B.C.’s three largest universities are facing growing pressures from faculty, alumni and students urging their institutions to sell off hundreds of millions of dollars in oil, gas and coal stocks from their pension funds and endowments.

Last week, University of Victoria’s faculty voted 66 per cent in favour of divesting from fossil fuels. Environmental science professor James Rowe – who often lectures on climate change action -- said his students pressured him to take a stand.

“Our pension funds are invested in fossil fuel companies, and many of us stand up in front of the classroom explaining why we need to be drawing down emissions, and yet our retirement is being financed by fossil fuel companies.”

“It would be hypocritical for us not to take action,” Rowe told the Vancouver Observer from Victoria on Monday.

Likewise, SFU faculty voted 71 per cent in favour to urge pension trustees to divest from the fossil fuel industry in November.

And in January, thousands of UBC students voted 77 per cent in favour for a similar motion.

UBC students rallied to "Divest UBC" from fossil fuels, in a successful student vote in January. Photo from UBCC350.org

Campus environmentalists with the group 350.org met yesterday to coordinate their push on B.C.'s universities to rid their investments of oil and gas companies.

“If a enough influential and respectable organizations like churches, universities and cities divest, then the social license to operate that fossil fuel companies currently enjoy will get challenged, making it easier for governments to take actions to draw down emissions rapidly in the next 36 years, that our best climate scientists say we need to do,” said Rowe.

The “divest fossil fuel” campus movement began south of the border, spear-headed by environmentalist Bill McKibben and the climate change action group he co-founded, called 350.org.

Bill McKibben giving his "Do the Math" talk - photo from 350.org

McKibben’s 2012 Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math” – outlining a litany of broken heat records, and predicted natural disasters – seems to have sparked the movement for divestment.

Ivy league schools divesting

The campaign is now producing results. Stanford University announced earlier this month that it will divest 100 coal companies from its $18 billion endowment. Harvard University undergrads also recently voted in favour for a similar move.

It’s catching the attention of the petroleum industry. Alberta Oil magazine’s article “The energy industry ignores the fossil fuel divesture movement at its own peril” likens the divesture movement to the anti-Apartheid sentiment in the 1980s that stirred enough social change to overturn a morally corrupt regime.

There are now 40 campus campaigns in Canada, according to 350.org’s UBC chapter. The University of Toronto also said Tuesday that its President is now convening a special committee to look at divesting options.

Closer to home, UBC's governing board is more cautious.

“This [divestment] option may be more symbolic than effective, especially for relatively small investors such as UBC, and carries the risk of unintended consequences,” states the UBC Board of Governor’s April policy paper.

10 per cent of UBC holdings in fossil fuels

However, recent research by Justin Ritchie, a PhD student at the UBC Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, shows that UBC's investments in fossil fuels are significant. He found that the university’s $1 billion endowment carries about 10 per cent of its holdings in oil and gas stocks.

Ritchie's presentation at UBCC350's divestment campaign launch last September indicates that UBC currently invests in funds that hold oil and gas juggernauts as: Halliburton, Kinder Morgan, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Cenovus.