Bill McKibben, one of the co-founders of 350.org, told a crowd of about 30 students, faculty and administrators on Tuesday that divesting the University’s endowment from fossil fuels must go hand-in-hand with efforts to reduce campus energy consumption. His speech was followed by a discussion among three panelists about divestment at Brandeis.

McKibben, the author and climate activist who founded the 350.org movement which urges universities to divest from fossil fuel companies, spoke via Skype at the second of four events being hosted this semester about the question of divestment. Titled “Money Matters: Fossil Fuel Divestment as Political Power,” the event was sponsored by Brandeis Climate Justice, Faculty Against the Climate Threat and the Office of the President — Interim President Lisa Lynch and Senior Advisor to the President Peter Giumette attended the event, among other senior administrators.

Lynch told the Justice in an interview after the event that she felt the discourse on campus about divestment has been positive, but reiterated that the issue of divestment would be decided by incoming University President Ronald Liebowitz. During her time in office, Lynch has prioritized decreasing consumption and increasing recycling on campus in order to combat climate change. As president of Middlebury College, Liebowitz also prioritized sustainability but ultimately did not divest the school’s endowment after significant community pressure to do so.

Philip Wight, Ph.D., who is part of Lynch’s Presidential Task Force on Sustainability and a member of Brandeis Climate Justice, introduced McKibben and interviewed him throughout the Skype call. Wight first asked about McKibben’s 2012 Rolling Stone article “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” which reported that humanity must keep 80 percent of earth’s fossil fuels in the ground to maintain what scientists call a “carbon budget,” which would prevent catastrophic climate change. “Had we only been so lucky as to run out of fossil fuel 10 or 20 years ago, we’d be fine now,” McKibben said. “We would long since have made the technological transition to something else … The problem is we didn’t run out. There’s more than enough coal, gas and oil left beneath the crust of the earth to overwhelm the planet’s climate systems.” McKibben said he got the data in his article from the Carbon Tracker Initiatives.

McKibben said he arrived at divestment as the best strategy to stopping fossil fuel companies from over-consuming because “it’s not that there’s a flaw in the business plan of some company that needs fixing. The flaw is the business plan. And so the need is to break the political power of those companies right away.”

Wight then asked McKibben about recent revelations from the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News that Exxon Mobil executives had been aware of the climatic effects of burning fossil fuel since the 1980s, and in fact leased Arctic territories in part because climate change would make the areas more accessible for drilling. Wight’s question to McKibben was, “How do these revelations influence arguments for divestment, and what message do universities send if they continue to own stocks in firms like Exxon?”

McKibben, who has called Exxon’s inaction “the crime of the millenium,” said he had “no idea” why anyone would continue to own Exxon-Mobil stocks and said, “The problem is not just that Exxon knew about all this; it’s that they studiously avoided saying [anything] about it.”

According to McKibben, divestment works to stigmatize fossil fuel corporations in order to prevent politicians from accepting donations from these firms.

He said that since politicians still accept money from oil and gas companies, particularly congressional Republicans, the firms are not stigmatized enough.

Wight then asked about the criticism that it is hypocritical to urge divestment while one still consumes fossil fuel, and whether the inverse criticism was true — that it is hypocritical to reduce one’s carbon usage and not divest. “I think it’s a good idea to be reducing one’s carbon imprint, and at the same time, it’s a very good idea to be divesting. Colleges sometimes say ‘oh we’re working hard, we’re getting the cafeteria green,’ or ‘we’re reducing the amount of heat in the dining halls.’ That’s good, that’s smart, and that’s something we should all be doing. The endowment’s just another part of the campus. … it makes no sense to have a filthy endowment and an otherwise clean campus,” McKibben responded.

Wight also asked if moderates might be a greater roadblock to progress than climate deniers, due to believing they are doing their part without taking stringent enough actions. McKibben responded that slow change is not an option in the climate debate and that divestment was the least of the strong actions one could take.

Wight then opened the conversation to the three panelists in the room as McKibben ended his call. The speakers were Craig Altemose, the co-founder and executive director of the Better Future project, a climate advocacy group that opposes fossil fuels; Prof. Dan Perlman (BIOL), the University’s associate provost of innovation in education and a member of the Presidential Task Force on Sustainability; and Abbie Goldberg ’16, a member of Brandeis Climate Justice.

All three panelists voiced their support for divestment, but Perlman said he was concerned that divestment had become a goal in and of itself at Brandeis rather than just one means of addressing climate change, which he called “the greatest issue facing humanity today.” He argued that saying that it is immoral to invest in fossil fuel corporations and also saying that one loses money from investing in fossil fuels — he cited that stocks in Peabody Energy and Exxon-Mobil have deteriorated in market value over the last few years — are mutually exclusive arguments. “So what I’m seeing here is if we feel it’s amoral to invest in fossil fuel companies, fine, that can be our position. But then to turn around and say ‘and we should divest because we’re going to lose money,’ now all of a sudden divestment has become an end in and of itself rather than a means to do what Abbie, Craig and I want to achieve. … If that’s the only venue, or the primary venue for improving our world, we’re missing out on some important things.”

Goldberg countered that BCJ activists agree that there is no “silver bullet strategy,” and that divestment is just one action to fight against climate change. She felt that it was not contradictory for moral and economic arguments against climate change to coexist, and that most of the growth in the Brandeis endowment came from donations, not investment. Goldberg did not respond to a request for her source.

Altemose called the fossil fuel industry “not only the wealthiest industry in human history but the most deadly in human history,” and said that it was fallacious to say that divestment would reduce funds for financial aid.