Why They Hate Exxon

The investigations are based on the observation that Exxon took some steps, such as raising the level of its off-shore drilling platforms, consistent with the possibility that global warming might cause sea levels to rise. But Exxon has billions of dollars tied up in its oil exploration and extraction. The mere fact that the company may have taken precautions against a remote danger doesn’t mean the company believed the risk to be likely, let alone certain (any more than buying life insurance means one expects to die soon).

And how, one might also ask, could Exxon have had knowledge of a catastrophic rise in ocean levels when that catastrophe hasn’t even happened? Scientists who invested heavily in predictions of steeply rising sea levels have been scrambling of late to explain why the oceans have only crept up at the rate of 2.2 millimeters a year (a pace far below what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change once confidently said would come to pass).

The investigations, in other words, are clearly political. Is it a coincidence that California AG Harris happens to be running for the Senate seat being vacated by Barbara Boxer’s retirement? Smearing Exxon has its advantages, among them the sort of publicity that prosecutors crave. But perhaps more appealing, going after oil companies wins the support of a newly important political bloc — campus climate activists who might accurately be called the McKibben Left.

Bill McKibben is the godfather of revamped environmentalism, among the hottest topics at today’s colleges. McKibben’s environmentalism is not an aristocratic concern for pristine gardens unsullied by the smokestacks of the working class, but, instead, a populist rage that denounces elites for their oppression of nature and blue-collar workers alike. The ideological blend of these ideas is “environmental justice,” the theory that racial minorities and other disenfranchised groups disproportionately suffer from smog, neighborhood landfills, warming temperatures, and the looming rise of the oceans.

Which isn’t to say that McKibben himself isn’t one of the elite. A Harvard grad and onetime editor of the Harvard Crimson, he went on to write for the New Yorker and now holds an endowed professorship at Vermont’s Middlebury College. But he wears the cloak of humility well. He sat with Occupy Wall Street in New York. He speaks in Oil and Honey, one of his dozen-some books, with deep esteem for country beekeepers. He adopted Bernie Sanders’s motto as his own: “#NotMeUs.” Admirers consider McKibben a hero. A cynic might call him a demagogue.

McKibben has played a crucial role in making modern environmentalism a popular movement. His 1989 book, The End of Nature, was the first on global warming directed to laymen. It was McKibben who made the Keystone XL pipeline a political lightning rod. He spent the summer of 2011 recruiting anti-pipeline activists to protest outside the White House, plotting to get them — and himself — arrested. By the end of that August he and 70 others had spent a weekend in D.C.’s Central Cell Block. Then he spent the next few years all over the news.

McKibben has in recent years leveled his sights on fossil-fuel companies, denouncing them (with characteristic understatement) as “Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization.” Nowhere has he found a more receptive audience than college campuses. There, activism-eager students steeped in the romance of progressivism have no small amount of free time on their hands. They’ve signed up for McKibben’s anti-oil crusade in droves. And these collegiate activists have mapped out a path that government officials are now following step by step.

The Exxon investigations in New York and California mark stage one in a trail that McKibben and his cohort of college students blazed. Exxon’s “crimes” are its insufficient public anxiety about “climate change” and that it had the audacity to influence public policy by making (perfectly legal) financial contributions to groups skeptical of doomsday climate predictions. The investigations, in effect, require companies to embrace the so-called consensus on anthropogenic global warming — exactly what McKibben and his crew of college activists have been demanding for half a decade.

Five years ago, a group of Swarthmore College students returned from a field-trip to West Virginia determined to put an end to mountaintop-removal coal mining. They started a fossil-fuel divestment campaign targeting the Swarthmore endowment. The Wallace Global Fund and the Sierra Club tried to scale up the idea, but it took McKibben — who had recently founded the activist group 350.org with a small group of Middlebury College students — to launch a national movement in 2012. It was that summer he published “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” in Rolling Stone arguing that the planet’s only hope was for the oil companies to be toppled, leaving the majority of fossil-fuel reserves deep in the ground. In a national “Do the Math” speaking tour on campuses from L.A. to New York City, McKibben preached that institutions and individuals should divest themselves of oil and coal company stocks. He found a receptive audience among students, few of whom had any investments of their own, but most of whom were at schools with endowments that could be pressured to shun traditional-energy investments.

Others took note, too. Hedge fund manager Tom Steyer wrote to McKibben and asked to hike the Adirondacks with him. By the time they came off the trail, Steyer was sold. He now donates to McKibben’s activist group, 350.org. And in 2014 Steyer spent $76 million trying to make climate change an issue in that year’s elections. The effort mostly failed. Only two of six Senate candidates and one of five gubernatorial candidates backed by the environmentalist movement won their elections.

But if McKibben’s message failed to rouse the general electorate, it has captivated the college crowd, who expect to shift the political tide. The strategy McKibben pitched to them was to use divestment to demonize their targets, making fossil-fuel industries such pariahs that no politician would be willing to protect them. The campuses were proxy battles: Students would use their leverage to enlist their universities in the cause; universities would use their prestige to denounce fossil fuels; the modern energy corporation, rendered beyond the pale, would come to an end. McKibben called this a plan to “revoke the social license” of fossil-fuel companies, paving the way, he predicted, for the sort of inquisitions that AGs Harris and Schneiderman have since launched.

The strategy is working. By now, hundreds of foundations, pension funds, cities, and colleges have committed to divesting their portfolios of fossil-fuel stocks. Among them are organizations from the obscure (Great Old Broads for Wilderness) to the overexposed (the Sierra Club); religious groups from the fringe (Australia’s Earthsong) to the mainline (the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A.); and colleges from the humble (Prescott College, Ariz.) to the prestigious (Stanford, where Tom Steyer is a trustee). Last year saw hundreds of protests (450 alone on Global Divestment Day) and more than a dozen campus sit-ins — including one that ran a month at Swarthmore College and one at MIT that began in October and didn’t peter out until February.

