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Fossil fuel purge sought for CU portfolio

Students demanding divestment of $1.4B

University of Colorado students concerned about climate change are pushing regents to purge fossil fuels from CU’s $1.4 billion investments portfolio.

They’ve mobilized on campuses in Boulder, Colorado Springs and Denver, strategizing over pizza with guidance from faculty supporters and national climate change activists. Orange-clad “Fossil-free CU” coordinators attended the regents’ latest meeting and requested a sit-down by Feb. 19 to discuss divestment and possible re-investment in solar and wind energy.

“It’s wrong to wreck the climate,” CU-Boulder organizer Franky Navarrette said. “It’s wrong to profit from that. We think our regents ultimately will want CU to be on the right side of history.”

Students see action to compel a shift away from gas and oil as a moral duty, said Alex Sinchak, a sophomore at CU-Colorado Springs. “Profit over people is how the fossil-fuel industry sees it. But, as young people, we don’t want to inherit the consequences.”

The push is part of a movement on more than 180 college campuses. Student efforts have driven 14 schools to at least partially divest funds.

Stanford announced it will divest holdings in the coal industry. Heirs to the Rockefeller oil fortune said the $860 million Rockefeller Brothers Fund will join the campus movement. But Harvard, with the nation’s largest college endowment of $32.7 billion, decided not to divest.

A preponderance of scientists has concluded climate change is happening, in part caused by human emissions. NASA this year reported the global concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a main driver of recent climate change, has reached 400 parts per million – the highest level in recorded history and 100 ppm higher than in the last 1 million years.

The UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found the rate of greenhouse-gas pollution doubled between 2000 and 2010.

CU regents haven’t agreed to a sit-down. Individual regents have met with students. Regent Jim Geddes told students at the recent meeting he questions whether climate change is happening.

CU spokesman Ken McConnellogue said he’s confident regents will consider this issue. They are bound by university and state fiduciary responsibility rules requiring investment decisions based on revenue rather than social and political concerns.

“The university’s investments benefit faculty, students, programs and buildings,” McConnellogue said. “It’s a lot of scholarships, a lot of faculty projects. So this is a complicated issue. Discussion around it is a good thing.”

CU regents didn’t join counterparts at other universities who divested funds from South Africa in the 1980s to try to help break the “apartheid” system of racial oppression. CU later passed a policy of not tying investments to political and social issues.

But in 2007, facing evidence of genocidal massacres in Sudan, CU removed $650,000 from a Chinese company and another company involved in Sudan.

The divestment movement to force action to address climate change is gaining momentum, said Jay Carmona, national campaign manager for 350.org, a New York-based advocacy group.

“We’re sending a market signal that the end of fossil fuels is coming. We need to re-envision where we put our money,” Carmona said.



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