Renewable Revolution

 

Fossil Fuel Industry in Denial on Divestment


From Brexit’s impact on stocks to the Koch brothers’ campaign expenditures, money is, as usual, a hot topic. Who’s spending how much on what can give important insights into their priorities.

 One such example is the divest/invest movement, which advocates for institutional investors like pension funds or universities to sell their holdings in fossil fuel companies and instead invest in clean alternatives. For the first few years, as the campaign found few wins and rarely reached past college campuses, the industry largely ignored them.

But a new story in ClimateWire suggests that the recent successes (U Maryland just last week) have the fossil fuel industry worried.   

Chloe Maximin of Divest Harvard likens it to the stages of grief, with the industry first in denial about the potential success of the campaign, then anger, and now bargaining. 

Organizing panels, writing op-eds, commissioning multiple surveys and setting up the website DivestmentFacts.com   , the fossil fuel industry seems to be taking the divestment campaign pretty seriously. And for good reason, as the list of divesting institutions has grown to encompass a total value of  $3.4 trillion dollars and numerous high-profile divesters.

The main repository of industry pushback is DivestmentFacts.com, which endeavors to “educate” the public about the facts of divestment...as told by the Independent Petroleum Association of America   .

Given that their similar project to defend fracking, Energy in Depth, is not only funded by Big Oil, but also guilty of relying on shoddy pseudo-science, it’s unlikely anyone legitimate will take its claims seriously. But the fact that they’ve gone to the trouble of setting up a website demonstrates that they’re growing increasingly worried by the movement’s successes.

And there are good reasons for those divestment wins that have nothing at all to do with the environment. On a purely economic level, divestment makes sense, from avoiding future stranded assets and presently-bankrupt coal companies, to simple metrics of market performance.

For example, a 2015 analysis found that those who divested from fossil fuels in 2010 would be outperforming those still invested in 2015. A 2016 analysis found that New York’s pension system would have had an additional $5.3 billion had it divested in 2012, translating to $4,500 for each pensioner.

Funny enough, neither of those two facts appear anywhere on DivestmentFacts.com. Perhaps they haven’t moved out of the denial stage after all, and have instead opted to divest from facts altogether.