00:00 Speaker: I'm down today from Oxford. I was asked to speak, and I'm very, very grateful for the chance to speak, because of the fossil fuel divestment campaign that a group of students in Oxford is currently trying to kind of champion. We have had some recent success: the university has called a university-wide consultation on the topic of fossil fuel investment, so
00:31 hopefully we'll gain some momentum. Before I get to that, though, I'll say a little bit about what divestment is, why it's important — sorry, some people here might already be familiar with it, so I won't spend too much time — then I'll get on to kind of the dynamics of the campaign, some of the problems we've encountered, and sort of what we hope to do. So, first, why divestment. There's a statement that I heard from a financial activist
01:03 here in London, Brett Scott, which I really like, which basically — to paraphrase — says investments are about how you imagine the future, what vision of the future you have. And so you need to make sure that however you're investing is consistent with a future that you believe in and that you think is consistent, in this case, with a liveable planet. The need for fossil fuel divestment
01:34 comes from the incredible urgency of responding to climate change. In Copenhagen, governments agreed that we need to stick to two degrees warming, we cannot exceed two degrees warming, because it is an incredibly dangerous tipping point. To do that, though, we need to stay within what climate scientists are calling the carbon budget, which is the total amount of carbon emissions we can afford to sort of spew into the atmosphere before
02:05 we reach these two degrees, before we begin to see even more catastrophic consequences than we're already beginning to witness. To stay within that carbon budget, though, we can only use up 20% of known fossil fuel reserves — so that's a fifth of the fossil fuel reserves we currently have under the control of fossil fuel companies. Fossil fuel companies, however, not only plan to burn and extract 100% of
02:35 those reserves, but they're developing and searching for more. So this is a completely unsustainable premise for any business to be operating under. It's moreover one that is supported by governments internationally. There are not the regulations for carbon emissions that there need to be; there is not the investment in alternatives that would mean that we have something viable to switch to. Right now we're all sort of trapped in this carbon dependence, which
03:07 we need to somehow collectively extricate ourselves from. So, divestment, which started as a movement in the States a few years back, championed notably by an environmentalist, Bill McKibben — many people here might know about him — you know, it's spread because it's this powerful idea that how universities, how faith groups, how cities and pension funds invest their money can be a symbol of what sort
03:40 of future we need, and it can send a powerful political message to our governments as well as financial markets that we need a decisive shift. So in terms of Oxford, we really started around this time last year. It started out of frustration — this was before I got there — but out of frustration with the fact that the university had recently agreed to a new contract with Shell, which has created a partnership to fund research within the university focused
04:12 on how to not only extract fossil fuels but extract unconventional [ones]. So this is Arctic drilling, this is fracking, this is, you know, ever pushing the limits of what we are currently able to access now out of some kind of profit-seeking desperation. But the university is now inextricably committed to this process through its own research. So this was something students couldn't accept. In October we
04:46 started focusing on divestment as a way to kind of look at the big picture, [to] force the university to consider its position within the fight against climate change and within this huge problem we're facing — which, you know, Alan and Natalie both highlighted — in terms of changing our way of doing things,
05:17 changing our economies, etc. So, how we've done it. I mean, in October we had a lot to learn. We didn't know half of what was lying behind divestment. We had to learn about the climate science, we had to learn about really arcane university administrative structures, but most interestingly we had to figure out how we were going to talk to other students. And the strategy we picked for Oxford was to talk to common rooms. Oxford is
05:48 this really bizarre decentralised system with — I think it's 38 colleges — and students are kind of fragmented across these colleges. So to get everyone to kind of hear each other and know about what was going on, you had to, at the end of the day, go to these colleges, go to these common rooms, and present this motion and get it passed, and get the mandate and the voice to tell the university that this is something people really care about. So we've done that; we are now up to 25 common rooms, which is getting close — I mean, we're about a
06:20 little over a third of the way there. So it's slow going, but the conversations we've had in these common rooms have been fantastic. Sometimes it's a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, because you get students who are very opposed to the idea, often disturbingly — students who say, you know, "I have a BP scholarship, so what are you telling me about my scholarship?" Like, well, this is part of how we're all kind of implicated, and how there's the sense in which we have to pull ourselves out. But more than
