is running out. We hope that others will follow our lead, as a reminder to college presidents and boards of trustees that society is quickly becoming disgruntled with inertia on this issue. Business as usual is the one thing we can’t afford.
Not until your college divests its endowment of fossil fuels.
For those who haven’t been paying close attention, the fossil-fuel-divestment movement has become the biggest campaign of its kind in history, surpassing even the effort that Nelson Mandela credited with helping end South African apartheid a generation ago. Endowments and portfolios worth $8 trillion have divested in whole or in part of their holdings in coal, gas, and oil. The six-year-old movement has had several victories. One of its biggest came this year, when Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the biggest pool of investment capital on the planet, moved to exclude companies exploring for new fossil-fuel reserves. As for colleges, nearly 50 in the United States have committed to divestment, and more than 75 in Britain have done the same.
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The movement has played a significant role in helping focus investors and governments on the most basic fact about fossil fuel: We have in our reserves five times as much of it as scientists say we can burn and still have any real hope of meeting the targets the world set in the Paris Agreement. New studies have shown that divestment has served to substantially increase the attention on climate change, and has even begun to reduce the amount of capital that oil companies can use for further exploration and drilling. It’s been a crucial part of the many-pronged effort to avert the biggest crisis human beings have ever faced — and it’s also saved money for participating institutions, since fossil-fuel stocks are underperforming in the markets as alternatives become more viable.
But some colleges have refused to divest, despite appeals from their students and faculty members. This does not mean they should be shunned — we will continue to lecture and teach at many diverse institutions. It also does not mean they are bad places: Our undergraduate alma maters, Swarthmore and Harvard, for instance, accomplish a great deal of good in the world. But their refusal to divest from fossil fuels has been painful for us to watch. So one of us has found himself sleeping in the shrubbery outside the Harvard president’s office as part of a large student protest for divestment. And the other has refused an honorary degree at last year’s Swarthmore commencement.
We are well aware that others are doing things that are far more difficult, from going to jail protesting pipelines to doing hard scientific work on alternative fuels. We each have other, more important ways of trying to move the needle on climate. And we do sincerely enjoy the chance that college commencements provide, both to celebrate the achievements of graduates and to remind them just how much the world needs their efforts. College commencements are an important tradition, a way of remembering that the cycle of life will continue. They have ancient roots, and look ahead far into the future.
That is precisely why it is necessary for us to point out that the traditional order of things is now very much in doubt. The students graduating from college today will inherit a world very much impoverished by climate change; indeed they will probably be diverted from the specialties they are studying in order to respond to the emergencies of a warming world. And that impoverishment will be made much worse if the fossil-fuel industry does not quickly transition into new technologies.
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Some college leaders have told themselves that they will be able to engage with the oil companies and somehow turn them into positive actors on the world stage. But this is true only in a very few cases. Recently, for instance, Exxon Mobil issued yet another report saying that climate change would require no real change in its business plans.
Since colleges are the places where we first learned the truth about climate change, and since their product is in some sense the future, their leaders need to take all the steps they can. Many institutions are cutting their own greenhouse-gas emissions, which is commendable. But it’s not enough. The endowment is as much a part of a college as the dining hall or the gymnasium, and institutions can’t pretend to be blind to the impact that their investment decisions can have on improving or destroying our planet.
Christiana Figueres is a former executive secretary of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change. Bill McKibben is a co-founder of 350.org, a grass-roots climate campaign, and the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at the (recently divested) Middlebury College. Together they hold more than 20 honorary degrees.