Tag: Divest UVA

By Kristin O’Donoghue

About 200 students calling on the University of Virginia to divest from fossil fuel industries marched across Grounds to the park near the coal plant on Earth Day, April 22.

Marchers first met at the Rotunda, where leaders of DivestUVA shared opening remarks, beginning with recognition of the Monacan Nation, the “historic caretakers of the land.”

“We should all be dedicated to acknowledging and utilizing our privilege and position for change, and strive for an activism that is decolonizing, self-aware, and as equitable as possible,” said one speaker. 

DivestUVA organized the march with a list of specific demands: that UVA and the UVA Investment Management Company, UVIMCO, fully divest by the end of the year from any company whose primary profit is from the extraction or distribution of fossil fuels; that the university remove the influence of fossil fuel companies from its administration and educational spaces; and that both UVA and Charlottesville have an environmental justice report done to see effects of the city structure on BIPOC communities, and then act to remediate the damage done. 

Alex, a fourth-year student, read a poem she wrote about the university’s complicity in the climate crisis.

“It makes me angry to see the university that I love and care about fund an industry setting the earth on fire,” she said.

The students then took off toward the coal plant, to chants of “Hey Jim Ryan, the planet’s dyin’!”

Homemade signs included slogans such as “I speak for the trees” and “This is not what we meant by ‘Hot Girl Summer.’”

When one of the organizers asked the crowd what brought them there, a student called out, “I don’t want the world to end.” 

The marchers were energized, and the force of the group appeared magnetic as a few onlookers joined them.

Zack, an aspiring lawyer specializing in Indigenous peoples’ law, was one of those who came to watch—and then got involved. He even addressed the crowd, saying: “I noticed the engines of the train tuning out the chants of climate activists marching.”

Josh Vana, director of ARTIVISM, an organization that connects resident artists and activists in the central Virginia Area, spoke next. 

“I’m here to talk about power,” Vana said. He warned the students about the “Virginia Way,” a term describing how entrenched power works to pursue business as usual while refusing to respond to those calling for justice. 

Vana discussed the group’s efforts to prevent the building of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, which he called the “largest climate change catalyst right now in our region.” 

The pipeline spans 303 miles, from northwestern West Virginia to southern Virginia, and the project is both over budget and behind schedule. Vana pointed people to StopMVP.org, where they can join the fight.

“Stay loud,” he told the students. “Agitate, educate, and organize.”

The event concluded with an “email zap,” during which students individually sent emails with the DivestUVA demands to UVA President Jim Ryan at the same time, in an effort to flood his inbox and force his attention.  

A student-led campaign to pressure the University of Virginia to fully withdraw its investments in the fossil fuel industry has gained momentum in recent years with petitions and public protests. Last month, the University of Virginia Investment Management Company finally addressed some of these concerns by publishing a framework that lays out principles the school will follow for investing in fossil fuel companies.

Students and sustainability advocates, however, say that this isn’t enough. 

The move “feels like it’s divestment,” but will not constitute full divestment in practice, says UVA Student Council Sustainability Co-director Aayusha Khanal.

“I would like to see full, complete divestment from the fossil fuel industry because I just don’t understand how it is an ethical, or moral, or political, or social, or economically viable thing to do,” she says. 

UVIMCO’s framework creates criteria that fossil fuel producers receiving UVA funds are expected to follow. But DivestUVA, a student organization that has advocated for fossil fuel divestment since it was founded in 2015, sees responsible fossil fuel divestment as an oxymoron.

“I think that responsible investment in fossil fuels is an antithetical statement,” says Khanal, who is also a member of DivestUVA. “Fossil fuel industries, especially the big ones, have these climate change goals where they’re trying to be more sustainable, but if you just look at the fine print for just a second longer, you’ll realize that they’re still operating under the same dirty tactics they did a decade ago.” 

In the coalition’s first public statement this semester, DivestUVA acknowledged that these new changes are an improvement but questioned the details of the framework and whether responsible fossil fuel investment is even possible. The group last hosted a rally in December during which they pinned their demands on UVA President Jim Ryan’s door. 

The statement examined each of four proposed principles UVIMCO laid out for fossil fuel companies: to be transparent, adopt best practices, safeguard the environment, and act with integrity. Each was challenged for being vague and or not plausible. 

