I’ve read last Friday’s letter from President McCartney and the Board of Trustees with a plan for divestment from fossil fuels. I find it concerning.
With the fifteen-years-to-divest timeline, I would like to suggest that the Board of Trustees is being not only environmentally irresponsible, but they are also being fiscally irresponsible.
- The best science tells us that – very conservatively – we might have about a decade to slash greenhouse emissions to prevent irreversible climate catastrophe
- If we need to bend the emissions curve so drastically, time is swiftly running out to get started. Clearly we must rapidly diminish fossil fuel use. What does that mean to the market for fossil fuels and fossil fuel investments?
- In order to save the biosphere, it means that the demand for fossil fuels must fall to little or nothing in a very short time, and consequently the value of the gas/oil/plastics stocks will be falling along with demand for the products.
- To best serve the fiscal interests of the Smith endowment and Smith students of the past, present and future, the Trustees should be mandated to sell off all the fossil fuel investments as rapidly as possible, while they still have any value. Just seems logical.
My favorite sign from last Friday’s rally: “I’m class of ’84 and my math says no Smith on a dead planet. Divest.”
Jackie Ballance
Northampton
