When you think of SFU, images probably come to mind of students staying up late at the library, bagpipes, First Nations art or the sparkling view from Burnaby Mountain park. You might think the dark grey of the Burnaby campus, late night escapades on the 135, windowless labs, and the fact that despite being 20 minutes late to class, Renaissance Coffee is always a necessity.
You probably don’t associate our university with the expansion of the tar sands and furthering reliance upon multi-billion dollar corporations.
If anything, you may associate our Burnaby Mountain campus with protests against Kinder Morgan expansion proposals and continual debates and lectures about climate change and resource extraction.
If you know a little bit about our history, you may know that Simon Fraser University was once a notable hotbed for political discourse by anti-war activists who were frustrated with the failures of the Canadian education system. However, contrary to this human rights-focused reputation, SFU holds ties with contentious corporations.
MOVEMENT ON THE MOUNTAIN
Upon realizing the serious discrepancy between the school’s sustainability branding and their close connections with the oil, gas, and mining industries, SFU student Tony Nguyen started volunteering with Divest SFU and is currently the president of SFU 350, a climate justice organisation on campus.
Divest SFU is a group of students, faculty, and staff that believe that SFU needs to stop investing in dirty energy, and clean up our school’s reputation and carbon footprint.
Although Divest haven’t been able to specifically campaign on any one investment, as they are waiting for the release of the custodial reports of SFU’s investment portfolio on April 1, they believe that there is reason for concern. SFU has a traditional investment portfolio, which in Canada typically includes corporations such as Suncor, Cenovus, Husky Energy, Syncrude, Shell, BP, and Imperial Oil.
The idea of ‘divestment’, simply put, is to take funds out of one investment, and put them into another.
“For SFU, it means realigning the university’s values of sustainability and its research record on climate change with its investment practices by pulling its money out of the fossil fuels industry,” Nguyen explained. “It means rising up and acknowledging that staying invested in the industry is just as political as divesting and recognizing what message that sends to students and to others in the community.”
Akin to voting with your dollar at the grocery store, divestment works on the principle of reclaiming consumer power to change the market. By investing in green technology, the school or public institution is buying value for a solutions-oriented future and sending a signal to shareholders that the age of fossil fuel extraction is over. Collectively, divesting companies are putting wind turbines in our shopping baskets instead of oil infrastructure.
Divestment gained international traction back in the 1980s during the South African apartheid, when the global community decided that it was unethical to invest in a country that allowed such a system to occur within their borders. Divestment was also used in the battle against the tobacco industry, which is notable because many environmentalists have drawn parallels between the tobacco industry and the oil and gas industries, including false marketing.
DIVESTING DEVELOPMENT
In SFU’s case, divestment is about taking money out of fossil-fuel companies, to address the fact that our continued extraction is causing a mass extinction, and climate catastrophe. According to The Guardian, 32 million people displaced by climate change in were 2012 alone. Without shifting our system away from reliance upon carbon intensive energy, these stark numbers will only continue to climb.
According to a report by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada published in The Globe and Mail, the Canadian government isn’t realistically responding to the threat of climate change. The federal government is working to expand the tar sands through encouraging projects like Keystone XL, TransMountain, Energy East, pipelines facilitating approvals for natural gas wells, and funding multi-billion dollar oil extraction sites. Conservatives and Liberals alike are pushing Bill C-51, which could criminalize environmental groups and implement mass surveillance measures.
Meanwhile, in BC, the provincial government is promoting fracked gas and the LNG industry with tax dollars by using Science World’s engagement tour to reach remote communities and youth throughout the province. The Conservative government has consistently gutted environmental review protection through legislation from Budget Bill C-38 to Bill C-4, slackening resource project requirements, and allowing oil projects to move through BC’s parks — even though, according to a 2015 Nature report, we need to leave approximately 33 per cent of oil, 49 per cent of gas, and 82 per cent of coal unused in order to survive a warming world.
On March 15, The Guardian reported that the United Nations supported the divestment movement, stating that Nick Nuttall, the spokesman for the UN framework convention on climate change, commented “we support divestment as it sends a signal to companies, especially coal companies, that the age of ‘burn what you like, when you like’ cannot continue.”
As Naomi Klein wrote in her critically-acclaimed book This Changes Everything, fossil fuel stocks are consistently under-performing, making our continued investment in them foolish. To paraphrase Klein, fossil-fuel projects will continue to be volatile investments, and will see diminishing returns over the coming years.
In the long term, many believe it makes little moral or financial sense to continue to invest in the large-scale destruction of our planet, as this behaviour will result in major losses. According to investment manager James Cameron, a member of British prime minister David Cameron’s business advisory group: “investors continue to pour cash into unsustainable assets without understanding the risks associated with these investments, such as climate change, local pollution, fossil fuel price volatility, political risk and catastrophes such as Deepwater Horizon.”
If our planet’s temperature rises by two degrees Celsius, some island nations will not survive rising ocean levels. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, if the current rate of extraction projections continues, Earth will eventually reach that temperature, resulting in food shortage, increased poverty, coastal flooding, and displacement of people.
The number of climate refugees, as well as the shortage and movement of arable land, means that fossil fuels will continue to be a poor investment even through a capitalist framework, as we will face disruption of an unknown cost at an unknown but staggering scale. In Bloomberg Business, writer Alex Morales compares investing in fossil fuels to be akin to “running off a cliff they can’t see. As these investors face the possibility that untapped deposits of oil, gas and coal — valued at trillions of dollars globally — they could become stranded assets as governments adopt stricter climate change policies.
