To strip something of its power or rights, or to rid yourself of something that you no longer want
Angkor Wat at sunrise photo credit: ME
That’s a picture of Angkor Wat this massive complex of Hindu temples in Cambodia, a truly breathtaking place where people from all over the world gather to strike their best poses kissing or arms up in the air and sometimes to get into arguments about who is blocking whose view. It’s one of many places I was lucky enough to see over the past couple of weeks on vacation in Southeast Asia. I also just got back home so am coming off of like 30 some hours of air travel and brutal jetlag so I barely know what day it is or what my name is right now and I am very cold. Which means this is going to be a quick issue light on the accoutrements.
But I did want to send something out because earlier this week, part two of an in-depth series of articles I wrote about the fossil fuel divestment movement published. The first installment was more about understanding the logistics and financial pros/cons of ditching fossil fuel stocks. This one is more about the strategic, philosophical, and moral debate so be sure to check it out I like how it turned out. Here are a couple chunks of it:
Wallace Global Fund started its journey toward divesting from fossil fuels as far back as 2009, but along with trying to change its own investment practices, Executive Director Ellen Dorsey became interested in divestment as an organizing strategy.
Starting in 2010, Wallace Global began making grants to explore a fossil fuel divestment campaign, and later convened a group of campus-based activists to discuss the topic, which had been bubbling up at Swarthmore and other colleges around that time.
This was unfolding in the shadow of a failed federal cap-and-trade bill in 2009, and amid a reckoning with the fact that meaningful climate action would require a broad-based, powerful grassroots movement. Campus campaigners were ready to try something new (and old), lifting a page from the divestment campaign against South African apartheid in the 1980s.
The fossil fuel divestment campaign caught fire with support from Bill McKibben and 350.org, rapidly growing to more than $12 trillion in funds committed today, across more than 1,100 institutions. For proponents of divestment, that growth and successful campaigns like the Sunrise Movement that have since sprung out of divestment, are solid proof of its power as a movement-building strategy and more.
It also makes it all the more frustrating that leading foundations explicitly concerned with climate change have not joined in by committing to divest their own endowments more than five years since an initial push focusing on the philanthropic sector.
“There’s a lot of talk about philanthropy being responsive, but I believe if there’s a movement, a true global social movement that’s making a demand of investors, philanthropy should heed those demands,” Dorsey says. “Divestment really created the first grassroots climate movement, and to not be responsive to the demands of that movement is just incomprehensible to me.”
…
I will say that in the course of reporting on divestment, I have certainly gained a better understanding of why foundations have said no. As Heintz puts it, “It’s complicated, right? It’s complicated technically, it’s complicated from the point of view of governance, and it is hard work overcoming deeply embedded conventional wisdom.”
But it also seems as though the barriers foundations cite to divestment are often overstated or overestimated as a result of advisors and leaders not wanting to change their ways or yield control. Meanwhile, they are perhaps underestimating some powerful financial, strategic and moral reasons to divest, some of which are only becoming more urgent.
As Dorsey puts it, foundations need to declare a climate emergency. If they did, they’d reconsider many aspects of their business-as-usual conduct, including substantially increasing their rate of grantmaking and capping the growth of their endowments.
“We would use every tool in our toolbox, including our investments,” she says. “And we would divest from fossil fuels immediately, and invest in climate solutions. To do anything less puts us on the wrong side of history.”
That’s one important aspect of this debate that is maybe the most compelling to me—divestment from fossil fuels points in the direction the world is heading.
You can read the whole thing outside the subscription paywall for a limited time here at Inside Philanthropy: As Top Foundations Resist Divesting from Fossil Fuels, What Might Change Their Minds?
And you can read the first installment here: Major Climate Funders Are Still Invested in Fossil Fuels. Why is That?
And this is a thread in response to the article, from one of the key foundations I spoke with:
And with that, I will wrap things up and go doze on the couch with Jamie and the dogs. I missed you all. Thanks for keeping an eye on the Palace, watering the plants, etc. I’ll talk to you soon.
Tate