{"id":5470,"date":"2016-09-20T13:10:43","date_gmt":"2016-09-20T17:10:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/federal\/?p=5470"},"modified":"2016-09-22T13:18:05","modified_gmt":"2016-09-22T17:18:05","slug":"trustees-adopt-broad-climate-change-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/federal\/2016\/09\/20\/trustees-adopt-broad-climate-change-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Trustees Adopt Broad Climate Change Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Cutting energy demand and avoiding investment in coal, tar sands included<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\"t_butoday_15-9385-CLIMATE-030\"<\/a>The Board of Trustees Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing has held several forums on fossil fuel divestment, including this one last December with CAS Professor Anthony Janetos. Photo by Cydney Scott.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

Expanding BU\u2019s efforts to curb climate change, the Board of Trustees last week unanimously approved a broad strategy, including efforts to avoid investments in companies that extract coal and tar sands oil, the most carbon-intensive fuels.<\/span><\/p>\n

The board also authorized a Climate Action Plan that will lay out goals and timetables for greater energy efficiency and green energy use, more climate research and education on campus, and addressing climate change effects on BU\u2019s physical plant. A third board-approved measure calls for BU\u2019s endowment investment office to include managers with expertise in renewable energy and technology, a move the office had begun on its own.<\/span><\/p>\n

The board also directed its Investment Committee to report back at least annually on the implementation of the coal\/tar sands policy, and it agreed to review the issue at least every five years in light of economic, climatic, and technological developments.<\/span><\/p>\n

The board\u2019s actions recognize that reducing energy consumption is key to mitigating climate change, says trustee Richard D. Reidy (Questrom\u201982), who heads the board\u2019s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing (ACSRI), which had recommended climate change policies<\/span><\/a> to the board.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHuman-made climate change is real,\u201d Reidy says. \u201cIf we do nothing about it, it will create social harm that will affect the world and BU. We understood that a comprehensive global climate change strategy had to focus on reducing demand and replacing fossil fuels with clean alternatives.\u201d The board endorsed development of a Climate Action Plan, he says, because \u201cthe best role for a university is doing research and education and being a good global citizen and reducing its carbon footprint.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

President Robert A. Brown announced the trustees\u2019 decision in a letter<\/span><\/a> emailed to the University community.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cBecause of the work of the ACSRI and the Board of Trustees,\u201d Brown said in an interview, \u201cthe University is on a path toward facing the challenges of anthropogenic climate change. This is the first step in what will be an ongoing process in the years and decades ahead.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As is its usual procedure, the board had referred the\u00a0ACSRI proposals, made in April,\u00a0to its Executive Committee\u00a0for study.\u00a0That committee reviewed these proposals at its regularly scheduled May meeting and again at a special meeting held in August, reaching consensus on three recommendations to be presented to the board last week.\u00a0The board voted unanimously to endorse each of the recommendations put forth by the\u00a0Executive Committee.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a document posted on the trustees\u2019 website<\/span><\/a>, Board of Trustees chairman Kenneth Feld (Questrom\u201970) said he has asked Brown, \u201cin consultation with such others as he deems appropriate, to develop a Climate Action Plan for review and consideration\u201d by the board.<\/span><\/p>\n

Recognizing that divestment was the most complex issue among the possible options, the Executive Committee said it weighed the potential harm of climate change against the social and economic disruption from a too-abrupt shift to clean energy.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Executive Committee reviewed data on global energy use, which demonstrate the magnitude of the challenge associated with shifting the world\u2019s energy production (heavily based on coal, oil, and natural gas) to low-carbon sources\u2014solar, wind, and nuclear power\u2014that are more expensive sources of energy.<\/span><\/p>\n

The trustees\u2019 decision could result in divestment from some current holdings as well as avoiding future investment in coal and tar sands. The trustees noted that total avoidance of coal and tar sands companies may not be possible, because the University\u2019s portfolio includes vehicles such as mutual funds, whose managers choose stocks, and passive index investing. That latter is tied to the performance of a particular stock index\u2014say, the S&P 500\u2014whose holdings BU has no say over.<\/span><\/p>\n

The trustees\u2019 votes last week capped several years of campus activism for divestment, most recently in the form of a student rally<\/span><\/a> the day before the board\u2019s decision. Two years ago, faculty members petitioned for divestment<\/span><\/a> from all oil, coal, and gas companies.<\/span><\/p>\n

With the board\u2019s actions, \u201cwe have stepped beyond what most of our fellow colleges and universities in the area have done,\u201d says ACSRI member John Robb Dixon, a Questrom School of Business associate professor. \u201cWe\u2019ve said no to the two dirtiest, worst in terms of carbon dioxide release fuels that are out there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Dixon says the board\u2019s unanimous support for all the measures surprised and gratified him. \u201cWhile we would love to have some technological miracle come along that would enable us to stop using fossil fuels, the technology infrastructure that\u2019s in place is still going to be very costly and time-consuming to replace,\u201d he says.<\/span><\/p>\n

In weighing divestment, the board is guided by several principles, one of which notes that most divestment discussions involve issues that aren\u2019t directly related to the University\u2019s operation; another notes that by divesting, BU adopts a viewpoint in a debated issue and risks undermining robust campus discussion about that issue.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNon-investment or divestment actions based on social or political principles should be very rare,\u201d the board\u2019s principles state, \u201cand occur in only the clearest of circumstances, and should be judged to withstand the test of time in terms of how the wisdom of the University\u2019s decision will be judged by future generations.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The University has divested at least twice before<\/span><\/a>. In 2006, BU shed its holdings in companies linked to Sudan and its genocidal government. In 1979, the University pulled money from companies tied to South Africa to protest apartheid.<\/span><\/p>\n

Author, Rich Barlow can be reached at <\/i>barlowr@bu.edu<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0Cutting energy demand and avoiding investment in coal, tar sands included The Board of Trustees Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing has held several forums on fossil fuel divestment, including this one last December with CAS Professor Anthony Janetos. Photo by Cydney Scott. Expanding BU\u2019s efforts to curb climate change, the Board of Trustees last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8],"tags":[144,111,13,208],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/federal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5470"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/federal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/federal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/federal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7048"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/federal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5470"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/federal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5474,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/federal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5470\/revisions\/5474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/federal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/federal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/federal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}