McMaster dumping fossil fuel investments
McMaster’s president announced last week that he is directing the university to eliminate fossil fuel corporations from its endowment fund investments. This caps years of petitions and faculty appeals for the university to stop making money off the climate catastrophe facing the planet.
McMaster Daily News reported the action by President David Farrar on March 4 as part of the university’s new vision statement and strategic plan released last month. It cited Farrar as stating: “It is necessary, alongside our carbon reduction activities, to confirm that we want to be a leader in these areas and so today I asked the university’s Board of Governors to work with us to put in place a strategy to divest fossil fuels from our institutional investment pool as soon as possible.”
As recently as two years ago over $50 million of McMaster’s endowment fund was invested in the fossil fuel sector including Arcelor Mittal, the owner of Hamilton’s Dofasco steel mill. That industrial facility generates over half of the city’s annual greenhouse gas emissions and is the single largest source of carbon pollution in the entire province.
The fossil fuel divestment movement was initiated nearly a decade ago by the international climate organization 350.org and described in detail in their on-line film “Do The Math”. It has since won commitments from around the globe of over $14 Trillion and succeeded in forcing fuller public accounting of how fossil fuel companies plan to address climate change.
Pressure on McMaster goes back as far as student demonstrations in March 2013. Those were bolstered by a 2015 letter to then president Patrick Deane in 2015 that argued bluntly that if destroying the climate is wrong “then surely profiting through investments in fossil fuel companies is also wrong” that was signed by over one hundred current and retired faculty.
“The University has a choice,” warned the faculty letter. “It either invests in fossil fuel corporations sustaining this industry’s harmful damage to the environment, or it divests, exerting pressure on the industry to promote green sources of energy. If the University regards divestment as “political,” then its continued investment is a similarly political act, one that finances present harmful corporate activities and calculates profit from them.”
That led President Deane to strike an investigative committee that held a campus town hall and conducted an opinion survey in the McMaster community. Its 2017 report rejected divestment and instead called for various measures to try to reduce campus greenhouse gas emissions.
Deane accepted the latter, but kept the divestment debate alive for further examination. The faculty and students formed MacGreen Invest that has continued the campaign and added a demand that divested monies be used instead for green energy investments.
Farrar replaced Deane as president just over a year ago and one of his first steps was to invite university community input into a new vision and strategic plan.
Dozens of universities around the world have joined the fossil fuel divestment movement, but it has been slow to gain traction in Canada, especially outside Quebec. Concordia went first in 2014 but doesn’t expect to complete its divestment until 2025. Laval committed four years ago, and University of Guelph took the plunge last April.