The politicians one would expect to get in line are getting in line. In September New York mayor Bill de Blasio declared he plans to de-fossilize the city’s five primary pension funds — those for city employees, teachers, police, firemen, and members of the board of education. “It’s time that our investments catch up” with the city’s status as a “global leader” in “taking on climate change,” the mayor said. “Divestment from coal is where we must start.”

The New York State Assembly and Senate, too, have taken up divestment. The Fossil Fuel Divestment Act, with 21 cosponsors, would mandate the $178.3 billion New York State Common Retirement Fund jettison coal investments within a year and all fossil-fuel companies by 2020. The state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, who is also a trustee of the pension funds, has so far declined to push for divestment but has called on ExxonMobil to assess whether the oil it drills will push the planet beyond the maximum two-degree Celsius temperature rise stipulated in last year’s Paris climate agreement.

This January in his State of the State address, Vermont governor Peter Shumlin begged the legislature to send him a bill mandating public pensions divest themselves of Exxon-Mobil shares. If anything, he’ll get a bill to force divestment from all fossil-fuel companies.

These examples are instructive, because they show the power of pressure coming from youth fired up by McKibben. Shumlin once opposed divestment. Two years ago Vermont’s house and senate took up divestment bills of the sort Shumlin now demands; he balked, saying it was better to keep “a seat at the table” with fossil-fuel companies rather than just cut them loose. At the time, McKibben, a part-time Vermonter, denounced Shumlin as a “slippery politician” and warned that “a couple of thousand Vermonters” who trekked to New York’s People’s Climate March would soon “hold him accountable to his statements.” Shumlin reversed course, and now McKibben praises him for having “taken the lead” against ExxonMobil.

Among the schools promoting divestment in New York has been the Union Theological Seminary. In its announcement in 2014, Union hailed McKibben as “a driving force in the divestment movement.” McKibben, in turn, declared that Union’s “long ties to the city’s leaders” would “have a major impact.” It wasn’t long before the New School one-upped Union by announcing a “Comprehensive Climate Action Plan” that included not only divestiture from fossil fuels, but a pledge to turn all its students into “climate citizens.”

Colleges and universities also led the political way in California. After nine schools in the state announced they were eliminating their investments in fossil fuels, California governor Jerry Brown signed, in October, a bill requiring state pension funds for public employees and teachers to divest coal company stocks.

The California divestment mandate includes a caveat allowing public investment-fund managers to maintain their stakes in fossil-fuel companies if divesting runs contrary to “fiduciary responsibilities.” This is a rare but important admission that funds divesting for political reasons can put a dent in people’s life-savings. And for what? Divestment merely means that one group of investors — those fixated on the threat of global warming — sell their fossil-fuel stocks to another group of investors — those who are not similarly fixated. Divestment doesn’t improve the environment, but to the extent the sell-off hurts the value of traditional energy stocks, it does mean jeopardizing the stability and profitability of retirees’ nest eggs.

From colleges to cities to states to the federal government, one divestment decision leads to another. Two weeks after Brown signed the California law, the U.S. Department of Labor issued “new guidance” permitting pension managers to count environmental factors in gauging the value of an investment. State governments and federal agencies now endorse a campaign that leftist students turned into a litmus test.

As for the Exxon investigation, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) last year proposed using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act to investigate oil companies as criminal gangs. In October, two members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Ted Lieu and Mark DeSaulnier, both California Democrats, wrote to Attorney General Loretta Lynch asking her to investigate ExxonMobil for “organizing a sustained deception campaign.” In February, three members wrote again to Lynch, asking her to open a parallel investigation into Shell. Wrote Lieu, along with Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.), “we now ask that Shell also be investigated for intentionally hiding the truth about climate change and embarking on a massive campaign of denial and disinformation.” Lieu, Welch, DeSaulnier, and Cartwright have also asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to open its own investigation.

It’s worth remembering where the idea of an investigation came from: a team of graduate journalism students at Columbia University. In 2014 five students and one professor launched an examination of Exxon that resulted in three articles published in the Los Angeles Times. Those articles, along with parallel muckraking from Inside Climate News, are what inspired the state investigations and the calls for federal investigations.

What do the campus activists want next? Now that the base of political support is built, McKibben is pushing his divestment acolytes to devote more attention directly to national politics, not just the campus proxy battles. He wants a blanket prohibition of drilling and mining both in the Arctic and on all public U.S. lands. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell partially satisfied his call in January when she announced a moratorium on new coal mining leases. Senators Bernie Sanders and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) would enact McKibben’s vision in toto with legislation named for one of McKibben’s slogans, the “Keep It in the Ground Act.” In February Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and 16 cosponsors introduced a companion bill in the House.

It won’t end there. The students say they want divested endowments reinvested into solar and wind energy. McKibben has also said he wants to eliminate federal subsidies to oil companies, boost (already extensive) subsidies to wind and solar companies, and ban fracking — all cornerstones of Sanders’s energy platform. McKibben has already stumped for and endorsed Sanders, who enjoys a comfortable lead over Hillary Clinton among the young voters McKibben has done so much to mobilize.

Such policies, of course, would leave the United States careening straight for Solyndra II — or to nationalized energy. McKibben and his college activists appear at ease with either option. Which is alarming because elected leaders are marching in lockstep right behind them.

Rachelle Peterson is director of research projects at the National Association of Scholars and author of Inside Divestment: The Illiberal Movement to Turn a Generation Against Fossil Fuels (2015).