Divestment: The Anti-Science Movement

Let’s suppose, for a moment, that divestment would cripple the energy industry’s profits margins. Thanks to their decreased capital, they’d drill less, would lose political sway, and CO₂ emissions eventually would fall; all together, divestment directly takes down the energy industry, started thanks to one college’s endowment divesting from fossil fuels.
OK, now back to reality.
No divestment campaign, Divest Harvard included, claims that they can directly damage big oil.  In fact, for the most part they openly admit that they won’t. That’s not the point of divestment; it’s turning these corporations into “social pariahs.” And that’s what’s most worrying; divesters willingly admit they’re shifting the debate towards a moral arena, foregoing the scientific arguments that should drive environmentalism. Before I heard about divestment, I thought only climate change deniers rejected the most obvious and agreed upon facts—sadly, they’ve been joined by the science-phobic left and its multi-billon dollar moral crusade.
Now, I’m all for a healthy hatred of energy companies; they slowly destroy our planet while lining their wallets thick. But, if we want to rage a moral war, does a divestment campaign really think it can take on BP, Exxon, etc.? They own our political system, our community centers, and create millions of jobs. There’s no anti-oil critical mass anywhere within reach, and any hedge-fund manager who rejects these investments needs their frontal lobe checked.
All the while, of course, Fox News gets its bogeyman—lefty social activists from the Kremlin on the Charles. Unless progressives can break a nearly six-year trend of legislative stalemates, then support from the Republican Party, or at least it’s moderate wing, remains a necessary and probably sufficient step towards comprehensive climate change legislation. Instead, divestment groups are mud slinging, fully willing to shoot themselves in the foot in the hopes that some blood gets on the shirt of big oil. The “us vs. you” mentality that deploys ad hominem and vitriolic rhetoric hasn’t worked before and won’t work now, no matter what the far-left and the far-right want to imagine.
There’s a winning arena for this debate, of course, and that’s science. Climate change is not up for debate; there’s an ever-growing consensus among climate scientists (more than 97%) that this is real, manmade, accelerating, and dangerous. Science isn’t exactly a buzzword on the right, either, but if we let this play out, we—i.e., the pro-environmental regulation citizens—win. I think a good analogy would be evolution; while it’s not particularly popular still, 6% more of Americans believe in the widely proven theory than as of 2000 (all while, of course, our country’s most prominent religion rejects this view—a hurdle far larger than any climate change proponents will have to overcome).
On the other hand, moral debates rarely feature winners; facts become secondary to personal judgments, and any one person’s view on the moral permissibility becomes as valid as the next’s. Divestment plays on the most shallow of moral arguments—that people and corporations shouldn’t even associate with energy companies, lest they inherently represent evil ends. By fighting a symptom instead of a cause, divestment urges stigma for the sake of stigma and minimalizes the arguments that have led 13% of Americans to accept climate change in the past 2 years; solidarity among climate change deniers could only slow this incredible trend.
Many have argued that stigmatization might work, an Oxford study among the most thorough of them. The study, while pro-divestment, offers nine examples of past American divestment campaigns that it’d be good to review. The “success” stories can be described as mild, at best, and include the not particularly weakened alcohol and tobacco industries (with the notable exception of the successful South Africa apartheid divestment movement). And, of course, the study doesn’t claim the slightest impact after more than half of the campaigns. Divestment, it says, only works if “investors to lower their expectations of the target firm’s net cash flow.” Or, as President Faust pointed out, this is hypocritical and makes no sense unless we all consciously decide to reduce our carbon footprint.
Altogether, this seems to be a misguided and potentially delusional PR campaign—it ignores the more rational arguments and puts a self-righteous face on the environmental movement. Divest Harvard, in particular, ties environmentalism to an elitist liberal bastion.
Oh, and that’s not even the worst part.
As Divest Harvard claims, divesting would cost Swarthmore $204 million dollars over ten years. Harvard’s endowment, being more than twenty times larger than Swarthmore’s, would therefore stand to lose $4 billion. That’s not a typo: billion, with a “b.” Just to put the exchange value of divestment’s cost into perspective, according to GiveWell.org, that translates to 1.8 million lives saved via malaria nets.
Even if Harvard lost the same amount that Divest Harvard claims Swarthmore would, could anyone actually claim that’d be worth it? Assume for a moment that the null hypothesis were that Harvard doesn’t invest in fossil fuel companies. Any mildly responsible environmentalist would immediately petition for investing in those companies and using the $200 million dollars to research methods to slow climate change, lobby on behalf on environmental causes, or just about any project that helps our planet. Instead, Divest Harvard thinks that this money is better spent on a morally self-righteous claim of sustainable living. Even if this cost were “just” $1 million, a number multiple scales of magnitude lower than rough estimates, there doesn’t seem to be any justification for divesting.
At the core of this argument is the idea that activism works for moral issues, and backfires otherwise. I’m all for boycotting Chick-fil-A, marching for abortion rights, and so forth, but divestment abandons the intellectual debate that environmentalists can win, and in doing so trivializes the issue to those not already supportive.
We have a choice. Harvard can save its money, and a whole, whole lot of it, and in the process put it towards a number of laudable social causes or otherwise worthy expenditures—CO₂ emission-reducing projects included. Or, of course, it can let that money slip away, and in the process take the chance that passing worthwhile legislation comes via bombastic campaigns instead of concrete arguments. Whether or not those campaigns have facts on their side, they’ve neglected to use them, and should be treated as any other fact-free mission is: utterly ignorable. In rising above the clamors of the student body, President Faust made the responsible decision that divestment is neither proper nor practical. We need environmental change, and this isn’t the way to do it.