Harvard’s fund to stop investing in fossil fuels

WASHINGTON. Harvard University will stop investing in fossil fuels and instead use its giant $42 billion endowment to support the green economy, joining a growing wave of investors moving away from pollutive industries.

Harvard Management Co., which runs the endowment, has no investments in companies that explore for or develop fossil fuels and “does not intend to make such investments in the future,” President Larry Bacow said Thursday in a letter posted on the university’s website.

The move comes after years of sustained activism from students calling for fossil-fuel divestment, and amid increasingly urgent demands from investors that financial institutions withdraw their support of businesses that are contributing to man-made climate change.