(Image: Andrzej Krauze)

Paul Younger

TO HAVE to dissent publicly from the governing body of my own university is excruciating. But I felt compelled to do so last month when I read a self-congratulatory report that the University of Glasgow had decided to withdraw its financial investment in fossil fuels. It was not the divestment per se that riled me. Rather, I am appalled by the mistaken assumptions that underlie this posturing.

The divestment movement is premised on the idea that fossil fuels can be abandoned immediately, which assumes that there are alternatives already available on sufficient scale to displace them. This is simply untrue. We do not yet have viable alternatives at anything close to the scale required for many of the key uses of oil, gas and coal.

For example, they are vital to the production of most food we eat, grown using fertilisers made with fossil fuels. Plastics and many other synthetic materials, demand for which is soaring, rely on fossil fuels. Space heating, which overwhelmingly uses natural gas, is another stumbling block since there is insufficient plant or animal waste to create the biogas to replace it. Steel production from iron ore requires coke made from coal. Transport fuels are highly reliant on oil, and we have already seen the impact on food prices and ecosystems of a dash for biofuels at modest scale. Then there’s electricity production on demand, for which gas and coal are ideally suited.


The impression given by the divestment lobby is that the ascendancy of alternatives is hindered only by the evil machinations of some climate-change-denying Dr Evil in the fossil-fuel sector. But the real world is not so simple.

In Scotland, households with access to the gas grid have a 1-in-4 chance of being in fuel poverty; in regions off the gas grid it is a 2-in-3 chance. It will not be possible to demonstrate that climate change killed a single person in Glasgow this winter, but I can reliably predict that fuel poverty will kill. We can envisage heat pumps replacing gas-fired central heating – but that presupposes a tripling of electricity production to power the pumps. How can we do that with only weather-dependent sources of generation?

Our challenge as scientists is to solve these conundrums, but we can’t do so if we simply turn our back on heritage technologies. Surely a wiser use of fossil fuel investments would be to exploit the access they give to company leaders. This would let us encourage the acceleration of renewable technology transfer, and insist that fossil fuels be used as efficiently as possible in the meantime, capturing and storing the carbon arising.

A wiser use of fossil fuel investments would be to exploit the access they give to company leaders

Tim Ratcliffe

WE ARE at a crucial crossroads. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reaffirmed that keeping global warming to 2 °C is feasible and economically viable if we take immediate steps towards a low-carbon economy. That requires a huge shift in investments. The panel estimates that a $30 billion a year decline in fossil-fuel investments is needed, alongside a $147 billion a year increase in low-carbon energy, and a $100 billion a year boost for energy efficiency.

It’s simple maths: we can emit another 565 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide and stay below 2 °C global warming. However, the coal, oil and gas that corporations have in their reserves add up to 2795 gigatonnes of CO 2 . In other words, 80 per cent of their carbon reserves cannot be burned if we are to avert irreversible climate change. Yet, they are not only intent on burning reserves, but are also spending billions every year to discover and develop more. ExxonMobil and Shell openly dismiss the 2 °C target. Simply put: their business plan and a liveable planet are incompatible. Public institutions that continue to fund this are complicit in wrecking our climate.

The IPCC made it clear that we have the solutions at hand to move to a low-carbon economy. The cost of renewable energy technologies has dropped dramatically and is projected to continue to decline, opening up huge potential to tackle energy poverty through decentralised, community-owned projects.

Carbon capture and storage has not been deployed on a large scale and is not economically viable. But the question of whether the world will keep within the remaining carbon budget is not one of technological or economic feasibility. It is all about power.

The fossil fuel industry is the most profitable in history. It has lobbied to block action on climate change for years. Every institution that divests weakens its stranglehold over our political process. That is why more and more leading figures – from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to World Bank President Jim Yong Kim, to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon – call on institutions to divest. Many have heeded this call: the Rockefeller family, who made their fortune from oil, the World Council of Churches, the British Medical Association and numerous cities and universities.

Divestment from fossil fuels is not only a moral imperative, it is also financially advisable. The International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England are just a few of the voices warning that carbon assets are grossly overvalued and risk becoming stranded assets. Instead of fuelling climate change, public institutions have a duty to take a long-term stewardship approach to the money they are entrusted with. They have a responsibility to support a just transition to a low-carbon economy.

This article appeared in print under the headline “It’s do or divest”