Fossil fuel divestment and climate change: Reviewing contested arguments

The 2019 report of The Lancet Countdown on health and climate change: ensuring that the health of a child born today is not defined by a changing climate

“…The debate on the direct and indirect consequences of these approaches is nuanced and complex, with evidence on their effects only just beginning to emerge. 163 This indicator tracks the total global value of funds divested from fossil fuels, and the value of divested funds coming from health institutions, using data provided by 350.org, 164 with full methodology described in the appendix. Negative externalities, including the various direct and indirect consequences for human health and the natural environment, mean that the true cost of fossil fuels is far greater than their market price.…”

Environmental Justice and Transformations to Sustainability

“…53 In the private sector, financial organiza tions have begun to take account of ESG (ethical, sustainable, and governance) benchmarks, divest from fossil fuels, and even refuse insurance coverage to fossil fuel businesses. 54 While more urgent change is clearly needed, the influence of climate justice activists in winning the argument for divestment is contributing to the transition to green energy. 55 These might be small steps, but they suggest that the mobilization of more holistic justice goals can help to enable transfor mations that transcend lockins to unsus tainable pathways.…”

Deliberate decline: An emerging frontier for the study and practice of decarbonization

“…The expanding scope of divestment links to the popularization of the notion of unburnable carbon by the co‐founder of http://350.org, Bill McKibben (2012), in his Rolling Stone article titled “Global Warming's Terrifying New Math.” This helped crystallize the core logic of divestment, which sees fossil fuel companies as primarily responsible for climate disruption and calls for the wholesale decline of the fossil fuel industry. Although fossil fuel divestment campaigns have proliferated across university campuses, these calls were strongly contested (Braungardt et al, 2019) and saw mixed initial success (Grady‐Benson & Sarathy, 2016). More recently however, fossil fuel divestment announcements have gradually increased across the academy (Oxford University being a recent and particularly prominent example as of the time of writing).…”