The giants of the green world that profit from the
planet's destruction
A new movement has erupted demanding
divestment from fossil fuel polluters – and Big Green is in their sights
Naomi Klein
'Purists will point out no big green group is clean, since virtually
every one takes money from foundations built on fossil fuel empires.'
Illustration by Belle Mellor
The movement demanding that public interest
institutions divest their
holdings from fossil fuels is on a serious roll. Chapters have
opened up in more than 100 US cities and states as well as on more than 300
campuses, where students are holding protests, debates and sit-ins to pressure
their to rid their endowments of oil, gas and coal holdings. And under the
"Fossil Free UK"
banner, the movement is now crossing the Atlantic, with a major push planned by People &
Planet for this summer. Some schools, including University
College London, have decided not to wait and already have active divestment
campaigns.
Though officially launched just six months
ago, the movement can already claim some provisional victories: four US colleges
have announced their intention to divest their endowments from fossil fuel
stocks and bonds and, in late April, 10 US cities made similar commitments,
including San Francisco (Seattle came on board months ago).
There are still all kinds of details to work
out to toughen up these pledges, but the speed with which this idea has spread
makes it clear that there was some serious pent-up demand. To quote the mission
statement of the Fossil Free movement: "If it is wrong to wreck the
climate, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage. We believe that
educational and religious institutions, city and state governments, and other
institutions that serve the public good should divest from fossil fuels."
I am proud to have been part of the group at 350.org that worked with students and other partners to
develop the Fossil Free campaign. But I now realise that an important target is
missing from the list: theenvironmental organisations themselves.
You can understand the oversight. Green
groups raise mountains of cash every year on the promise that the funds will be
spent on work that is attempting to prevent catastrophic global warming. Fossil
fuel companies, on the other hand, are doing everything in their power to make
the catastrophic inevitable. According to the UK's Carbon Tracker Initiative (on
whose impeccable research the divestment movement is based), the fossil fuel
sector holds five times more carbon in its reserves than can be burned while
still leaving us a good shot of limiting warming to 2C. One would assume that
green groups would want to make absolutely sure that the money they have raised
in the name of saving the planet is not being invested in the companies whose
business model requires cooking said planet, and which have been sabotaging all
attempts at serious climate action for more than two decades. But in some cases
at least, that was a false assumption.
Maybe that shouldn't come as a complete
surprise, since some of the most powerful and wealthiest environmental
organisations have long behaved as if they had a stake in the oil and gas
industry. They led the climate movement down various dead ends: carbon trading,
carbon offsets, natural gas as a "bridge fuel" – what these policies
all held in common is that they created the illusion of progress while allowing
the fossil fuel companies to keep mining, drilling and fracking with abandon.
We always knew that the groups pushing hardest for these false solutions took
donations from, and formed corporate partnerships with, the big emitters. But
this was explained away as an attempt at constructive engagement – using the
power of the market to fix market failures.
Now it turns out that some of these groups
are literally part-owners of the industry causing the crisis they are
purportedly trying to solve. And the money the green groups have to play with
is serious. The Nature
Conservancy, for instance, has $1.4bn (£900m) in publicly traded
securities, and boasts that its piggybank is "among the 100 largest
endowments in the country". The Wildlife
Conservation Society has a $377m endowment, while the endowment
of the World
Wildlife Fund–USis worth $195m.
Let me be absolutely clear: plenty of green
groups have managed to avoid this mess. Greenpeace, 350.org, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network, and a host of
smaller organisations such as Oil Change
International and the Climate Reality Project don't
have endowments and don't invest in the stock market. They also either don't
take corporate donations or place such onerous restrictions on them that
extractive industries are easily ruled out. Some of these groups own a few
fossil fuel stocks, but only so that they can make trouble at shareholder meetings.
The Natural Resources Defense Council is halfway there. It
has a $118m endowment and, according to its accounting team, for direct
investments "we specifically screen out extractive industries, fossil
fuels, and other areas of the energy sector". However, the NRDC continues
to hold stocks in mutual funds and other mixed assets that do not screen for
fossil fuels. (The Fossil Free campaign is calling on institutions to
"divest from direct ownership and any commingled funds that include fossil
fuel public equities and corporate bonds within 5 years".)
Purists will point out that no big green
group is clean, since virtually every one takes money from foundations built on
fossil fuel empires – foundations that continue to invest their endowments in
fossil fuels today. It's a fair point. Consider the largest foundation of them
all: the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation. As of December 2012, it had at least
$958.6m – nearly a billion dollars – invested in just two oil giants:
ExxonMobil and BP. The hypocrisy is staggering: a top priority of the Gates
Foundation has been supporting malaria research, a disease intimately linked to
climate. Mosquitoes and malaria parasites can both thrive in warmer weather,
and they are getting more and more of it. Does it really make sense to fight
malaria while fuelling one of the reasons it may be spreading more ferociously
in some areas?
Clearly not. And it makes even less sense to raise
money in the name of fighting climate change, only to invest that money in,
say, ExxonMobil stocks. Yet that is precisely what some groups appear to be
doing. Conservation International, notorious for its partnerships with oil
companies and other bad actors (the CEO of Northrop
Grumman is on its board,
for God's sake), has close to $22m invested in publicly traded securities and,
according to a spokesperson, "we do not have any explicit policy
prohibiting investment in energy companies".
