Our Universities’ Investments in Fossil Fuels Are Unethical — and Illegal

We’ve stormed football fieldsAnd staged sit-ins to highlight our universities’ complicity in the climate crisis. We have demonstrated the imperative that our universities, self-proclaimed harbingers of “light and truth” (Yale), acting “in the service of humanity” (Princeton) transition away from fossil fuels as an energy source and take action to limit the Earth’s warming.

As student divestment activists, we have always maintained that university endowment investments into fossil fuels are irresponsible and dangerous. We now have a new conclusion. These investments are not only unethical — they’re illegal.

On February 16, with the help of lawyers at the Climate Defense Project (CDP), organizers at Yale, Princeton, MIT, Stanford and Vanderbilt filed legal complaints with our respective state attorneys general, asserting that our schools’ fossil fuel investments run counter to their charitable purposes as tax-exempt, educational nonprofits, pursuant to each state’s Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA).

These complaints are meant to encourage universities to investigate the legality and legality of fossil fuel investments. Similar complaints have been filed in the past by organizers. Harvard(March 2021). CornellThese universities were listed in 2019 divestedWithin six months of the respective filings before any investigations were opened. If a successful investigation went forward, confirming that fossil fuel investments violate a state’s UPMIFA, it would set a resounding precedent: Every university, foundation and pension fund would have a clear imperative to divest.

To demonstrate our schools’ violations of UPMIFA, we evidence the scientific realities and social consequences of climate change, presenting fossil fuel companies’ attacks on university climate researchers — and the risky, underperforming nature of the industry — as a violation of the duty of care, a legal imperative outlined by UPMIFA. We identify conflicts of interestat the highest institutional levels chancellorsTrustees, members of investment boards and donorsOur schools are among those who are tied to the fossil-fuel industry. Their undue influence is a violation the duty to loyalty

Our complaintsSigned by distinguished climate researchers, alumni, faculty, and community leaders. They include Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change authors including Richard Somerville, activists such as Bill McKibben, and government officials including former Sen. Timothy Wirth and former Commissioner Bevis Longstreth of the Securities and Exchange Commission — whose work inspired the very UPMIFA laws we cite.

Our universities produce some of the most important research on climate crisis. They are uniquely positioned in order to illuminate how greenhouse gasses and pollutants propel our world closer towards a future of catastrophic environmental consequences. consequences. In some ways, our schools work to improve the world, today and for future generations. We, and our children, will grow up in a world that’s hotter, more inhospitable, more prone to environmental disasters and epidemics, unequal and impoverished, and more environmentally degraded.

Ours is a national coalition. Our partnership is an example of the cross-state, inter-institutional coordination needed to address the climate crisis on a national scale.

Already, the disastrous effects of climate changes are threatening the lives and livelihoods of those who live in the communities where our schools reside. Stanford is located in Palo alto, California. smoke from nearby wildfiresIn 2020, it was so severe that it caused strokes and heart attacks. After more than a decade online, Yale classes were due to resume in-person formats on the day that flooding damage from Hurricane Ida prevented Yale classes from returning to their original format. forced students back to Zoom,Princeton students were also told to shelter from tornadoes in flooding basements. Nearly 10% of Nashville’s properties are located in Vanderbilt. are severely threatened by flooding, and much more of Cambridge, Massachusetts could be underwater within 100 years, leaving MIT’s campus at risk. Fossil fuels are not good investments, even if you consider self-interest. These holdings violate our schools’ fiduciary duties to their students and their most basic commitments to keep us safe.

The most powerful indictment is divestment. Divestment is the most powerful indictment. We believe that endowments, especially ones of the staggering size represented by our universities, are inherently political forces that are never “neutral.”

But it is clear we can’t rely on moral appeals to dig us out of the pit of climate emergency. Despite knowing it’s wrong to profit off the destruction of students’ futures, our universities continue down the road of complicity with their irresponsible investments. Direct action and rhetorical ethics alone haven’t been enough to inspire them to do what’s right.

This legal approach is a solid foundation for the moral argument activists have made for decades. The window is closing for schools to do right on their terms. Soon, they will be divesting on our terms, and the law’s.