In November the board of trustees of American University, where I teach, rejected the call of a student group, Fossil Free AU, to sell off our stocks in “fossil fuel” companies. The board’s decision was typical of the national response of campus leaders to a foundation-funded divestment campaign that has spread across the country as quickly and broadly as the one to divest from companies investing in apartheid South Africa did in the mid-1980s.
This campaign has not spread as successfully, though. Only a dozen small colleges have divested, while larger ones including Cornell, Harvard, and the University of California system have rejected divestment, citing their duty to maintain the profits that keep them going. Stanford has taken a middle position, divesting from coal companies but not companies that extract oil and natural gas or deliver electricity produced by fossil fuels.
Fossil Free, which had won votes of support from American University’s student body and faculty senate, cried hypocrisy at the board’s decision. The official position of the university is in accord with the group’s belief that industrial emissions have created a climate catastrophe that threatens the survival of the human race. The president of AU has joined over 600 other university presidents in signing a “climate commitment” agreeing with a “scientific consensus” that there must be an 80 percent reduction in industrial emissions “to avert the worst impacts of global warming and to reestablish … more stable climatic conditions.”
In explaining the board’s rejection of divestment, even its chairman agreed with Fossil Free that “there is no greater challenge facing our current and future generations.” Given these stances, the group’s website said, “to continue investing in fossil fuel companies is a conscious choice to be accomplices in global climate murder.”
The logic of the student group is unassailable. Having listened carefully to the president, board, faculty senate, and nearly all of their professors, the students are simply pointing out to them the necessary consequences of the beliefs they express. It’s the elders who are all wrong.
But the students have the hypocrisy of their campus leaders backwards. It’s not that they believe in climate catastrophe but can’t bring themselves to make economic sacrifices to deter it. The truth is that, like politicians from President Obama to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, for all their speechifying about the existential threat that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses pose to the planet, they don’t really believe it — or at least not enough to hamper anybody’s economic growth or limit anybody’s personal comfort.
The students are absolutely right to tell leaders who claim to believe in climate catastrophe to put up or shut up. And the leaders won’t do either. As economic columnist Robert Samuelson predicted in 1997, the debate over what to do about industrial emissions of heat-trapping gasses continues to be “a gushing source of national hypocrisy” because no politician wants to “impose pain on voters for no obvious gain to solve a hypothetical problem.” Campus leaders concerned about returns on investment are too wise to impose pain on their endowments either.
I am in the distinct minority on the AU campus for applauding the trustees’ decision. As a professor of both mathematics and African politics, I have for a decade taught students how to analyze government and media misrepresentations of climate models and exaggerations of climate statistics. I immersed myself in this field because it provided such teachable examples of statistical analysis and mathematical modeling. I stayed in it because claims of climate catastrophe have led to policies that threaten to derail Africa’s drive to raise life expectancy by increasing its share of households with reliable electricity from the current one in four.
The moral case for divesting from fossil fuel stocks is the belief in climate catastrophe. The moral case for continuing to invest in them is that these companies perform an important social function in delivering reliable, inexpensive, and increasingly clean energy to residents and businesses around the world.
At present, the moral case against divestment is far stronger. The recent energy boom from new and more efficient ways of harvesting fossil fuels is spurring economic growth in America. If mineral rights can be taken out of the hands of corrupt African officials and the profits from exploration used to expand access to clean water and electricity, millions of years of African life expectancy can be preserved.
These are real lives being balanced against hypothetical ones. I think the elders on campus understand this. I wish they’d have the courage to join me in explaining this unpopular reality to our students. They deserve better than what they are getting now.
Caleb Stewart Rossiter is an adjunct professor at American University. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions for editorials, available at this link.
