Fossil fuel talks fall flat for campaigners, but the future looks bright
On March 30, 2016, University of Toronto President Meric Gertler released a 43-page report detailing the university’s response to an increasingly popular divestment campaign.
Divesting from the top 50 companies that run the fossil fuel industry has become a popular desire in post-secondary institutions in both the U.K. and the United States; however, the movement has not been able to gain the same momentum in Canada.
U of T joins the University of British Columbia (UBC), Concordia University, Simon Fraser University (SFU), McGill University, the University of Winnipeg, Dalhousie University, and the University of Calgary in rejecting the demands of divestment campaigns.
Not all of the schools that have rejected the idea of divestment have shut it down outright. Some institutions, like Concordia, have created separate investment lines to fund clean energy. Other schools, like UBC, SFU, and now U of T, are working on implementing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment policies with specific portions of their endowment funds.
ESG investing is a relatively new trend. The phrase was coined in 2014 as a way for companies and investors to address the three main areas of concern when measuring the sustainability and ethical impact that a company has on the natural environment.
In his statement on March 30, President Gertler said that he believes investing in environmental and social companies will likely exclude further investment in the companies targeted by divestment campaigns.
“The virtue of an approach such as the one I am outlining is that it allows us to look at the practices of firms not just in fossil-fuel-producing sectors, but in the rest of economy as well,” said President Gertler, in a March 30 statement.
Some key issues are consistently raised by the universities that have declined to divest in fossil fuel companies. In almost every case, only a small portion of the school’s finances are invested in the fossil fuel companies from which campaigns attempt to divest. In U of T’s case, for example, the school has no investments in any of the seven companies that the environment sustainability committee deemed to be globally high-risk.
Currently, the price of oil is down, which means that shares in companies that support fossil fuels are not fiscally responsible for the schools to sell. As a result, it is now easier for institutions to deny the suggestion of divestment. In the case of UBC’s endowment investment, the worth of their stock in fossil fuel fell from $110 million at the beginning of 2015 to $85 million at the beginning of this year.
UBC’s vice-president of communications, Philip Steenkamp, said that divestment campaigners characterize the issue as a moral one, but that the university is committed to a “more effective way” of combatting climate change—namely committing to “very aggressive” reductions in the greenhouse-gas emissions of its campus.
At UBC, the discussion with divestment campaigners is far from over. Alex Hemingway, a spokesman for the student campaign for fossil fuel divestment, says that his group is considering campus sit-ins and protests after “jumping through all the hoops” set up by the administration, only to fail when the issue reached the board.
President Gertler hopes that students will accept and embrace the response from the administration.
“I am completely convinced by the need for us to move,” said President Gertler, in his statement. “We take very seriously the call from [Environment Minister Catherine McKenna] and other leaders to translate words into action, and this is our attempt to do so.”
The board of governors at U of T have implied that getting to a low-carbon economy will not happen with haste, and that this transition and temporary compromise is just part of the process of moving forward.
“I agree with the committee’s insight that many forms of fossil fuels will be with us for some period of time as we transition to new sources,” added President Gertler.
At McGill, a university that has outright rejected the idea of divestment, students are holding a sit-in at the office of university principal Suzanne Fortier. Principal Fortier said she will meet with protesters this week.
The University of Guelph (U of G) has not yet reached the point of respectfully calling upon the administration to make a decision about the divestment campaign. The student body will not be able to significantly lobby the administration from U of G in one way or another until fall 2016, due to a failure to reach quorum for the divestment question in the 2016 Central Student Association general elections.