CCNF Interview with Divestment Movement Leaders

Note

[Below are a set of excerpts from a CCNF virtual session with Ben Franta, PhD Candidate in Applied Physics at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a board member of the group Divest Harvard, and Geoffrey Supran, MIT Energy Fellow and leader of the group Fossil Free MIT. The transcript is minimally edited for readability and brevity.]

Quirke: Welcome Ben and Geoffrey, so before we get into the weeds, what is divestment?

Franta: Divestment is the opposite of investment, so when you pull your investments out of a particular sector or company — that is divestment. Often people will do this as an act of protest or because what the company is doing is not socially responsible. So some prominent examples in the past include: institutional divestment from tobacco companies in the 1990s, and divestment from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. There have been some more recent ones as well, like companies implicated in genocide in South Sudan.

Quirke: And regarding this movement calling on institutions to divest their money in fossil fuel companies, how did this come about?...

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