Letter to the editor


By
 in ,

Rallying against fossil-fuel investments 

USC students take pride in the large sums of money the school receives to enhance our educational experience. It’s with a cumulative endowment of $3.5 billion that ’SC is able to maintain its standing as one of the top research institutions in the world.

But while our university is grateful for corporate generosity to our educational community, many of these gifts come with negative implications. Gifts, such as the $1 million donated to USC at the USC-Cal football game on Oct. 12, 2012, are tied to the major fossil fuel companies causing destruction to our planet; receiving their dirty money is no laudable feat.

USC’s endowment of $3.5 billion is the 21st largest in the nation. In order to keep that endowment fund growing, our university also invests that money in the stock market. At the moment, a significant portion of our endowment money is invested in fossil fuel companies. We believe that this is unacceptable. After all, it’s our generation of students and future leaders that will be forced to deal with an incoming slew of environmental disasters of greater magnitude. How can our university invest money in corporations whose business models destroy our future?

It’s contradictory for an educational institution to be preparing its students for the future, while simultaneously contributing to its destruction.  Participating in a divestment campaign is one way we can get our institution to play a significant role in supporting that future. We demand that USC freeze any new fossil-fuel investments starting now and pull out from all dirty energy ties in the near future.

USC is not the only institution involved in a fossil-fuel divestment campaign. More than 250 universities across the nation have started campaigns, some of which are significantly ahead of that at USC. Harvard’s board of trustees has already met with students to discuss divestment, and UC Berkeley students finished voting yesterday on a referendum for fossil-fuel divestment at Cal and across the UC system.

This campaign, as expected, will be an uphill battle. Some members on USC’s board of trustees are the biggest players in the fossil fuels industry. Just to name a couple: Ray R. Irani Ph.D. ’57 was the chairman and CEO of Occidental Petroleum Corporation from 1990 to 2011. Chengyu Fu M.S. ’86 is the chairman of China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation (Sinopec Group), which ranks among the top 10 largest companies in the world by revenue.

This is not to say that they are bad people or that they don’t care about the well-being of future generations. After all, they are part of our Trojan Family, too. It’s just that times have changed, and our generation has a new issue to deal with: climate change. Given the information we now have at our disposal, we must collaborate with our university’s board of trustees to “clean up” our portfolio.

If you’re concerned that a clean portfolio will harm the profits of the university, consider this: a study by the Aperio Group proves that by excluding investments in the “Filthy Fifteen” corporations, the resulting effect to portfolio risk is negligible. In fact, fossil-fuel companies can be considered overvalued: their worth does not include the costs of the destruction they cause to our planet.

Our university is one of the finest in the nation, and its role in the world is an increasingly important one. But unless it is willing to free itself of dirty investments, the progress it makes in other areas is only parochial.

There may be genuine attempts toward on-campus sustainability, but unless the university is also willing to clean up its portfolio, these attempts are of little significance. This is why we are calling on our university to divest from fossil fuels.

 

Ivan Kumamoto 

Co-Director, Environmental Affairs Organization

Kaitlin Mogentale

Co-Director, Environmental Affairs Organization