Yahoo Finance Fight over fossil fuels goes beyond college campuses
This week, students at Harvard staged a week-long protest in an effort to get the university's $36 billion endowment to divest from the oil and gas and coal industries. Student action included blocking the entrance to Massachusetts Hall, Harvard's oldest building, and preventing university president Drew Gilpin Faust from entering her office. On Thursday, President Faust agreed to meet with the students, who nonetheless vowed to continue the protests until Harvard's endowment divests from the oil and gas industry.
The "divest in fossil fuels" movement is growing at colleges across the country, but it stretches beyond campuses. A number of religious groups have already divested after similar campaigns as well as public pension funds.
New York City comptroller Scott Stringer, who oversees about $150 billion in pensions, is familiar with the push to divest. Stringer stopped by Yahoo Finance this week. Stringer says, "There’s always the question of how you manage a pension fund. My job is first and foremost is to be a fiduciary. I look at these issues in terms of creating long-term value for the 700,000 retirees I protect managing this pension fund. So sometimes you divest, sometime you stay and fight in a company."
But, he says, "Our public pension fund is concerned about our investment in many of these companies because obviously we believe the future is in clean energy."
On Friday CalPERS, the nation’s largest pension fund with more than $240 billion in assets under management, joined by nearly 60 other institutional investors and several state treasurers asked the SEC to require oil and gas industries to publish detailed analysis of the risks to their business of climate change. Basically to "stress test" their businesses for climate change.
As for the push at the university level, it's a win-some, lose-some record. Last month, Syracuse University announced its $1.2 billion endowment plans to drop all fossil fuel stocks. Last year, Stanford's $21.4 billion endowment said it will divest from coal stocks thanks largely to the efforts of university trustee Tom Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund manager and president of NextGen Climate. On the flipside, just this week, the University of Colorado's Board of Regents rejected a similar plea from students to divest its roughly $2.7 billion endowment.
You can watch the entire town hall on the divestment movement here.
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