Energy
Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaigns Are Falling On Hard Times, Here’s Why
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Green groups campaigned heavily in May to keep oil in the ground, yet their anti-fossil fuel crusades are now met with yawns from other environmentalists who believe renewable energy is an ineffective alternative for fossil fuels.
The “Keep It In The Ground” groups embarked on a two-week long Break Free 2016 rally in hopes of convincing the U.S. and the world to permanently stop using oil and coal. Environmentalists like Bill McKibben, among others, called the rally the “greatest civil disobedience for climate action in history,” and others said more than 30,000 protesters would take part in events in far flung-places like the Philippines.
Kathleen Hartnett-White, the director of the Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told The Daily Caller News Foundation she thinks many green activists, as well as institutions such as Stanford University, are realizing renewable energy alone cannot fill the void left by jettisoned fossil fuels.
“The decarbonizing folks,” White said, referring to them as the true ideologues within the environmentalist community, “want a complete break from fossil fuels,” while other green types say “complete fossil fuel divestment is a pipe dream.”
White’s comments are not without precedent. A cavalcade of liberal voices and green activists have called an all-out ban on fossil fuels a naïve mission.
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, said during a panel discussion in April that anti-fossil fuel activists and “Keep It In The Ground” types are a “small minority” and “not an accurate representation of the people of Colorado.” Hickenlooper warned “we’re a long way from saying we can walk away from hydrocarbons and not do significant damage to our economy.”Former NASA climate Scientist James Hansen, often considered the godfather of global warming, said in a 2013 interview “that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.”
The U.S. cannot ban all fossil fuel resources overnight, the White House said in response to a February petition from anti-fossil fuel activists requesting federal lands stop being used to develop fossil fuels. The petition requested President Barack Obama secure his so-called climate legacy by “halting all new drilling, fracking, and mining on public lands and waters.”
“Even as we move full steam ahead towards cleaner energy, the United States will still need to use fossil fuels in the near term,” the White House wrote in a post on its website.
Stanford University used a nuanced approach when deciding not to divest, White explained, by admitting burning and producing fossil fuels is neither a moral imperative or the ethical thing to do.
Stanford’s Board of Trustees established an Advisory Panel on Investment Responsibility and Licensing (APIRL) made up of faculty members, students, and alumni to help the trustees determine whether to purge the university’s oil assets.
The group concluded, “That it could not evaluate whether the social injury caused by the fossil fuel industry outweighs the social benefit it provides,” so it advised the school not to divest its fossil fuel assets. The board agreed with APIRL’s position.
“They admitted something that is heretical within the divestment campaign,” White said, which could ultimately give “them a chance to talk about climate change realistically.”
The realization that natural gas and other fossil fuels fills an important niche in the world’s energy needs may be one of the reasons the Break Free rally in Colorado was met with so little fanfare — despite being sold as one of the greatest climate change protests in the state’s history.
“Here in Colorado, we are taking action to defend our communities from the dangers of fossil fuel extraction on our lands,” the Break Free website exclaimed. “We are sending a strong message to our state leadership that we must break away from fracking our public lands and communities! Together, we can be a powerful voice for the just transition to a 100% clean energy economy!”
But the rally attracted little attention.
Randy Hildreth, the Colorado director of Energy in Depth, who attended the event, told TheDCNF Monday that the supposedly historically large rally attracted less than 100 people.
Colorado’s oil production increased dramatically from 2004 to 2014. The state’s natural gas output jumped by 51 percent during that 10-year stretch, according to data compiled by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The Centennial State, in all, gathers nearly 60 percent of its electricity from coal, 22 percent from natural gas, and 18 percent from renewable energy.
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