Fossil-fuel critics push Washington U. to ‘walk the walk’ on global climate change

April 21--Though four weeks shy of graduation, Washington University senior Ingrid Archibald is not coasting to the finish line. Far from complacent, the environmental policy major is among hundreds of student activists pushing for the school to rid its $7 billion endowment of any holdings in fossil fuel companies.

In other words, they want the university to sell any stakes it has in companies such as ExxonMobil or Peabody.

"Many of us will graduate from Wash. U. and spend our entire careers fighting climate change," Archibald said at a recent on-campus demonstration that delivered to Chancellor Mark Wrighton a petition with more than 1,000 student signatures supporting divestment. "It's not fair that we're working on these issues inside and outside of the classroom while Wash. U. is working against us."

As threats posed by climate change become more dire, students have made the divestment debate a recurring theme on campus the last several years. And each year, petitions to divest have been rejected by school administrators.

This year, however, Wrighton said the school would at least review the decision with the body that oversees investment of the endowment.

"Regarding the call to divest of fossil energy investments, our position has long been that our investment policy will not be changed or used to support political, social or other agendas," Wrighton said in a statement to the Post-Dispatch last week. "I will ask that our policy be reviewed at a meeting of the board of the Washington University Investment Management Company."

The timing and outcome of that review, though, remain unclear.

And at Washington U., divestment could be a tall order. Those backing the divestment movement say previous efforts probably fell short because of the private university's close ties to fossil fuel companies -- and especially the influence of the coal industry, with locally headquartered giants including Peabody and Arch Coal long holding connections to the school's board and academic funding.

Those industry ties, divestment proponents say, make Washington U. uniquely linked to fossil fuels, even as the movement has swept across college campuses nationwide and extended to investment communities outside of academia.

"One thing that does make Wash. U. unique is that level of involvement with the industry," said Elaine Emmerich, a 2017 graduate who tracked divestment issues and was back on campus for a recent visit. "I mean we're in Coal Central, pretty much. I don't think that other schools have quite as much industry influence over their financial interests in the way that we do."

Students, and also some faculty members, say that influence is especially prominent -- and problematic -- within parts of the university dedicated to environmental programs. In the school's International Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability, for instance, the advisory committee largely comprises current and former executives from coal, gas, and other highly carbon-intensive industries. The committee also includes a former president of Fenner Dunlop, a company that makes conveyor belts used in coal mining, and a senior adviser to the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency.

An emphasis on promoting fossil fuels is directly reflected in at least some of the center's research. The Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization looks for ways to reduce the environmental impact of coal and counts Peabody, Arch Coal, and the coal-heavy energy utility, Ameren, as its lead sponsors. Meanwhile, at the helm of the university, top executives from Peabody and Arch Coal, the nation's two largest coal companies, held positions on the school's board of trustees until 2016 -- a presence that stoked student protests over the years.

Added up, those fossil fuel connections have sparked criticism across swaths of students and faculty members supporting divestment. While many at Washington U. say climate change provides a moral argument to divert money away from those industries, some tout other, additional reasons for their support of the movement.

"The corruption of research ethics is what I harp on," said Bret Gustafson, a professor of anthropology who also teaches classes about energy politics at the school. He, along with others on campus, suggest that fossil fuel influences compromise the school's official research integrity policy.

"There's this really deep engagement in compromising their research, compromising their integrity, and compromising their mission, for the purpose of making a couple faster bucks," said Emmerich, who feels the school has "this sort of backwards commitment to serving an industry rather than serving a student body."

Others argue that, purely from an economic perspective, the school could find stronger investments than in the beleaguered coal industry -- fresh off a wave of high-profile bankruptcies and bracing for continued decline in U.S. energy markets.

"It is an industry with extremely dire financial prospects," said Michael Wysession, a geophysicist who teaches a course called Energy and the Environment in the school's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. "The long term for coal is not good, economically. It's very clearly in our best interests as an institution to divest."