The same goes for Ocean Conservancy,
which has $14.4m invested in publicly traded securities, including hundreds of
thousands in "energy", "materials" and
"utilities" holdings. A spokesperson confirmed in writing that the
organisation does "not have an environmental or social screen investment
policy". Neither organisation would divulge how much of its holdings were
in fossil fuel companies or release a list of its investments. But according to
Dan Apfel, executive director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition,
unless an institution specifically directs its investment managers not to
invest in fossil fuels, it will almost certainly hold some stock, simply
because those stocks (including coal-burning utilities) make up about 13% of
the US market, according to one standard index. "All investors are
basically invested in fossil fuels," says Apfel. "You can't be an
investor that is not invested in fossil fuels, unless you've actually worked
very hard to ensure that you're not."
Another group that appears very far from
divesting is the Wildlife Conservation Society. Its financial statement for
fiscal year 2012 describes a subcategory of investments that includes
"energy, mining, oil drilling, and agricultural businesses". How much
of WCS's $377m endowment is being held in energy and drilling companies? It
failed to provide that information despite repeated requests.
The WWF-US told me that it doesn't invest
directly in corporations – but it refused to answer questions about whether it
applies environmental screens to its very sizable mixed-asset funds. The
National Wildlife Federation Endowment used to apply environmental screens for
its $25.7m of investments in publicly traded securities, but now, according to
a spokesperson, it tells its investment managers to "look for
best-in-class companies who were implementing conservation, environmental and
sustainable practices". In other words, not a fossil fuel divestment
policy. Meanwhile, the Nature Conservancy – the richest of all the green groups
– has at least $22.8m invested in the energy sector, according to its 2012
financial statements. Along with WCS, TNC completely refused to answer any of
my questions or provide any further details about its holdings or policies.
It would be a little surprising if TNC didn't
invest in fossil fuels, given its various other entanglements with the sector.
A small sample: in 2010, the Washington Post reported that TNC "has
accepted nearly $10m in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated
corporations"; it counts BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell among the
members of its Business Council; Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, one of the
largest US coal-burning utilities, sits on its board of directors; and it runs
various conservation projects claiming to "offset" the carbon
emissions of oil, gas and coal companies.
The divestment question is taking these
groups off guard because for decades they were able to make these kinds of
deals with polluters and barely raise an eyebrow. But now, it appears, people
are fed up with being told that the best way to fight climate change is to
change their light bulbs and buy carbon offsets while leaving the big polluters
undisturbed. And they are raring to take the fight directly to the industry
most responsible for the climate crisis.
Hannah Jones, one of the student divestment
movement organisers, told me: "Just as our college and university boards
are failing us by not actively confronting the forces responsible for climate
change, so are the big corporate green groups. They have failed us by trying to
preserve pristine pockets of the world while refusing to take on the powerful
interests that are making the entire world unliveable for everyone." But,
she added, "students now know what communities facing extraction have
known for decades: that this is a fight about power and money, and everyone – even
the big green groups – is going to have to decide whether they are with us, or
with the forces wrecking the planet."
It doesn't seem like too much to ask. I mean,
if the city of Seattle is divesting, shouldn't WWF do the same? Shouldn't
environmental organisations be more concerned about the human and ecological
risks posed by fossil fuel companies than they are by some imagined risks to
their stock portfolios? Which raises another question: what are these groups
doing hoarding so much money in the first place? If they believe their own
scientists, this is the crucial decade to turn things around on climate. Is TNC
planning to build a billion-dollar ark?
Some groups, thankfully, are rising to the
challenge. A small but growing movement inside the funder world is pushing the
big liberal foundations to get their investments in line with their stated
missions – which means no more fossil fuels. It's time for foundations to
"own what you own", says Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the
Wallace Global Fund. According to Dorsey, her foundation, which has been a
major funder of the coal divestment campaign, is now "99% fossil free and
will be completely divested by 2014".
But convincing the biggest foundations to
divest will be slow, and the green groups – which are at least theoretically
accountable to their members – should surely lead the way. Some are starting to
do just that.The Sierra
Club, for instance, now has a clear policy against investing in, or
taking money from, fossil fuel companies (it once didn't, which caused major controversy in the past). This is good news
for the Sierra Club's $15m in investments in publicly traded securities.
However, its affiliated organisation, the Sierra Club Foundation,
has a much bigger portfolio – with $61.7m invested – and it is still in the
process of drafting a full divestment policy, according to Sierra Club's
executive director, Michael Brune. He stressed that "we are fully
confident that we can get as good if not better returns from the emerging clean
energy economy than we can from investing in the dirty fuels from the
past".
For a long time, forming partnerships with
polluters was how the green groups proved they were serious. But the young
people demanding divestment – as well as the grassroots groups fighting fossil fuels
wherever they are mined, drilled, fracked, burned, piped or shipped – have a
different definition of seriousness. They are serious about winning. And the
message to Big Green is clear: cut your ties with the fossils, or become one
yourself.