Why we risked arrest to protest Harvard and Yale funding fossil fuel giants

[G_j]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/25/harvard-and-yale-are-complicit-in-the-climate-crisis-its-time-for-them-to-divest?CMP=share_btn_fb

Climate change is not a distant reality for us – it is imminent and deeply personal

Ilana Cohen and Camilla Ledezma

Mon 25 Nov 2019 08.16 EST

This Saturday, we risked arrest at the 136th Harvard-Yale football game alongside hundreds of our peers and alumni. This was not an accident; it was a strategic choice. By leveraging our privilege as students of two of the world’s richest universities, we called attention to our universities’ and all of our institutions’ complicity in degrading our planet and our futures through their continued investments in the fossil fuel industry. In a climate emergency, we cannot afford to kick back, watch the game and ignore reality. Our movement – the youth movement for climate action and justice – cannot win if we play by the rules. As we fight to divest, we fight to radically transform an unsustainable and unethical status quo.

Climate change is not a distant reality for us; it is imminent and deeply personal. Within both Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard and Yale’s Endowment Justice Coalition, students come from the smoke-filled skies of California, the vanishing shores of American Samoa, and the hurricane-hit lands of Puerto Rico. Our universities are not immune to narratives of climate disaster and injustice. Yet so long as they continue to invest in an extractivist industry, they undermine the voices of these lived narratives within their walls.

Collectively, Harvard and Yale could be investing upwards of $1.2bn in the fossil fuel industry. While universities worldwide are waking up to the threat of climate change and pledging to divest, ours are jeopardizing their own students’ futures. And given the long-term risks of fossil fuel investments, in addition to the moral imperative, there is a clear financial incentive to divest. That’s why over $11.5tn has been divested from the fossil fuel industry worldwide and why recently, the University of California decided to make its over $70bn endowment and $13.4bn pension fund fossil fuel-free.

But it’s not only through their investments that these elite institutions prop up the bad actors behind our planet’s degradation. Harvard continues to refuse to publicly recognize the vast and problematic ties that the Harvard Corporation maintains to the fossil fuel industry, including that one of its members, Ted Wells, is a top lawyer defending ExxonMobil against charges of misleading investors about the risks of climate change. Even as Harvard has moved to investigate gifts made by sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, moreover, it has taken no action regarding the large gifts it receives from oil companies to fund much of its environmental programming and research.

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[Igel]

1. I'd like them to answer a simple question.

How does the purchase of oil-company stock that was issued years ago fund the oil company?

That's the claim. They should be able to justify it.

[California_Republic]

2. I think we will see this again