Wysession's economic argument was echoed in a separate petition for divestment from faculty members at the school, which said the endowment's 9.6 percent losses suffered in 2016 were worse than that year's average decline of 1.9 percent, nationally.

"In comparison, the University of California rose 4.3 percent and Stanford 0.8 percent," it said. "Both have larger endowments than our own and have divested from coal and tar sands, some of the dirtiest fossil fuels. Though our university administration previously cited financial concerns as justification against divestment, clearly divesting from fossil fuels in a well diversified and wisely managed portfolio does not seriously endanger positive returns on our endowment."

Student groups estimate that 5 percent or more of the school's investments are linked to fossil fuels, but the figure is not known for certain because its endowment is not transparent. The school did not provide details about its fossil fuel investment when asked by the Post-Dispatch.

"We don't typically discuss investment strategy," university spokeswoman Susan Killenberg McGinn said.

Adminstrators have told students the school will form a committee on endowment transparency, but it's not certain what will ultimately be disclosed.

Supporting research

Dissenting opinions about the university's divestment movement come from its Consortium for Clean Coal Utilization.

Richard Axelbaum, an engineering professor and the director of the consortium, argues that the divestment movement is counterproductive in two ways. First, he says that by not boycotting fossil fuels, the push in effect underscores the inconvenient truth about society's dependence on them.

"That unwillingness to boycott illustrates the value of fossil fuels. That unwillingness not to take a vacation illustrates our level of seriousness about this," he says.

"I don't want to be controversial," he adds, "but hope people will understand the uniqueness of fossil fuels and the value of them and not be opposed to finding solutions to make them better."

His research, he explains, seeks to reduce coal's carbon footprint because he believes fossil fuels, and coal specifically, will continue to be a sizable part of the global energy mix, and that an accompanying emphasis on carbon capture technology will eventually materialize.

He suggests that investments needed to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuels could be jeopardized if divestment diverts money away from the industry.

But those supporting the movement say it aims to stop industry investments in infrastructure that would promote further -- and potentially ruinous -- levels of fossil fuel consumption.

"By saying you're not going to invest in fossil fuels, it means you're not investing in the expansion of the global warming machine," said Gustafson. "If you can stop that, or make that more difficult, then you can sort of pull the rug out."

Despite the widening reach of fossil fuel divestment movements, only a relatively small percentage of U.S. colleges and universities have followed through with commitments to divest. But other divestment campaigns have found broad success in the past, including at Washington U., where student activism in the 1980s led the school to eventually divest part of its endowment from companies with ties to apartheid-era South Africa.

While the statement issued last week from Chancellor Wrighton did not reference that precedent, it did mention the school's "ambitious goal" to reduce carbon emissions at its own facilities and through research.

But those backing divestment say that the school's pledges toward sustainability are undermined by the endowment's continued linkage to fossil fuels.

"They say words like 'fully committed,' 'core priority,'" graduate physics student Benjamin Groebe said. "They want to talk the talk but they don't want to walk the walk. They want to be seen as leaders without actually leading."

Controlling the narrative

Whether it results in commitments to divest, the movement's success could more broadly hinge on stigmatizing fossil fuels. And some think Washington U. students are already tilting the narrative in that direction by putting the administration on the defensive.

"The students have already won control of the narrative," Gustafson said. "The problem is that the institution is not run democratically."

Divestment proponents hope that narrative is not seen just as one that is critical of the university, but one that can be constructive and mutually beneficial.

"We see so much potential in all the good that (the school) could do while still being economically sustainable," said Emmerich. "There's, now more than ever, an emphasis on social responsibility in the corporate sphere. People are being more careful about how they brand themselves and I think that extends to universities."

With Wrighton about to retire, students backing divestment hoped he might look to burnish his legacy with an announcement to divest. Without a commitment in place, they insist that the issue will not go away and, according to senior environmental policy major Sarah Greenberg, will be inherited by the new chancellor who is eventually named.

"We want the incoming chancellor to know that this will always be on the table if they don't deal with it," she said.

Bryce Gray --314-340-8307 @_BryceGray on Twitter [email protected]

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