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August 26, 2015

The City University of New York (CUNY) Monday joined the chorus of colleges and universities across the country rejecting fossil fuel divestment, including Harvard, Cornell and the University of California. In response to a small rally by CUNY Divest Monday afternoon, college spokesman Mike Arena told POLITICO (sub req’d) that the University was concerned divestment …

July 30, 2015

One of the more interesting and under-reported aspects of the so-called divestment “movement,” which lead organizer Bill McKibben has declared is now a “mass movement” and a smashing success, is McKibben’s continued inability to convince the very school at which he teaches to join his effort. Keep in mind: McKibben doesn’t teach at Texas A&M …

July 29, 2015

A new study from the Commonfund Institute and the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) has some bad news for the divestment movement: schools have almost no interest in divesting from fossil fuels. The study surveys 200 colleges and universities in the United States to discover their attitudes and policies on a range of “responsible investing” …

July 22, 2015

A special MIT issue committee charged with ensuring the prestigious school remains a leader in the fight to address climate change released a report earlier this summer rejecting blanket fossil fuel divestment, finding divestment to be a “polarizing” and unnecessarily complicated approach to dealing with the issue. The report, “MIT and the Climate Challenge” is …

July 13, 2015

Two longtime and respected reporters with the New York Times recently raised significant concerns over (and outright disapproval of) The Guardian’s fossil fuel divestment campaign, saying it has the potential to undermine the credibility of climate change coverage and hinder efforts to address global warming. Andrew Revkin, author of the Dot Earth blog hosted by …

July 10, 2015

Thursday night’s panel discussion hosted by Columbia University, billed as a high-level discussion on fossil-fuel investments in a carbon-constrained world, included surprisingly little discussion on the topic of fossil fuel divestment, as well as a noticeable lack of students — especially from Columbia. Sitting right there in the audience ourselves, we couldn’t help but leave with …

July 2, 2015

Last month, The New York Times published a fairly balanced report taking a closer look at what fossil-fuel divestment proponents are actually trying to accomplish with their campaigns, stipulating at the start that the effort isn’t really about trying to affect the valuations of the companies being targeted. Of course, not all divestment activists concede …

June 8, 2015

Remember last fall when the heirs to the Rockefeller fortune announced their decision to divest their financial holdings of companies that produce fossil fuels? Given the history of the Rockefeller family, of course, the announcement was treated as a massive news event by the Washington Post, New York Times and others, with lead divestment activist …

May 27, 2015

Add Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe to the long list of climate advocates opposing fossil fuel divestment. In a forum last month sponsored by The New Republic called “The Next Frontier of Climate Change,” Gov. McAuliffe spent almost the entire 30 minutes talking up his efforts to address climate change. But when he was also asked …

May 20, 2015

The same “news” outlet that brought you the “Keep It in the Ground” campaign, which seeks to “delegitimise the business models of companies” that produce and deliver the energy supplies needed to run the international economy, has been caught red-handed accepting ad dollars (or pounds sterling) from some of the same companies its campaign is …