WWU Students for Renewable Energy
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Additional Statements in Support of Divestment
Climate Change Issues and Impacts
These issues compel urgent action. Fossil fuel combustion has warmed the Earth’s surface, melted ice essential to local and global climate processes, raised sea levels and resultant storm surges, acidified oceans, shifted precipitation in destructive ways, and destabilized the global climate system. Physical, chemical, and ecological impacts of climate change affect water quality and availability, air pollution, food production, land stability, dynamics of infectious diseases, and heighten the risk of human conflict. Many of these physical and chemical changes are expected to persist for centuries or millennia. They have driven many local populations and species to extinction, and are expected to threaten large fractions of species on all continents. The impacts of climate change are manifesting now, and they are projected to expand at increasing rates as greenhouse gases accumulate in Earth’s atmosphere. 1 These effects threaten human health and human life throughout the world, and they threaten the very existence of some human societies.
Climate Change Science and Disinformation Campaign
97% of climate scientists concurring with reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2, 3 Yet, public recognition and concern about climate change is low—in a 2013 study, only 44% of U.S. residents surveyed acknowledge that Earth’s climate is warming due to human activities, 4 and only 40% view climate change as a major threat. 5 The magnitude of this gap in understanding between climate scientists and the public demonstrates the effectiveness of the climate change disinformation campaign funded by the fossil fuel industry. As scholars and educators, we must resist this campaign to marginalize our work. Withdrawing the university’s investment in the fossil fuel industry is a requisite first step in this resistance. Responding to current and future impacts of climate change will require all the resources we can summon, but first we must stop pouring gasoline on the fire ourselves.
Some may object to university divestment due to perceptions of political partisanship. In the context of disinformation campaigns and climate change impacts, continuing to invest also is partisan; investing supports the very disinformation campaigns that undermine our work and mission. Similarly, continuing to invest would constitute action in conflict with our ethics, by supporting practices that violate many ethical norms that the University values deeply
WWU Actions and Values
“Uncertainty and challenges do not scare us. They engage us,” President Shepard said in his fall 2013 convocation address. “While matters like core mission do not change, how the mission is to be served should change if the external environment is opening new challenges, threats, opportunities. Adventurousness assures that we have the will to seize the rudder even as skies threaten. Relentless innovation is the wind in our sails.” Just as Western seized the rudder when it divested in the 1980s from profiteers of the inadmissibly oppressive South African apartheid regime, it now must diverge from a globally ruinous status quo. To honor our core vision of being “an international leader in societal problem solving,” Western must stop providing capital to the industry whose actions and propaganda perpetuate the climate crisis—the most pervasive societal problem of our generation.
In the words of President Shepard, “We are here to make a difference. To be the difference. We are not active minds alone. We are about changing lives.” We act on this charge by calling for our university to align its financial investments with its values on this issue of profound social and environmental import. We understand divestment will be complicated by the legal and financial structure of the Western Foundation’s investments. That structure does not reduce imperatives for divestment described in this letter. We urge the Foundation to work with its fund managers to achieve fossil fuel divestment as expeditiously as possible.
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1 U.S. Global Change Research Program. 2014. National Climate Assessment. http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/
2 IPPC. 2013. http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf
3 IPPC. 2013. http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
4 Pew Research Center. 2013. http://www.people-press.org/2013/11/01/gop-deeply-divided-over-climate-change/
5 Pew Research Center. 2013. http://www.pewresearch.org/key-data-points/climate-change-key-data-points-from-pew-research/