Divestment

On my more cynical days, I think that “sustainability” has largely become a meaningless buzzword, a marketing ploy to attract customers in the case of a corporation or potential students in the case of a university. This is because many companies, schools and individuals who espouse environmentally conscious beliefs while at the same time profiting from fossil fuel extraction due to investments. I do acknowledge that sometimes this is out of the individual’s control in some cases. However, at the end of the day it seems pretty dishonest for a school to claim the mantle of sustainability while they give money to and receive dividends from extractive fossil fuels industries. Therefore, I call upon CSB-SJU to divest itself from fossil fuel interests to become a more genuine partner in the global fight to stop the burning of fossil fuels as our primary form of energy. This will assuredly not happen unless students force the issue, the administrations will not change on their own.

In many ways, divestment (or reinvestment) is back end solution to ACC. I think a more front-end course of action would involve ensuring that companies profiting from the burning of carbon receive no public funded subsidies. This will decrease profitability (in an environment where prices are already decreasing) and therefore these companies will not be so attractive to investors because they will be competing on their own merits. I would propose taking at least some of that public subsidy and pushing it into subsidies for non-carbon-based forms of energy such as solar and wind.