“Fossil fuel companies, by virtue of their existence, are harmful to the environment,” reads DivestUVA’s statement. “There is no amount of responsible operation that can reverse this fact.” 

Maille Bowerman, Student Council sustainability co-director and member of DivestUVA, condemned the ongoing lack of transparency in UVIMCO’s policies, which fail to address important questions such as who stakeholders are and the metrics used to distinguish a good fossil fuel company from a bad one. 

“There’s only so much activism that can happen when you don’t even know what’s going on behind closed doors,” she says.

According to UVIMCO’s statement, the company has no direct investments in thermal coal or tar/oil sands and only .05 percent in fossil fuels. Less than 6 percent of indirect investments, funds that hold shares in fossil fuels companies, go toward natural resources. 

At UVA, fossil fuels are primarily for heating, with the vast majority of UVA’s fossil fuels used to heat buildings. The rest goes toward smaller things like cooking, dryers, and Bunsen burners in laboratories. 

Paul Zmick, director of energy and utilities at UVA, says that in order for the university to get off fossil fuels, it has to change the infrastructure of its buildings and rely on new technologies for heating. 

Options currently in the works include increasing building efficiency through installing low-temperature hot water systems, using heat recovery chillers, eliminating coal, and using geoexchange, which involves storing excess heat during the summer underground for use in the winter. Whereas the heat production efficiency of natural gas, a primary fossil fuel, ranges from 80 to 85 percent, these new technologies are far more efficient. 

The first step will be getting off coal, and then it will be continuing to expand heat recovery chillers and geoexchange before ultimately connecting these heating and cooling loops together to reduce fossil fuel use, a process that Zmick says can mostly be accomplished in 10 years. 

The biggest obstacle, however, is the UVA Medical Center—it relies on steam, which is largely made through the combustion of fossil fuels. 

“If we were able to get the Medical Center off steam in the next decade, certainly, within 15 to 20 years, we could be fossil fuel free…I think in that 2040 timeframe is realistic,” Zmick says. 

UVA has publicly announced a commitment to becoming fossil fuel free by 2050. UVIMCO, however, has not made a similar statement and did not respond by press time to C-VILLE’s request for information on a divestment goal.

“UVIMCO should be aligning itself more with UVA’s commitment to be fossil fuel free by 2050 to keep the consistency in messaging,” says Bowerman. 

UVA’s status as the flagship university in Virginia means it has a responsibility to set an example for other universities to divest, she says, since those schools often model their policies on UVA’s. Columbia University, Boston University, Harvard University, and the University of Southern California announced divestments from the fossil fuel industry last year, and many other colleges have since followed suit. 

UVIMCO’s new statement won’t slow DivestUVA’s efforts. On April 22, the coalition will hold an Earth Day climate action march to elicit input from students and community members on ways in which the university can be more environmentally just. 

A big concern is the apparent mismatch between UVA’s stated values and its ongoing investment in fossil fuels, but according to Khanal, the solution is easy. 

“By a university investing in fossil fuels, it cannot truly say that it cares about students and cares about creating a future generation of leaders, because if it truly wanted to do that, then it would create a future that is not going to be ravaged by climate change,” says Khanal. “And one way to ensure that—not the only way, but one way to do that—is to divest from the leading cause of the climate crisis, which is the fossil fuel industry.”

By Kristin O’Donoghue

What do they want? Divestment. When do they want it? Now.

That was the message from UVA students and community members who gathered at the Rotunda December 4 for a rally protesting the university’s investment in the fossil fuel industry. Following remarks from student organizers, the group marched to Madison Hall to plaster a list of their demands on UVA President Jim Ryan’s door.

They want a public announcement of support for fossil fuel divestment from Ryan, the administration, and Board of Visitors, as well as an official commitment to divestment from University of Virginia Investment Management Company. It’s the latest wave of activism in a fight that’s been going on for years at the school.

“The goal of the rally was to push the Board of Visitors, administration, and UVIMCO to see that this movement has a lot of student support,” says Emilie Bidgoli, UVA Student Council’s sustainability deputy director. “It’s not fluff.”

