A mega-million dollar donor to one of the largest environmental advocacy groups in the U.S. called out fossil free campaigners Monday for suggesting Bowdoin College’s investment managers are fossil fuel industry cronies.
“At various times, my funds have been net long fossil fuels equities, at other times we have been net short them,” Stanley Druckenmiller, environmental activist and chairman on the Bowdoin Investment Committee, wrote in an editorial. “We do not buy stocks to support the fossil fuel industry, and we do not short them to destroy the industry.”
He argued that full divestment “would only have a symbolic effect on the fossil fuel industry,” and would lead ultimately to smaller gains for the college in the long run — not to mention, cause several members of the committee to lose their positions.
Druckenmiller directed his op-ed at Isabella McCann, a member of a group calling itself
Bowdoin Climate Action (BCA), who suggested in an April 14 editorial for the school’s newspaper that the chairman, along with a number of his colleagues on the fund, has deep ties with oil and gas producers that effect how the university handles divestment.
“Several trustees on our Investment Committee have deep ties to the oil and gas industry,” McCann wrote, “which may be impeding them from taking leadership. Today, we wish to share these conflicts of interest.”
She then went on to castigate Druckenmiller and his mutual fund, Duquesne Capital Management, for supposedly investing in several “high risk natural gas wells” in New Mexico. Druckenmiller brushed off McCann’s criticism and said investing in fossil fuels does not necessarily show support for that industry.
In fact, Druckenmiller suggested he was the least likely to support the fossil fuel industry, because, as he noted, “I am on the board of the Environmental Defense Fund, through which my wife and I have committed tens of millions of dollars to combat climate change.”
He went on to argue that it is “misguided to think that the Bowdoin endowment, particularly given its size relative to the market capital of the industry, would have any effect whatsoever on the industry going forward.”
Anti-fossil fuel groups have argued in the past that they’re campaigns are not intended to cause direct pain to fossil fuel companies, but rather, to tar and feather oil producers, and ultimately to tarnish their image. The best way to shift public opinion away from the fossil fuel industry, they wager, is by focusing on big institutions like universities and retirement pensions.
“The idea was basically to shift cultural attitude,” Karthik Ganapathy, a spokesman for the environmental group 350.org, told the Huffington Post in 2015. He went on to say they are attempting to tap into past successful campaigns against the tobacco industry.
“The whole idea is basically to get the institutions that people trust — Harvard, the University of California, Stanford — to get folks to pull their money out of fossil fuels and take a stand against the industry — the way that a lot of them did with tobacco, the way a lot of them did with apartheid-era South Africa,” he said. “The idea is that it will shift cultural attitudes by getting big institutions that people trust to take a moral stand against.”
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