Fossil Fuel Divestment as Climate Action: Environmental Rhetoric and Historical Roots of an Environmental Campaign

• In Event: Mediating Environmental Activism

Abstract

During the COP21 Paris climate talks in December 2015, as part of a push to “divest for Paris,” 350.org and Divest-Invest announced that fossil fuel divestment commitments had reached $3.4 US trillion in assets from more than 500 institutions and organizations. Divestment has been characterized as a socially responsible investing tactic to remove assets from a sector or industry based on moral objections to its business practices. In this article, we use historical case study methods in order to examine the roots of the fossil fuel divestment movement and its post-2012 gaining traction on the international scale. The movement has historical roots in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and efforts to shun industry sectors based on harmful products, such as tobacco, private prisons, and firearms. We explore the rise of the fossil fuel divestment movement following Bill McKibben’s 2012 Rolling Stone article, “Global Warming's Terrifying New Math” and its growth on college campuses, to The Guardian’s “Keep it in the Ground” campaign. In partnership with 350.org and its Go Fossil Free Campaign, the Keep It in the Ground campaign was launched in March 2015 at the behest of outgoing editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger. Within its first year, the digital campaign garnered support from more than a quarter million online petitioners and won “campaign of the year” in the Press Gazette’s British Journalism Awards. Since the launch of The Guardian’s campaign, “keep it in the ground” has become a dominant frame used by fossil fuel divestment activists. In this article we review the origins and tracks the rise of this messaging and the movement’s communication strategies. We also address post-COP21 divestment actions in May 2016, organized by the Break Free from Fossil Fuels coalition. There is a tension within climate action between policy-based means and technological advances to address climate change; and, on the other hand, individual-level behavioral social marketing strategies. Since 2012, the fossil fuel divestment movement has been gaining traction in the United States, with student-led organizing focused on pressuring universities to divest endowment assets on moral grounds, and increasingly on an international scale. Following the 2015 Paris climate agreement where representatives of 195 nations set an ambitious goal to reach net zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by the mid-century, it is likely that climate activists will shift additional attention towards fossil fuel divestment as a tactic.

Authors

• Jill Hopke, DePaul U

• Luis E Hestres, The U of Texas at San Antonio