Students get active for divestment.

Tuesday, 11 June 2013
By Matt Twomey | CNBC.com Writer/Editor

For young people who believe climate change is the biggest challenge humans have ever faced, the time for debate has passed. Now they’re aiming to hit fossil fuel merchants right in their market caps.

The Fossil Free campaign, which claims activists on 300 campuses and was kicked off by an article in Rolling Stone last summer by environmentalist Bill McKibben, is targeting primarily university endowments to stop investing in the top 200 oil, gas and coal companies. …

… Jay Friedlander, chair of sustainable business with Maine’s College of the Atlantic, which has committed to divesting under this campaign, readily admits that a school like his, with its $32 million endowment, “is not going to change Exxon Mobil’s world.”

He says that divestiture is about more than that, however. “It’s also about where resources can be redeployed, such as in sustainable and local enterprises.”

… Friedlander said College of the Atlantic’s decision to divest was because the deployment of money has meaning and consequences. “It’s about how a school should be investing its endowment,” he said. “We shouldn’t be profiting from companies not aligned with out values and goals.”

Read the full article here.