Opinion: Divesting in Oil Makes Economic and Moral Sense

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In an opinion piece in the Montreal Gazette, Alberta Finance Minister Travis Toews argues against the decision of the Caisse de dépôt et location du Québec to divest its oil funds which hurts Quebecers. He is wrong.

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What hurts Quebecers is the climate crisis, which came ever closer to home when the West Island neighborhood I grew up in was flooded, and even this summer, when the Montreal air was unhealthy to breathe.

I know Toews’s arguments are wrong, in more ways than I can fit here, because I have spent more than half my life finding scientific and political solutions to the climate crisis. I study the global carbon cycle, conducting doctoral research that aims to improve the way we measure greenhouse gas emissions. For years, I was a youth delegate to the United Nations climate conferences, the same negotiations that now end in Glasgow, Scotland. In 2012, I helped launch the fossil fuel divestment campaign at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, a campaign that was successful in October when the university announced that it would finally divest.

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As a climate scientist, I trust the facts, which the Toews article lacks. Toews’s arguments are flawed at best; at worst, they are misleading. It makes broad claims about fossil fuel divestment that harms “billions of vulnerable people” and hampers the global decarbonization effort, but does not provide evidence to support these claims. Toews, in fact, has his argument backwards: it is dependence on fossil fuels itself that will harm billions of vulnerable people living on the front lines of climate change, such as hundreds of the best scientists in the world say.

Toews also makes unsubstantiated claims that divesting from fossil fuels will hurt the Caisse pension financially. Research also shows this argument to be false, finding that fossil fuel stocks have, in fact, underperformed compared with renewable energy , or stripped off money without fossil fuels . It simply makes financial sense, then, that the Caisse, along with institutions around the world, more recently, the University of Toronto – have announced commitments to sell their fossil fuel stocks.

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The moral argument in favor of divesting from fossil fuels is also indisputable: it is unethical to invest in destroying the climate. Doing so would deny future generations the right to a world worth living in, as a recent study in Science emphasized a “Serious threat to the safety of the young generations ”No“ drastic ”reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Lest we also forget that the fossil fuel industry deliberately misled the public about climate science, even while its own scientists were studying it, as an article published in Nature Climate Change found. The evidence is clear: fossil fuel corporations are not “ethical” or “climate centric,” no matter how much Toews wants you to believe.

Toews is right about one thing: Divestment from fossil fuels will hurt Alberta’s bitumen production, and rightly so. It is one of the most polluting forms of fossil fuel extraction. all over the world : A 2019 study published in Communications from nature found that emissions from the Alberta facilities were much higher than initially reported. As world leaders gathered in Glasgow in an effort to find the necessary solutions to the climate crisis, there is a simple math: we cannot extract and burn all the bitumen reserves of Alberta, the third largest in the world, and still limit the most serious consequences of climate change. We just can’t .

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This math should inform our climate policies, but it should also inform our assessment of the Canadian fossil fuel industry. If we incorrectly overvalue the industry based on the extraction of all this polluting and intensive energy source, investors will in fact suffer when the fossil fuel bubble bursts. To argue otherwise is to bet that the world will not act on climate change, a bet that humanity simply cannot afford to make.

Leehi Yona of Dollard-des-Ormeaux is a Juris Doctorate Candidate at Stanford University. She was named the best environmentalist under 25 in Canada and one of The Guardian’s young climate activists to watch ahead of the United Nations COP21 conference in Paris in 2015.