Swarthmore College, the epicenter of student protest last year over investment in fossil fuels, has budgeted $300,000 as part of an ongoing commitment to improve energy conservation on campus. The college’s board of managers, at its meeting last weekend, approved the expenditure as part of a $160 million budget.
The College is sending its 3rd annual delegation to Paris for COP21. Read the delegation’s daily blog updates here. In 2013, the College applied for and was granted NGO observer status to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP).
In the three days since negotiators reached an agreement in Paris, I’ve seen the deal heralded as everything from “the world’s greatest diplomatic success” to “just bullshit” . There seems to be little consensus as to whether COP-21’s outcome was phenomenal, devastating, or even meaningful whatsoever.
We write in response to the Feb. 25 guest opinion, “Board Members’ Conflicts of Interest in Regards to the Fossil Fuel Industry Leave Us No Choice but to Escalate”. Many of the assertions in the piece are unfounded and present a distorted picture of the efforts the Board and the administration have undertaken.
Almost two years after Chief Investment Officer David Swensen added climate change awareness to Yale’s investment strategy, the endowment is starting to divest from fossil fuels. In a Tuesday letter to the Yale community, Swensen reported that after months of talking with Yale’s external investment managers about the potential risks associated with investments in coal, oil, around $10 million of the endowment has been removed from two publicly-traded fossil fuel producers.
The national fossil fuel divestment movement started at Swarthmore with the student group Swarthmore Mountain Justice. In 2010, a group of students traveled to West Virginia on their spring and fall breaks to learn about mountaintop removal coal mining and its effects on the communities of Appalachia.
As students across the country engage in nonviolent direct action calling on their administrators to divest from fossil fuels, calling out conflicts of interest embedded within their decision makers over the last two weeks.
The charge will levy a fee of 0.5% of each academic department’s budget. The money gathered will be used to establish a fund dedicated to carbon-reduction projects. Increasing carbon efficiency has been a major priority of facilities staff for a long time, according to Aurora Winslade, Director of Sustainability.
Holding signs reading “Carbon emissions – air pollution – 8 million deaths a year” and “Rhonda Cohen – Board of Glenmede Trust – $1 billion in Fossil Fuel Industry,” 18 members of Mountain Justice, accompanied by Professor of Religion, Mark Wallace, staged a demonstration at the Philadelphia offices of investment and wealth management firm Glenmede Trust on Wednesday morning.
On January 27th, Swarthmore Mountain Justice revealed the considerable conflicts of interest held on the part of three Board members, Rhonda Cohen ’76, Samuel Hayes III ’57, and Harold Kalkstein ’78. As of June 30, 2015, firms associated with these three Board members held more than $25 billion worth of investments in energy companies, severely compromising the integrity of any board decisions on divestment.