A greener future?
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By: Isaac Kinley
McMaster University President Patrick Deane is assembling a fossil fuel divestment advisory group in response to a petition demanding that the university pull its endowment out of fossil fuel investments.
The petition, an initiative of Fossil Free McMaster, aimed to collect 1,000 signatures but has so far managed to garner just over 900 in the two years that it has been online. Its text warns of the disastrous effects of climate change and says that McMaster students “deserve the opportunity to graduate with a future not defined by climate chaos.” It calls on the university to halt new investments in fossil fuel companies and to divest from all fossil fuel-related investments within five years, which it argues is also a financially responsible decision.
The advisory group will counsel the McMaster Board of Governors’ Finance Committee, responsible for the University’s investment decisions, on whether to divest from fossil fuels. Deane aims to form a group that is unbiased and includes both an undergraduate and a graduate student. To this end, he has contacted the Student Representative Assembly and the Graduate Students Association to ask them to provide candidates.
Conner Hurd, the head of Fossil Free McMaster, feels that this lack of bias may be difficult to achieve. “There’s very few people who sit on the fence on this issue,” he said. “It’s going to be hard to find an unbiased sample.” He expects that the advisory group’s eventual verdict will be in Fossil Free McMaster’s favour, but also stresses that his group advocates an approach that will allow the University to avoid losing money.
“Going forward with integrity doesn’t just mean taking the moral high road on any argument, it means being pragmatic. Ultimately we don’t want the university to lose out on money that comes back from endowment funds because it goes towards bursaries and grants,” he said. “Plus it is donated money, so the people who’ve donated [it] want to see it go back into the University.”
Professor emeritus of economics Atif Kubursi, who has been involved with the initiative along with Biology professor James Quinn, is also optimistic about its outcome, although he said he would like McMaster to move more quickly on the matter. “We should be at the vanguard of things,” he said. “It would be terrible if the university were a laggard and always reacting to others.”
He also feels that the recent 50 percent drop in oil prices may provide McMaster with a financial incentive to divest. “If they had listened to us, they would have saved a lot of money. This is an opportune moment to rebalance your portfolio by going into the kinds of investments that are sunrise, not sunset. The oil industry is a sunset industry. Sunrise would be renewable energy,” he said. “The University, even for pure financial reasons, is ill-advised to remain in fossil fuels.”
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