The facts are extremely clear – the burning of fossil fuels is dangerous to the environment and to our health. Recently, the United Nations listed air pollution as a carcinogen and a large factor for this pollution is the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, gasoline and natural gas. Even more alarming are the effects of climate change, which are now beginning to impact us in the form of significant drops in yields of crops, record wildfires and the prevalence of extreme weather events. At our current pace of fossil fuel use, scientists predict that global average temperatures could rise up to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit within the next 100 years. Within this time, sea level could rise 1.5 to 3 feet, making many coastal areas uninhabitable and making storms more frequent and destructive. The changing climate has already had an effect on many other animal species such as migratory species that depend on particular weather cycles. Mosquitoes and other insect vectors of infectious diseases like malaria may become more widespread over longer seasons due to the changes in temperature, rainfall and habitat.
The UMass community must take part in preventing global climate change and call for measures to prevent further destruction. One approach is fossil fuel divestment, a movement sweeping across the nation, especially within college campuses, which seeks to hold liable the corporations responsible for profiting from climate change. To divest from something is to remove all investments in a particular industry with the goal of stigmatizing their unethical and immoral practices. Fossil fuel divestment aims to replace the dangerous and unsustainable approaches the fossil fuel industry uses for energy production with novel, sustainable practices. It is important to note that choosing to only invest in green technologies does not provide the same power and message as first divesting from the old, unsustainable technologies.
In addition, divestment makes economic sense and some of the largest investment firms, like HSBC global and economic institutions, like the World Bank, are taking notice. This is because the costs of continued fossil fuel use and extraction are beginning to outweigh the benefit. More and more dangerous methods of extraction and transportation are utilized and because of this, deadly oil spills and fossil fuel disasters have become nearly omnipresent. Once we begin to account for the monumental cost of life in the form of health impacts due to asthma and cancer attributed in those who live near centers of pollution, or start to quantify the destruction caused by “super” storms – hurricanes like Katrina, floods, droughts, record wildfires in the Southwest and now the devastation caused by Typhoon Haiyan – we see that we clearly cannot afford this system anymore.
Governments are beginning to take notice of this as well. Every piece of legislation that keeps fossil fuels from being burned lowers the bottom line of the fossil fuel industry. According to 350.org – the organization that launched the divestment campaign – and prominent NASA scientist James Hansen, in order to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, two-thirds of the remaining yet-to-be-extracted fossil fuels have to remain underground. This means that up to two-thirds of the fossil fuel industries’ assets could become “stranded” if governments take the lead in combating climate change. And they are doing just that, evidenced by the new EPA restrictions of carbon dioxide pollution from power plants and the Renewable Fuel Standard Program, which increases the sale of renewable fuel and decreases greenhouse gas emissions by 138 million metric tons within the next decade.
On a grassroots level, we can continue to spread awareness about this topic and push for legislative and investment changes in our towns, states and within organizations in which we are involved. The UMass Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign is a student-run coalition and a vehicle for getting involved in the fight for our future. We must uphold the UMass mission to “improve the lives of the people of the Commonwealth, the nation, and the world.”
So lend us a hand – visit us in the Campus Center to sign our petition to show the UMass administration how we, the community of UMass Amherst, feels about this issue, or join the Divestment Campaign to help spread more awareness and build power for this movement. Join us in upholding the integrity of this university, and the assurance that we will still have an inhabitable world in which to grow old in the future. Check us out at our newly launched website, www.divestumass.org.
Pratiksha Yalakkishettar and Samuel King are members of the UMass Divestment Campaign. They can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].
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Genghis Khan • Dec 20, 2013 at 10:58 am
Sam:
The only reason “green” energy has succeeded in all the countries you name is because of heavy and massive government subsidies.
Let me state up front – conservation is a good thing. Green energy, in some cases, can be the most effective power supply. But green energy does not have the power density that fossil fuels and nuclear energy have. In our ever-more-electricity-dependent society, we need power.
As to “crisis” – what global warming? The earth’s temperature has not changed in almost 20 years, in DIRECT CONTRADICTION to the Holy Writ of the models. Testable predictions of the models, e.g., a buildup of moisture in the upper atmosphere, HAVE NOT HAPPENED.
So let me school you a little. Science is not dependent on consensus. It is not dependent on models. It is dependent on a theory making concrete predictions; predictions which can be tested against actual data. When there is a conflict between data and model, there are two outcomes:
1. Data wins. Models are changed or disproved. This is called The Scientific Method.
2. The models win. When data is ignored, critics silenced, and information and methods hidden, in favor of the model, that’s called a faith, and is akin to creationism.