06:51 that, we've had conversations with people where you say the thing about how you can only extract a fifth of known fossil fuel reserves, and people kind of go "oh, right, okay, this is a problem", and there's a sense of surprise, but one that then is kind of channelled into more energy. So, kind of on the back of these common rooms, we've got the university-wide consultation, and we've started organising more, and importantly we've started organising with the Oxfordshire fossil free
07:21 campaign. And it's an unbelievable group of people across Oxford: activists, lifetime activists, who have phenomenal networks and who've been a wonderful motivating force. And what that kind of led to was, last week we had [what] ended up being a really fun demonstration going through Oxford, and kind of felt like, for us, something that we needed to keep up — this was promising, this was building momentum, we even got in a couple [of] papers, that was exciting. And
07:54 you know, it's something that can happen in Oxford and in other places around the UK. That said, like, we have encountered a lot of problems. The university is pretty intransigent. We don't know what will come out of the consultation; we'd like to be optimistic, but at the end of the day they keep saying, you know, "how will this affect our returns", "how can we even divest". And that has made me look at, you know, what is the bigger problem. And when you look at the London Stock
08:24 Exchange, there is a huge problem: 30% of the listed companies on the stock exchange are implicated in fossil fuels. Getting out of those is really difficult. There are so-called fossil free funds that are out of fossil fuel companies, but then they use Morgan Stanley, and Morgan Stanley is one of the biggest financiers of fossil fuel companies. So we're facing a really fundamental structural problem. And, you know, universities, if they divest, if they use their voice, their kind of institutional leadership, to kind of shift the discourse, that's
08:55 positive. But we need to then think about how our universities and how we as campaigns, in really concrete ways, can target these sort of structural embedded problems in our financial system — how we can, you know, get people to acknowledge that the way risk is calculated, you know, there are these awful games [?] that don't take into account climate change at all; carbon costs are just not factored in. And, you know,
09:27 what this means is we need policy, we need regulation, we need more imagination. And I think that's where divestment is such a powerful concept, because it says what the bottom line is. I've had to talk to really unusual people I didn't think I'd be talking to as a part of this consultation, like fund managers from London, and they say, you know, "we invest in efficient fossil fuel companies, they burn less while extracting all of this stuff" — and you're just like, this isn't an op[tion] [?], this doesn't make sense, this doesn't add up, you haven't done the math, you're
09:57 deluding yourself. But this passes for progressive investment. So, you know, this is what we've got to change, and this is why divestment is something that we can believe in. We can honestly say: this is what we're pushing towards, this is where we have to be able to arrive, and anything short of this vision is just pretending, it's being PC, it's saying climate change is a problem but it's not admitting what actually has to be done. So I think, you know, there's a lot of energy in the divestment campaign across
10:28 the UK, internationally [as well]. There are other universities in the UK which are really leading the way: Edinburgh seems like it might actually divest, they've had phenomenal student activism; SOAS is amazing, I hope some of you are here, I would love to chat. And then elsewhere in the US and kind of Australia, all over the place. But it's this kind of momentum that we need to build on ahead of Paris, ahead of a whole set of
10:58 policy decisions that have to be made by governments across the world. So we need to think about how we can link these campaigns, how we can keep the momentum up, and how we can force people to be — force government leaders to be — more imaginative and understanding in exactly what needs to be done. So, thank you.
## Corrections
- "**F tools**" → "**fossil fuels**"; "**FAL Feld** companies" → "**fossil fuel** companies"; "the topic of **f fuel investment**" → "**fossil fuel** investment". - "so first why **investment**" → "why **divestment**" — the subject of the whole talk. - "so that's **1 of** the fossil fuel reserves" → "so that's **a fifth of** the fossil fuel reserves". She gives the same figure correctly later in the talk, which is what settles it. - "championed notably by an environmentalist Bill McKibben **any** people here might know" → "**many** people here might know". The name is right in the captions. - "a financial activist here in London **Brett Scott**" → correct as given. - "Morgan Stanley is one of the biggest **fan seers**" → "one of the biggest **financiers**". - "the investment in **alternative natives**" → "the investment in **alternatives**". - "present this motion and get it **ped**" → "get it **passed**". - "we didn't know half of what was **line** behind divestment" → "what was **lying** behind divestment". - "they've had a phenomenal student **activ activism soas** is amazing" → "phenomenal student activism; **SOAS** is amazing". - "we even **gotten** a couple papers" → "we even **got in** a couple [of] papers". - "you haven't done the **math**" — kept as spoken; it is the slogan of Bill McKibben's divestment tour, which she has just cited. - Marked and uncertain: "there are these awful **games [?]**"; "this isn't an **op[tion] [?]**". - **"A little over a third of the way there"** against "25 common rooms" out of "38 colleges" looks wrong but is not: Oxford colleges each have a junior and a middle common room, so the denominator is roughly twice the number of colleges. Left as spoken.