Anti-fossil fuel activists have been out in full force recently, campaigning hard to get public and private institutions to jettison their oil and fossil fuel assets. Yet, many of these green crusaders have faced stiff opposition from university administrators and other public institutions.
Several school officials, global warming skeptics and free market activists have issued scathing statements thrashing the divestment movement, calling its adherents “ignorant mobs” who are only interested in making symbolic gestures that don’t effect global warming.
As fossil fuel divestment champions continue their push for a world dependent on green energy, it seems an opportune time to list seven moments when “keep it in the ground” protesters were castigated and subsequently embarrassed.
1. Editorials Can Sometimes Be Rough On Those Greenies
Protesters with Divest Dartmouth May 2 held a rally warning the university to purge assets from “the dirtiest fossil fuel companies” or risk damning their souls for eternity.
The New Hampshire Union Leader criticized the group’s message in an editorial shortly after the rally.
“Climate alarmism aside, these radical groups ignore the role fossil fuels have had in lifting human civilization over the past two centuries,” the editorial read.
Eliminating oil and gas from the electric grid would ultimately place a giant wet blanket on economic growth across the developed world, and “rob underdeveloped nations of their chance at prosperity.”
It concluded its lambaste by noting were Dartmouth to cave and purge its assets, it “would do nothing but satisfy an ignorant mob.”
2. Sometimes Mega-Billionaire Environmentalists Don’t Get Their Way
Democratic mega-donor and environmentalist Tom Steyer suffered a crushing blow in April to his years-long divestment campaign when his own college, Stanford University, refused to purge its oil assets.
Steyer is a member of Stanford’s Board of Trustees, which should have given him opportunity to exert pressure on the school to divest.
It didn’t work. The school essentially told him and his millions of dollars to buzz off.
Stanford University’s decision to stay married to oil and fossil fuels came the same day Steyer pledged to donate $25 million to propagandize global warming election day issues on college campuses.
3. Universities Don’t Always See Things The Way Anti-Oil Does
The University of Toronto, for its part, rejected calls for divestment in April, which, no doubt, devastated the protesters that had been working on getting the university to jettison its fossil fuels for several months.
In a report titled “Beyond Divestment: Taking Action On Climate Change,” the university said divestment makes no logical sense, especially for a school that depends on solid investments to keep its wheels churning.
The report goes on to suggest a “blanket divestment strategy would be unprincipled and inappropriate.” The point is clear. The costs of divestment, according to the report, outweigh the benefits associated with the practice.
4. Divestment Proponents Get Devastated In Debates With Their Critics
The University of Manchester debate team in March orchestrated a debate discussing whether the school should divest fossil fuels following revelations in February the school invested $56 million in fossil fuel companies.
Jonathan Redfern, a professor of Petroleum Geoscience at the school, said during the debate he thought global warming is “too serious… to be hijacked” by the type of “emotive words” divestment proponents typically use.
A straw poll conducted by Manchester Debating Union (MDU) before the debate showed the audience at the discussion was either undecided about the divestment or simply did not know enough about it to form an opinion.
Another poll was done after Redfern’s comments at the debate reveal opposition to divestment received a 16 percent increase in votes in their favor. In effect, the green campaigners lost the debate.
5. Greenie Peers Point Out The Obvious: Fossil Fuels Bring Economic Prosperity
Ross Cavanaugh, a college student from George Washington University, wrote an editorial for The Daily Caller last year explaining his frustrations with activists at his school who champion the divestment movement without realizing much of their academic career is owed to the prosperity fossil fuels provide.
Cavanaguh co-wrote the piece with fellow divestment critics Julia Morriss and Claire Zeng, students at American University and Georgetown, respectively.
They added, “expanding access to electricity from all sources could dramatically improve the lives of the impoverished.”
6. It’s Dangerous To Use Taxpayer Money To Push Anti-Fossil Fuel Political Agendas
Rob Roper, president of Ethan Allen Institute, a free market think tank base in Vermont, blasted in February Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin’s decision to pressure the state’s pension fund into purging its fossil fuel investments, calling it bad public policy that unnecessarily “politicizes” retirement funds.
“It is kowtowing to a small, loud group of activists, well-funded by out-of-state sources and pushing an agenda that has nothing to do with state workers’ retirement benefits,” Roper said about pressure from environmentalist and divestment champion Bill McKibben on Shumlin to sell off Vermont’s pension fund’s oil assets.
“It is even worse,” he said, “to cloak a political agenda under the guise of environmental responsibility.”
“These efforts are pure window dressing,” Frank Wolak, an economics professor who directs Stanford’s energy and sustainable development program, told reporters in 2015. “And, much to my surprise, the student groups are complicit in this deception.”
Oxford University, for instance, claimed it is “a world leader in the battle against climate change,” yet in May it acknowledged it would avoid only direct investments in coal and oil-sands companies in its $2.6 billion endowment — the university, in fact, had no direct assets in coal.
Syracuse University announced something similar that year, though it had no coal or oi-sand holdings.
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