California lawmakers want the state’s public pensions to get rid of fossil fuel stocks, claiming that will help save the planet. Who are they trying to kid?
Eleven years ago, the prominent climate activist Bill McKibben wrote an article for Rolling Stone magazine in which he acknowledged that decades of effort to slow global warming had been largely ineffective, and proposed a new tactic: divestment.
Taking his inspiration from the divestment campaign that preceded the abolition of apartheid in South Africa, McKibben called on institutions that managed money to sell their shares in fossil fuel companies. He quoted Bob Massie, an investor who had been active in the anti-apartheid campaign, as saying, “Given the severity of the climate crisis, a comparable demand that our institutions dump stock from companies that are destroying the planet would not only be appropriate but effective.” McKibben soon founded a grassroots organization, 350.org, that made fossil fuel divestment one of its primary goals.
