ARE FOSSIL FUELS IMMORAL?
What little worry-time we university types have left after we’ve spent the day censoring each other’s speech, deconstructing rape culture and hunting down racist micro-aggression on campus (there being no racist macroaggression anymore) we like to spend debating whether our institutions should divest their endowment funds from companies that enable the use of fossil fuels.
University funding being what it is these days, you might think we’d be the last institutions to sell profitable investments in order to make a point. But if you believe an activity is immoral, you’ve got to do what you can to dissociate yourself from it, stop it or both. Especially if you are the moral guardians of society, which, the churches having descended into sin and corruption, we academic types tend to think we now are.
Is consuming fossil fuels immoral? Climate science is complicated, to say the least. It does appear that continued consumption will create problems, possibly big ones, for our children, their children and so on down the line. On the other hand, our descendants likely will be richer than we are, will better understand the complex “general-equilibrium” system that is our climate, and will have many more technologies for minimizing their carbon footprints — provided, that is, we don’t crater our economies for the next couple of decades by eliminating fossil fuels as fast as many alternative-energy advocates recommend.
Fossil fuels currently account for more than 85 per cent of the world’s energy consumption, a number that has barely budged in the last 25 years: what solar, wind, biomass and geothermal have gained, nuclear has lost. People who have studied this problem carefully and whose opinion I respect tell me that, barring a transformative technological breakthrough, there’s no credible prospect of shifting the bulk of our energy consumption to non-fossil fuels for at least several decades.
Is it really immoral in that context to keep consuming fossil fuels?
If you think it is, will divestiture help? Maybe. The universities wouldn’t be destroying the capital of the fossil-fuel industry. They would be selling their share of it. Other people would be buying it. Burning the bond or stock certificates instead, or I suppose in this context composting them, would be more satisfying emotionally but would only help the oil companies by freeing them of financial obligations. Our expression of our moral purity therefore requires others less pure to pick up the slack.
If enough fossil-fuel debtowners did sell debt, that would bring down its price, which means the companies would have to pay higher interest to attract capital. If you think they only use capital for bad purposes, making it more expensive is unambiguously a good thing. But if they use at least some of it to work on new ways to minimize carbon use, you may want to worry you’ll be discouraging that.
Will the effect be big? If the movement takes off like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, it could be. But so long as most people still depend on fossil fuels, a mass movement to deny capital to the firms providing such fuels does seem unlikely, even allowing for Twitter-age penchants for illogic and hypocrisy.
To satisfy your moral imperative, is it enough to get the institution where you work or study to sell assets that don’t actually belong to you? Presumably you also have to manage your own portfolio responsibly and cut back as sharply as you can on your consumption of fossil fuels.
But, you will say, action in the market only takes us so far. Some decisions about fossil-fuel use — which transit systems we adopt, what building codes say — require changes in democratically made decisions. And that means persuading voters to support measures that will hurt, at least in the short run and maybe also in the long.
If persuasion is your destination, a moral high horse, however sound a vehicle environmentally, probably won’t get you there.