SFU’s reputation is one of innovation, forward thinking, science, political science, and smart business. As part of an academic institution, students and faculty are responsible for educating the public, a role that comes with a moral responsibility.
YOUTH ACTION
The Divestment Day of Action was held internationally February 13 and 14 to mark the necessity of moving away from fossil fuels, with over 450 actions and thousands of activists participating worldwide. Harvard’s students organized a 24-hour sit-in, while hundreds of people switched bank accounts over their bank’s investment policy.
“Divestment is one of the fastest growing movements in history and it is an incredible showing of people power,” Kelsey Mech, the Director of the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition, told The Peak. “But it goes beyond people, it uses large institutions in the world of finance to target the systems in place: economic, energy and political, and call for change.”
For a campaign begun in 2012, the fossil fuel divestment movement is going strong. With over 800 institutions and investors committed to divesting from fossil fuels, the most recent large-scale divestment commitment comes from the Norwegian Sovereign Fund, a portfolio worth almost 900 billion dollars.
A notable aspect of the fossil fuel divestment movement worldwide is that it is largely youth-led. As with many prominent historical social movements, students have been able to mobilize and organize incredibly quickly when they see their future is at risk.
Student-led movements are something to keep an eye on, as the people organizing them often wind up shaping the political system in later years. Mech reports that, in Canada, there are “30 student-led campaigns, from BC to Newfoundland and everywhere in between, including two in Calgary. There are also a number of municipal, faith-based, union, and community campaigns beyond that.”
Some of the most impressive work is being done by twentysomethings, new to the game and eager to protect their future. Mech describes her fellow student mobilizers as “fantastically badass, truly marvellous, passionate, dedicated, and just plain awesome. We have some incredibly skilled young organizers all across this country and I am so proud and honoured to work with them every day.”
Perhaps the fossil fuel divestment campaign is growing so rapidly because distant politicians are not representing local interests. Grassroots campaigns and influential local institutions are responses to what many environmentalists consider to be a flawed democratic system.
“The fact that we have a government that has been elected by a minority of votes is incredibly problematic,” Mech explained. “Especially when that government is dismantling environmental protection, violating indigenous rights, and continuing to heavily promote the expansion of the tar sands.”
TAKING CLIMATE CHARGE
Divestment is simple, and can be applied to anywhere that people keep their savings. If you are a member of a school, a church, a company, or even a customer at a bank or a corporation, you can demand that they divest.
This accessibility — that anyone can start a divestment campaign for the institution that they most care about — is akin to crowdfunding for organizing, empowering students newly involved in environmental campaigning.
“Divest SFU was the first campaign I ever joined, and it’s now become an essential part of my learning experience here at SFU,” Nguyen said of his experience. “It’s hard to imagine what university would have looked like for me if I hadn’t involved myself in organizing.”
Organize BC and Canadian Youth Climate Coalition held a campaign training in mid-February with leaders of divestment campaigns in the Lower Mainland. They discussed the power of sharing stories, strategy and structure in environmental and social justice organizing, and historically successful social movements.
This kind of training is what has made the divestment movement successful, and it will the result is an influx of graudates with a penchant for organizing activists and running meaningful environmental movements.
“As a sociology major, at least in my experience, we speak all the time about systems of power and resistance,” Nguyen said. “Being involved in the divestment campaign really allowed me the opportunity to not just absorb these ideas passively, but act and apply.”
Here at SFU, the stand-off is just beginning. As a student, staff, or faculty member, you will likely be hearing a lot of noise from the Divest SFU group over the coming terms until SFU commits to an ethical investment portfolio.
Recent contact by media, environmental organizations, and further student outreach demonstrates that SFU’s divestment movement is quickly gaining ground both on and off campus. All of SFU’s major student societies and more than 100 faculty members support Divest SFU. Commitments by the Board of Governors have been made, both to guarantee financial transparency and to release where their funds are currently invested.
The ripple of divestment means that a small difference in fossil fuel money can go a long way. As these companies realize that people can organize beyond their lobby power with government, and as governments realize that their voters are interested in seeing substantial funds being invested into renewable energy, the rise of successful green tech competition on a more even playing field with oil money will likely occur.
The Divest SFU group has built a collaborative system for student and faculty contribution, along with a series of interactive workshops and events to highlight our need to divest from dirty energy. These allow students to consider how we want the future of our energy use to look.
As our generation shifts towards a future free from fossil fuels, there is an opportunity to invest in the types of energy that our generation will rely upon. Divest SFU is currently collaborating with the SFSS, SFPIRG and local ENGOs on a project called Reinvest in Our Future, building momentum for investment in climate solutions at SFU.
Eoin Madden, Climate and Energy campaigner from Wilderness Committee, explained that he helps organize events with SFU students because they “paint the vision of the world we are fighting for, and demand that SFU play its role in ensuring that vision becomes a reality.
“It is the youth of today who will pay the true cost of climate change. In the fossil fuel industry, we have a collection of very large organizations whose business plan depends of depriving youth of a stable, livable climate,” Madden continued. “The means by which the industry can be confronted, the creativity and energy it takes to challenge the world’s most powerful corporations, is present on every campus in Canada.”
As the divestment movement gains ground both locally and internationally, it will remain a campaign to watch. Engaging students, faculty, professors, and administration in a language of financial responsibility, divestment is a creative response to a lack of government action on issues that affect our species, and indicates a huge market shift well on its way.
