Category: Uncategorized

UN Climate Chief, Christiana Figueres ’79 calls on Board of Managers to divest endowment of fossil fuels

Post author By Lee Smithey
Post date March 23, 2015

Christiana Figueres ’79, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has written a letter calling on the Board of Managers to divest the College’s endowment of fossil fuel holdings.

Photo Credit UNclimatechange Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

In the letter addressed to the Chair of the Board of Managers, Gil Kemp, and Chair of the Board Investment Committee, Christopher Niemczewski, Figueres shared that the student sit-in “renews my optimism.” She points out “the moral imperative to align financial decisions with our highest sense of accountability, both across segments of society as well as across generations” and the “economic imperative” of adding financial value through incorporating sustainability into management of the endowment. She calls on the Board to be financially prudent and at the same time to “play its part in history.”

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Fossil fuel divestment continues to GROW — a conversation with student organizer Kate Aronoff

Post author By From the archive
Post date August 30, 2013

Bryan Farrell, a co-founder of Waging Nonviolence, interviewed our own student, Kate Aronoff, about the burgeoning fossil fuel divestment movement and the role Swarthmore students have played in launching it.

Students at Swarthmore have remained at the forefront of fossil fuel divestment, hosting a national convergence in February and — together with divestment leaders from a number of colleges — launched a series of meet-ups around the country this summer called GROW (Gather Rise Organize Win).

Read the whole article on Waging Nonviolence.

Photo credit: Anjali Cadambi; Creative Commons License: Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

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Students power up nationwide fossil fuel divestment campaigns

Post author By From the archive
Post date February 21, 2013

Our own student, Will Lawrence, has written a piece in Waging Nonviolence with Sally Bunner about the Power Up! Divest Fossil Fuels Student Convergence at Swarthmore College.

… After the fun and exciting work of starting divestment campaigns, students now face the long and challenging work of continuing them in the face of administrative obstacles. …

… To prepare for this important moment, students are gathering in Swarthmore, Pa., this weekend for the Power Up! Divest Fossil Fuels Student Convergence, where they will be sharing the skills necessary to strengthen their campaigns at home and the movement as a whole. Convergence organizers say they hope to focus on two particular threads — how the divestment movement can enact and advance an environmental justice analysis, and how divestment campaigns can coordinate to become more than the sum of their parts.

Read the whole article at Waging Nonviolence.

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Why Mainstream Economists Should Take a Step Back from the Divestment Conversation

Post author By From the archive
Post date February 15, 2013

Ben Wolcott ‘14, an honors Economics major and a course major in Sociology and Anthropology argues that traditional economics is not equipped to assess the social and political dimensions of divestment.

…Mainstream economics is a tool that has strengths and weaknesses. At its core, neoclassical theory examines the incentives around actors’ instrumental self-interest in order to describe and predict action given constraints. Unfortunately, neoclassical economics hurts our understanding of both the benefits and the costs of divestment. I will start with the benefits. While mainstream economics can help us understand situations that encourage people to act in their rational self-interest, it is worse than useless in describing how actors’ value-commitments impact their decisions.

Ultimately, everyone engaging in this conversation should examine why economists have so much say on a question that is mostly political. In America today, neoclassical economics is a dominant discipline. While its tools can be useful, it often fails to appreciate the complexities of human action. … Economics is often called the “dismal science” partially because it views people as instrumentally rational and cannot meaningfully conceptualize action based on value-commitments. We need every tool at our disposal to address climate change, and it would be dismal if we abandoned divestment due to economic arguments.
Read the full article from The Daily Gazette, now archived in The Phoenix.