Fossil fuel divestment means removing stocks, bonds, or investment funds that support fossil fuel companies from the university’s endowment. Activist groups and climate experts have encouraged universities to divest from fossil fuels, citing the need to adapt to a world altered by a changing climate and increased uncertainty about the viability of the fossil fuel industry. UVA keeps the exact composition of its investment portfolio under wraps, but the total endowment is worth $14.5 billion. According to UVA spokesperson Brian Coy, approximately 6 percent of UVIMCO’s “long term pool” is devoted to “natural resource investments,” a category that includes fossil fuels.

In 2020, the school announced a 10-year Sustainability Plan, which aims to “advance UVA as a global leader in creating equitable, replicable solutions to pressing, existential challenges.” The plan includes going carbon neutral and reducing the university’s nitrogen footprint by 30 percent before 2030.

For some students and community members, divestment is a key move for a school that has publicly committed to going green. A petition demanding divestment has 1,288 signatures.

“Our endowment investments should reflect our values, not the unjust power structures that we publicly decry,” the petition reads. It says UVA is directly contributing to carbon emissions through these investment practices.

The petition demands that UVIMCO release a transparent report regarding the extent of its current direct and indirect investments in the fossil fuel industry, fully divest from companies whose primary source of profit is fossil fuel extraction and refinement by the end of the year, and complete the total divestment from fossil fuels by the end of 2022.

UVA student Allegra Stewart has been working this year to relaunch Divest UVA, a student activist organization that was founded in 2015 but lost momentum, especially due to the pandemic, she says.

“UVA could be taking a leadership role, as one of the first schools in the South to divest. Still, they’re neglecting to take up the mantle.”

Around the country, calls for fossil fuel divestment have accelerated recently, and according to Fossil Free, over 100 colleges and universities have committed to partially or fully divest their fossil fuel investments from their endowments. In 2020, the University of California system got rid of all the fossil fuel investments in its $126 billion endowment. This September, Harvard followed suit. Across the state line at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, students are lobbying for their school to make similar commitments.

Stewart says that when UVA’s divestment advocates first applied pressure last spring, administrators said their current focus was on racial equity, implicitly signifying that climate action would have to take a back seat. But Stewart sees the issues as intertwined. “Environmental justice is a racial issue—it touches everyone,” she says.

Stewart also notes that divestment is not just a UVA issue. “Every decision that UVA makes impacts the Charlottesville community,” she says.

Divest UVA has the support of the Student Council, which recently passed a resolution in support of the cause.

UVA is taking other steps toward environmental friendliness, both at its own volition and at the direction of the state. In July, Governor Ralph Northam issued an executive order banning single-use plastics at state agencies (and public colleges and universities). The UVA Office for Sustainability is working on a transition plan to phase out everything from plastic cutlery to trash can liners.

The university has publicly committed to become fossil fuel free in 2050, which Stewart called a “good first step.” Other UVA sustainability plan initiatives include reducing waste production by 70 percent, reducing water by 30 percent, and becoming carbon neutral by 2030.

“Meeting these bold sustainability goals will require passionate students, staff members, and faculty to take ownership of the way we use resources, the way we educate ourselves and others, and the way we engage with our fellow Hoos,” the UVA Sustainability page states.

UVA Batten school professor Daniel Reifsnyder, who worked on environmental issues in the U.S. State Department for more than a decade, says that divestment may be important to maintaining UVA’s standing as an environmentally responsible institution, which in turn, “may be important for attracting quality students.”

Reifsnyder, who co-chaired the U.N. negotiations that led to the Paris Climate Agreement, pointed to the results of Princeton Review’s College Hopes and Worries Survey, in which 78 percent of college applicants surveyed said that having information about a college’s commitment to the environment would affect their decision to apply to the school.

Coy says the school’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility is “seeking to take a measured, thoughtful approach” to the issue, “that aligns with UVA’s mission and overall sustainability commitments and is consistent with UVIMCO’s fiduciary duty to the university.”

Coy says the investment team is putting together short, medium, and long-term recommendations, and it expects to respond to calls for divestment in greater detail in January 2022.

As one student organizer put it at the rally: “The success of UVA’s portfolio will be irrelevant in the event of a climate crisis.”