Giving a master class about need for fossil fuel divestment
Dalhousie University student Tina Yeonju Oh advocates against investing in fossil fuel industries.
For Tina Yeonju Oh, divesting funds out of the fossil fuel industry is a powerful way to confront climate change.
The 22-year-old came to this conclusion in 2014 during her first year of undergraduate studies at Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B.
Like many of her friends, Oh had grown up with the message that her individual actions, from taking shorter showers to hang-drying her laundry, helped create a healthier planet.
She didn’t question this advice — and happily did her part — until she arrived at university and saw her greener choices were being undermined by the fact she was paying thousands of dollars in tuition to an institution that had investments in the fossil fuel industry.
“It didn’t make sense. In class, we were learning the truths of climate science and about the destruction of the environment, yet our school was investing millions of dollars in these (fossil fuel) companies.”
Within months of starting university, Oh became involved with a group of students called DivestMTA, which was pressuring Mount Allison to withdraw its investments from polluting industries.
She’s now a loud — and wellspoken — advocate of fossil fuel divestment, a strategy gaining traction in Canada and around the world.
“It gets to the root of the climate crisis, which is that the massive fossil fuel industry persists in using these very destructive practices — and they can’t and shouldn’t be anymore,” says Oh, now pursuing a master’s degree in environmental studies at Dalhousie University.
“By divesting on a single scale, you are making a significant financial statement that’s saying there are consequences to using those destructive practices. By divesting at a collective scale, we are removing the social licence for those very carbon-intensive corporations to function at the status quo.”
Although Mount Allison has yet to fully divest their investments from fossil fuel companies, Oh says the university has made progress.
During the 2016-17 academic year, for example, Mount Allison’s board of regents set up a subcommittee, which made several recommendations on how the university could improve its responsible investment activities.
In the spring of 2017, the board approved all of the subcommittee’s recommendations, one of which allows people to donate to the university in a fund that limits or excludes investments in the fossil fuel industry.
“These are wins, but we know fully divesting is possible,” says Oh, who is the interim co-ordinator for the Canadian Youth Delegation, which sends delegates to United Nations climate change conferences.
And while some may see divestment as an overly forceful manoeuvre, Oh says time has run out to play nice.
“Climate change is the greatest threat to my generation. When we are confronted with imminent climate disaster, we have to use all our tools, tactics and strategies to transition away from our reliance on the fossil fuel industry.”