DIVEST MEETS WITH PRES. BACOW, SENIOR FELLOW LEE TO DISCUSS EARTH DAY 2020 DEMANDS

Students stand by deadline for divestment, raise concerns about industry engagement and University inaction

CAMBRIDGE, MA — Yesterday, October 23, five members of the Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard (FFDH) campaign met with five Harvard University administrators to discuss the campaign’s fossil fuel divestment demands. The five administrators present at the hour-long meeting were: Lawrence Bacow, University President; Bill Lee, Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation; Kate Murtagh, Managing Director for Sustainable Investing; Patti Belanger, Chief of Staff and Strategic Advisor to President Bacow; and Marc Goodheart, Vice President and Secretary of the University. The students present were Connor Chung ’23, Ilana Cohen ’22, Gabrielle Langkilde ’21, Eva Rosenfeld ’21, and Caleb Schwartz ‘20.

At the meeting, FFDH organizers reiterated that the campaign takes the deadline of Earth Day, 2020 that it has set out for Harvard to commit to disclose, divest, and reinvest its fossil fuel holdings seriously. FFDH communicated that it plans to escalate action up until that date and every day after if Harvard does not do so. The students also raised new concerns about the University’s recent shareholder engagement initiatives.

The meeting began with Langkilde sharing her connection to the climate crisis with administrators. Langkilde is from American Samoa, a group of islands and atolls in the South Pacific that are, along with other islands in the region, already facing the effects of rising sea levels and increasing storm intensity. “Without divestment a lot of students on this campus can’t call Harvard a home away from home,” she said, addressing the administrators. “Not when it’s destroying our true home.”

FFDH Co-Lead Coordinator Ilana Cohen then underscored the Earth Day 2020 deadline, by which the campaign demands the university commit to totally divest the endowment from fossil fuel companies as soon as possible. “We’re here because we care about this university,” said Cohen. “We take that deadline of Earth Day 2020 very seriously. There’s a moral and financial imperative [to divest], and the case for divestment has been made.”

Lee responded by assuring students that the Corporation has heard their concerns and takes them and the issue of climate change seriously. He does not believe the corporation should allow the endowment to be used to make a political statement, because “the end goal [is that the endowment] is there to ensure the wellbeing of the university decades and centuries in the future”. FFDH maintains that investing in industry that is actively destroying the future by stalling climate action is already a political statement. Bacow added that to face climate change, we need to “work collectively to decarbonize the economy,” which necessarily involves engaging with industry.

The conversation then turned to the University’s recent announcement that it had joined Climate Action 100+, an investor-led shareholder engagement initiative aimed at reducing emissions from the 161 largest greenhouse gas emitting companies. Schwartz argued that shareholder engagement is a fundamentally insufficient method of achieving the rapid decarbonization necessary to address the climate crisis. Murtagh responded by pointing to Harvard’s environmental, social and corporate governance guidelines and saying that engagement can be a slow process, but the University can have an impact on the issues it chooses to engage with.

Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard believes that the slow-paced shareholder engagement initiatives touted by the University are not only insufficient in addressing the climate crisis, but a harmful option that will distract from necessary climate action. Engagement may be successful in achieving positive small goals like disclosure of lobbying dollars, but it cannot be used to change the core business model of fossil fuel production companies — which in many cases is to grow fossil fuel sales for decades to come.

Rosenfeld delivered the last student comment, arguing that Harvard is soon going to lose its opportunity to be on the right side of history on the issue of climate change. Mentioning how Harvard’s delayed response to Apartheid divestment stained its reputation, she spoke about a global awakening to the urgency of the climate crisis is increasingly making Harvard look like a bad actor.

Profiting from the fossil fuel industry — which spends millions to block climate legislation, spreads misinformation on climate science, and attacks Harvard’s own climate scientists — is not a path to just, rapid, and transformative change. FFDH will stand firm in its demands that the University commit to disclose, divest, and reinvest no later than Earth Day 2020.