Report: Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement is ‘Elitist’, ‘Puppetry’, ‘Phony’

A report released on Tuesday by the National Association of Scholars (NAS) describes the campus fossil fuel divestment movement (FFDM) as a nationally-organized political campaign aimed at fostering deep-seated hatred of fossil fuel companies and promoting political demagoguery.

According to a press release, the report, titled Inside Divestment: The Illiberal Movement to Turn a Generation Against Fossil Fuels, claims “the campus fossil fuel divestment campaign undermines intellectual freedom, democratic self-government, and responsible stewardship of natural resources.”

“The divestment campaign is designed to fail,” said Rachelle Peterson, director of research projects at NAS and author of Inside Divestment, according to a press release. “The organizers’ goal is not to cause colleges to divest, but to anger students at the refusal of colleges to divest fully and to turn their frustration into long-term antipathy toward the modern fossil fuel-based economy.”

The FFDM is now active on over 1,000 American colleges and universities, with 30 having declared they are divested. FFDM originated in 2010 at Swarthmore College, and former Middlebury College professor Bill McKibben helped spread the movement spread through his organization 350.org, which the report claims is heavily financed by billionaire hedge fund manager and top Democratic donor Tom Steyer.

Calling the divestment movement “puppetry”, the NAS claims it is managed by professors, professional activists, and “driven by wealthy donors and deep-pocketed foundations and serves the material interests of Solyndra-style eco-cronyism.” According to the report, 350.org “pays students to be activists, arranges summer training for activists, and offers paid internships for activists” and “the movement’s themes, Twitter hashtags, and ‘days of action’ are determined top-down.” The report also points out that professors have awarded students credit for working toward divestment on their campuses.

NAS President Peter Word writes, “The movement pretends to change the way we generate energy, but its actual aim is to generate resentment, which is fuel for political demagoguery. The ultimate beneficiaries are rich people whose investments in ‘green energy’ will prosper only if they can trick the public to strand our reserves of coal, oil, and gas underground. They favor high-priced, inefficient technologies that happen to require massive government subsidies coupled with sweeping new government powers.”

The NAS also calls the FFDM “phony” because only 34% of divested colleges have ended all of their investments in fossil fuel companies. The report calls four instances of campus divestment, including Oxford University’s, “DINOs”, or divestment in name only, for having sold no fossil fuel investments since formally endorsing divestment. The leaders of the movement, the report claims, also acknowledge divestment will not negatively impact fossil fuel companies or their stock prices.

The FFDM is also political, notes the report, because it “turns the university endowment into a billboard for virtue signaling [and] turns trustees and donors into political operatives rather than patrons of higher education.”

According to the NAS report, the period of Oct. 1 through Dec. 12 is supposed to be an “escalation season” for campus divestment campaigns across the country, ending one day after the UN Climate Summit in Paris ends.

“If you say you want action in Paris, then you have a responsibility to divest from fossil fuels,” 350.org’s website reads.

Accordingly, starting in October student activists at Cornell renewed their pushes for divestment. Students held a protest on Ho Plaza after their requests to the Board of Trustees at a public Q&A for divestment went nowhere. An unknown perpetrator also vandalized the statue of Cornell co-founder and first president Andrew Dickson White in the early morning of Oct. 31 with the word “divest” and a hammer-and-sickle insignia.