Two months ago I spoke at King’s College London against a motion that “divestment from fossil fuel companies is a useful policy tool to bring about action on climate change”. Here’s why.

The diverse human influences on the climate system are large and growing, with burning fossil fuels the single biggest one. The risks to people, places and ecosystems posed by extreme weather and through more systemic changes in physical processes will therefore increase.



But what these bald scientific facts mean is another question. Climate change is a relative risk, to be judged against many others. Like political theorist Hannah Arendt, I believe that before we can act politically we each have to pass judgment on the facts, as I have done previously (pdf).



The fossil fuel divestment campaign and the Guardian have also passed their judgment on the facts. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for example, said: “People of conscience need to break their ties with corporations financing the injustice of climate change.”



But I believe that this singular focus on fossil fuel divestment as the pre-eminent strategy, tactic or policy tool to deal with the risks of climate change is misguided.



First, divestment is not a policy tool, but a campaigning strategy. It names the 200 largest coal, oil and gas companies as ‘the enemy’ and seeks to undermine their social licence to operate. This may or may not occur, but it is clearly not a policy.



Second, I do not believe divestment will bring about ‘action on climate change’ (whatever might be meant by ‘action’). There will be many other investors waiting to pick up any slack which results from modest investment withdrawals. At best such a campaign may heighten awareness of the energy challenges ahead – the need to meet the world’s vast and growing energy needs sustainably - but it won’t take us any closer to meeting the challenge.



Third, and most decisively for me, the divestment campaign is driven by a single and simple climate change narrative in which global bads are linked to global temperature. Keep global warming to below 2C and the world will be a better place; keep the trillionth tonne of carbon in the ground and climate change will be tamed. This narrative echoes columnist George Monbiot’s call from 2006, “Curtailing climate change is the project we must put before all others … if we fail in this task, we fail in everything else.”



But human influence on the climate system is not all about carbon fossil fuel, and the bads in the world cannot be indexed to global temperature or to trillions of tonnes of carbon dioxide. As we can see from the shortly-to-be-agreed sustainable development goals, there are many things that ‘people of conscience’ are rightly concerned with that have little to do with carbon.



The challenges posed by climate change should not be reduced to a campaign to divest from fossil fuel companies, least of all a campaign that makes no distinction between natural gas and lignite coal, between Shell and Vattenfall. This is to engage in gesture politics and is deeply reductionist. It misses important opportunities for changing things that matter.



Climate change is a so-called ‘wicked problem’ that is not amenable to single action strategies. Policy actions are multiple and diverse and need prioritising according a pragmatic logic, not an idealist one. Campaigning energy should focus on meeting the needs of people rather than on castigating energy companies.



To turn Monbiot around, “If we fail to attend to the needs of the poor and marginalised, then limiting warming to 2C is pointless.” Or as the Indian environmentalist Sunita Narain argued recently, fossil fuel divestment “will not work for us in India. We have a huge energy deficit … [and] … we have to address access to energy as much as the environmental problems of unclean power.”



Three things follow from such climate pragmatism. First, the necessary energy transition will be better secured by directing campaigning energy toward investing in alternative technologies, not divestment gestures to withdraw from all oil, coal and gas companies.



Second, invest in policies which seek to constrain the 50% of human influence on climate which is not caused by burning fossil fuel carbon: short-lived greenhouse gases, halocarbons, black carbon, arresting deforestation, enhancing carbon sinks and so on.



Third, invest in climate change adaptation as a public good. Weather is dangerous, always has been and always will be, irrespective of how successful we are in reigning in human influences. For example, one of the most effective ways of enhancing adaptive capacity is to invest in education.



Divestment might offer some symbolic successes while doing nothing to reduce the risks of climate change: protecting the people and places harmed by dangerous weather. Instead, it diverts campaigning and political attention away from the multiple causes of climate risk and removes potential allies from positions of shareholder influence.



Whilst born of frustration – one detects a sense of panic even in Rusbridger’s language – targeting high profile investors for divestment from fossil fuel companies is “feel-good” campaigning. It is the latest stage in the symbolic politics of climate change, which too often has been wooed by apocalyptic imaginary and false deadlines and lost sight of the politics of pragmatism by which change in the world occurs.