Ultimately, a theory must be able to be disproved. When The Goracle predicts that the arctic will be ice free by 2013… and there’s more ice there than there was last year… that says Al Gore was wrong. When the models say that it could be stormier or calmer, warmer or colder, wetter or drier, in other words ANY CHANGE FROM ABSOLUTE DUPLICATION FROM YEAR TO YEAR TO THE DEGREE AND INCHES OF RAIN/SNOW, it must be (cue reverb) Global Climate Change.
Did you know that the Romans lived in a warmer earth than we do now? It must be because of all those SUVs roman around the country. And the Minoans lived in a planet warmer than that – must have been the Atlantean coal power plants.
Sam • Dec 12, 2013 at 9:48 pm
Hello everyone,
I appreciate the sincere comments amongst you and I’m especially grateful that we are receiving a comment from a student or administrator at Vassar. It is quite an honor that you would pay attention to op-eds at UMass.
I’d like to address some of the concern I am hearing about the intentions and effectiveness of the tactic of divestment.
First off, divestment is not the end goal of its proponents. Those who use the tool of divestment, wield it as one weapon against the crisis of climate change. In the same way that an investor does not put all of his investments into one stock, activists don’t put all of their efforts into only divestment. Having said this, divestment will be strongest as a means to bring attention and action to the issue, as well as train leaders at universities around the nation. Additionally, when divestment is successful on a large scale, momentum will begin to shift in favor of larger institutional and legislative changes for limiting the use of fossil fuels and transitioning to a sustainable energy future.
Despite the propaganda, renewable energy is available and proven. Many countries around the world, including Germany, Sweden, Canada, Cuba, Spain, Morocco, and the Netherlands, rely heavily on their use. The United States has not employed them en masse, because they are beholden to fossil fuel interests, making our efforts even more needed.
Lastly, it is only a scoundrel who decries others for a possible wrong doing which they commit with frequency. It is not the growth of emissions in the developing world that we must worry about, it is our own. If the US takes the lead, others will follow. We are the US, we need to lead, instead of making detracting statements online.
That is my piece for now,
Thank you
Genghis Khan • Dec 2, 2013 at 10:06 am
With the polar cap showing more ice than last year, the globe not having warmed in 15+ years, the Warmists are in a panic as the Holy Writ – read: models – continue to diverge from actual reality.
Like Creationists, when DATA from the REAL WORLD doesn’t match the prediction, blame the data and try to find a way around it.
Locke • Nov 27, 2013 at 5:26 pm
There is a fundamental disconnect in the logic of this “campaign.” This column rightly states that the world needs to eliminate its dependence on fossil fuels in order to avoid the ravages of global warming, but naively assumes that divestment will somehow accomplish this.
Fossil fuels aren’t being burned because people invest in fossil fuel companies. Fossil fuel companies are not a single, malevolent force burning carbon to further their own ends- they are companies that sell products people want to buy, and need to live.
Our society is dependent upon fossil fuels, and the way to fix it is not to stage a silly campaign seeking to “stigmatize” fossil fuels. We don’t burn fossil fuels because we like to- we burn them because we need to. Our alternative energy sources are, at present moment, incredibly weak, and completely incapable of replacing fossil fuels in the current energy market.
The only way to eliminate our dependence on harmful fossil fuels is to focus our efforts on developing their replacements. When you want a new car, you don’t sell the old one first then sit around waiting for a nicer one to arrive- you go find a better car, buy it, then sell the old one. We can’t just distch fossil fuels then wait for green energy to catch up- that’s absolutely preposterous, and the reason why the fossil fuel divestment campaign is destined to fizzle out, as it has already has begun to.
Here at Vassar, and at numerous other institutions, there is a growing consensus that divestment, while well-intentioned, is overall a naive and ineffective way to combat climate change, as well as generally harmful to our college finances.
Ridiculous • Nov 26, 2013 at 5:56 pm
“One approach is fossil fuel divestment, a movement sweeping across the nation, especially within college campuses, which seeks to hold liable the corporations responsible for profiting from climate change.”
So, all of them?
.
Also, whether we like it or not, the growth of emissions in the next few decades is expected to come disproportionally from developing countries. If you’re serious about combating climate change, some sort of multilateral agreement is paramount. Seeing as how the chance of such an agreement coming to fruition is nil, the whole divestment movement has no credibility. This movement is not about preventing climate change. It’s about washing our hands of guilt, and then closing our eyes while the rest of the world keeps on polluting.
Sam • Nov 26, 2013 at 5:06 pm
Hi all,
Here are our references just in case you were wondering where we got our facts from. It seems they took them out when it was printed.
1(EPA, 2013a) http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/basics/
2(Ramasamy and Surendran, 2012) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3377959/
3(EPA, 2013b) http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/EPAactivities/regulatory-initiatives.html