Imperial still needs to divest from fossil fuels

Last year, while doing my Erasmus at King’s College London, I spotted a small placard on the wall calling on the university to "divest" from fossil fuels. By this, they meant that the college should not invest in corporations linked to fossil fuel extraction and exploitation. I am not a large fan of endowment funds in general and would really like to see a greener world, so the idea appealed to me immediately. This year, apparently, a few King’s students took the campaign a little further, and spray-painted a few pillars on the Strand building, an offence for which they promptly got arrested (anybody who has seen that building’s façade knows that the architect of the Strand building is the real culprit as far as urban vandalism is concerned).

This year, I study at Imperial. I am yet to see a poster calling for the College to divest from oil and gas. The fossil free campaign has no committee listed on the Union website, and models of oil rigs proudly sit in the Royal School of Mines. Sustainability week came and went, with little clamour. I guess the only green that matters at Imperial is the Queen’s Lawn.

The endowment fund’s repartition is unfortunately not publicly available information, and students don’t have access to the contact webpage of the people responsible for the fund. As a result, there is no way of knowing what amount Imperial has invested in oil, coal and gas, although an examination of its performance suggests that much of its portfolio is labelled in US dollars, as the periods of best performance roughly correlate with slides in the £. Since we do not know what is in Imperial’s fund, we should assume it is standard, and as such has invested to some extent in oil and gas companies. However, the stated objectives of the endowment fund would make a good argument for divestment themselves. The stated aims of the fund are a growth over five years of inflation plus 4%, a lower than average volatility in its investments. Why on God’s green Earth would you choose the energy sector as an investment then? These companies’ fortunes are highly dependent on the economic cycle, as oil booms and busts closely follow the patterns of global growth.

Now, if that was the only issue, it would not make oil stand out all this much; after all, most companies suffer during a recession. However, fossil fuels are also a channel through which countries leverage political and diplomatic leverage. The destinies of drillers depend decisively on the dreams of democrats and despots. For instance, every tentative move of Ukraine towards the EU has resulted in Russia closing the gas pipelines, forcing gas providers on the continent to shed extra money for alternative sources. The explosion of Iraq inflated oil prices (twice), as has the Iranian revolution. On the other side, an attempt by Saudi Arabia and Aramco to drive out of business the US fracking industry resulted in a prolonged slump in oil prices that brought numerous exploration and equipment companies to their knees. Those are not long-term events that are correlate to the wider economy or to technological advances. Those are shocks that can reduce or inflate the value of stocks significantly within hours. As such, it makes no sense for college to invest its money in a sector so volatile, since it states that it looks for low volatility.

In the very long term, Imperial will divest from oil, gas and coal, as these energy sources will lose relevance when renewables become cheaper. Climate change may cause irreparable damages by then, but it will happen eventually. It is however crystal clear that as long as the companies of the sector have any influence, they will try to slow the transition towards a carbon neutral economy down, in the same way they drove the fight against recognizing global warming for a quarter of a century. In its research capacity, Imperial does not want to associate with those who purposefully slow down progress and spit in the face of inconvenient truths. Why should it associate with them financially?