Well, it's Earth Day once again, and I have some opinions to share with you, which you should not be surprised about. What I'd like to write about today is divestment from fossil fuels, which you also should not be surprised to find out I am not in favor of. It's not that I think we should go out of our way to invest in fossil fuel companies, it's just that the divestment effort seems to massively miss the point. Let's start with the argument for divesting, which I think Felix Salmon makes better than I could, so I'm just going to link here. Salmon's argument is charming, but stupid. Honestly, I'm confused by this notion that we ought to invest our energy in doing things because they make bold, idealistic statements, even if they are utterly useless activities. To be clear, if you're on an investment committee for some institution and you want to divest from fossil fuel companies, you do you, whatever makes you happy. But as environmentalists, I think we need to step back and think about why we're asking investment committees to divest from fossil fuel companies.
Let's start with divestment as a tactic for social change. When does divestment work? Well, it works when the companies producing that product are susceptible to social or political pressure and/or when divestment of a few actors has a dramatic effect on the revenues of the product, and when the product you're targeting doesn't have too much influence on economies. I'll go through those one by one for fossil fuel companies:
Are fossil fuel companies susceptible to social or political pressure?
This is the one criterion I think may apply to fossil fuel companies, but probably not. I suppose anything is possible, although, to take an extreme example, BP seems like it was publicly shamed in the most dramatic way possible, and they don't seem to be doing things differently.
Does divestment by a few actors have a dramatic effect on fossil fuel company revenues?
I don't exactly know how to answer this question. I strongly suspect the answer is no, but I'm not sure where to get information about oil company revenue sources. If you could point me in the right direction, that would be great!
Do fossil fuel companies have a large influence on economies?
This one is a resounding yes, unfortunately. Our economy runs on cheap oil, make no mistake. This is the crux of my problem with this whole approach -- certainly, we can move our economy to one that is more reliant on renewable sources of energy, but that's not going to happen overnight, and it's going to take massive infrastructure investments. Make no mistake, our economy runs on cheap oil, and without fossil fuels our standard of living would not be as high as it is today. Regardless of any discussion of alternatives, the fact is that our economic dependence on fossil fuels means that we cannot get rid of them, and if we could get companies to stop supplying fossil fuels, we would be screwed and extremely unhappy.
Again, to be clear, I'm not against renewables, I'm not in favor of pumping enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the environment. As much as I think the ocean is a horrifying hellscape, I don't want acidification to kill every living animal in it. But divestment is a hollow, symbolic tactic. It doesn't accomplish anything, and it diverts energy away from what we should be doing, which is preparing for the painful, inevitable environmental changes that are coming. If we want to make a difference, we should be trying to protect vulnerable populations from sea level rise, from increasing vector-borne diseases, from drought, from famine, from dramatic temperature variability -- in short, from all the effects of climate change, many of which are already occurring. It's too late to stop climate change, climate change is happening -- but I have hope for the future of emergency management, and I'm hopeful that other fields will help people make the transition from our present environment to a less hospitable one (I'm looking at you, Amy). Let's put our attention and our energy to better use.
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