The student leaders waited months for a response. Finally, the news came in August via a letter from board chair William Berkley, a 77-year-old insurance billionaire. NYU, he said, has no direct ownership of companies engaged in fossil fuel extraction and “commits to avoid any direct investments” in such companies in the future. He even applauded Sunrise NYU, citing their research and communication skills and “their essential set of environmental sustainability values.”

It was a big win. Sure, Harvard and Princeton both agreed to divest fossil stocks last year, but NYU, located just blocks from Wall Street, was different.

Back in 2016, Berkley called divestment “ingenuous” and argued that many fossil fuel companies were investing in green energies. But as Sunrise NYU cofounder Dylan Wahbe told The Guardian in September, with oil companies currently expanding production and cutting back on renewables, “it would be hard to make those arguments today.”

NYU’s about-face should hearten climate activists everywhere. As the climate emergency grows, even recalcitrant institutions feel the ground shifting. Focused, imaginative and relentless action can achieve unexpected victories.

Sunrise NYC is one of 100 chapters of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-oriented political action organization founded in 2017. Sunrise made headlines in 2018 by occupying the Washington office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, proving that no politician is safe from their scorn. Wahbe was impressed by that action, so he was quick to join when film student Alicia Colomer started the NYU chapter in 2020.

The national Sunrise organization achieved another win in September, when President Joe Biden launched the American Climate Corps, a paid training and service program that will put 20,000 Americans to work on energy and environmental projects. Inspired by Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, Sunrise has lobbied for such a program for three years.

At NYU, the student activists identified their biggest problem as the board itself. So they’ve called out conflicted trustees such as vice-chair Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investor in fossil fuel firms. Other targets include Maria Bartiromo, a Fox News host who is a proponent of the fossil fuel industry, and Berkley, whose company insures oil and gas firms. In addition, the students say, several trustees represent oil interests in the Middle East, and recently retired trustee John Paulson was an advisor to the Trump administration.

As the new school year dawned, Sunrise NYU was back at it, attending Climate Week NYC protests, cleaning up beaches, lobbying to “democratize” the board of trustees, and trying to push fossil fuel money out of university research.

They’re in good company. In Canada, students at University of Waterloo, McGill and Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), among others, continue to pressure their schools to divest. They joined thousands of young people who rallied against fossil fuel in cities across the U.S. and Canada in September.

“There are already 12 universities in Canada that are already divesting or having plans to divest,” said one MUN protestor. “But right now, MUN has no plan in place to divest, and that is just not acceptable for us.”

The post How student campaigners finally convinced NYU to divest from fossil fuels appeared first on Corporate Knights.

To add some personal flavour to the divestment issue, we asked one of the architects of the movement – climate activist, author and 350.org co-founder, Bill McKibben – to chat with us about how he invests his own money for our inaugural Money Talks column.

What sparked your initial idea of asking institutions to drop their investments in fossil fuels?

Naomi Klein and I were reading the same somewhat obscure report from a London-based think tank, Carbon Tracker Initiative. It showed that these companies had far, far more carbon in their reserves than any scientist thought we could ever burn. Both of us thought: viewed this way these are rogue companies, trying to profit off unfathomable destruction. Since we’d both been active in the anti-apartheid divestment movement a generation earlier, we figured maybe it might be appropriate here.

Who was the first person you were able to convince to divest?

Pride of place goes to tiny Unity College in rural Maine. The president got up during one of the roadshows of the Do The Math tour to make his announcement  – an $8 million endowment, I think. Now that we’re at $8 trillion it doesn’t seem so big, but it got us going.

What’s been your biggest win so far?

The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund? The nation of Ireland? New York City’s pension fund? Half the universities in the UK? The first win that really started to change things fast was perhaps the Rockefeller family, who divested their charities. If the original oil fortune was done with oil…

Why do you think there are so few Canadian organizations on board with divestment?

Because Canadians, pleasant and conflict-averse, can’t bring themselves to say to Alberta, ‘you simply can’t dig up all that oil and burn it, it by itself will use up a third of the planet’s carbon budget.’  So they’ve never been able to really grapple with climate change. Look at the tragic positions that Justin Trudeau has gotten in trying.

The Canadian responsible investing sector has focused more on shareholder engagement to push for change from the inside. What are your thoughts on this tactic?

Works with many kinds of companies, but not fossil fuel ones. Because there’s not a small flaw in the business model–the flaw is the business model.

Petroleum producers have, not surprisingly, tried to discredit the divestment movement. What’s the biggest myth being propagated about divestment?

That it doesn’t accomplish anything. The industry has pushed it with great diligence (which should tell you something right there) but by now we’ve seen Shell having to declare it a material risk and Peabody Coal listing it as a factor in its bankruptcy. In Politico a few weeks ago, one coal exec after another explained they couldn’t raise capital anymore because there were too few funds left willing to invest

Your focus has been on convincing institutions to divest, but many individuals reading this will be thinking of doing the same. Do you think the ripple made by an individual’s decision to buy or sell a stock or fund makes any difference in the grand scheme of things?

Well, it’s more important to move institutionally, but to the extent that changing your light bulb matters, divestment would matter more.

Have you divested your personal investments to reflect your values?

I’m a…writer and volunteer organizer. What investments I have reflect my values.

Can you give us a rundown on which investments you hold?

Nothing that burns.

How has investing with your values worked out for you financially?

Living in the woods has worked out for me financially.

How has divesting worked out financially for those governments and institutions that have chosen this tactic?

Yes, anyone who divested has made out like bandits – the fossil fuel sector has badly underperformed the larger market. So, for instance, the New York State pension fund would have $19k more dollars per pensioner had it done the right thing when all this started.

What’s next for the divestment movement?

I think we’re aiming for $10 trillion by next year.

The post Bill McKibben on investing in “nothing that burns” appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Corporate Knights was able to determine this by pulling the NYSCRF’s stock holdings for each of the past ten years from its 13-F SEC filings and Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR), and then creating a fossil free portfolio* and comparing its performance accounting for net outflows to the NYSCRF’s fossil inclusive stock portfolio using Bloomberg’s PORT function from April 1, 2008 to March 31st, 2017.

*Fossil free means all oil, gas, thermal coal mining and thermal coal power producers were excluded. The weight of the removed companies was redistributed proportionately towards the remaining companies in accordance with their relative weights

The post New York State Common Retirement Fund Pays High Price for Holding on to Fossil Fuel Stocks appeared first on Corporate Knights.