Guest post: Greg Mikkelson on Divestment & Democracy

[A few months ago Greg Mikkelson made newsheadlines [HT Dailynous; see also here; here; here] by resigning from his tenured position at McGill; I have known Greg since graduate school, and admire his integrity. So, I reached out and invited the following guest post.--ES] 

In September 2001, I started working as a professor with a joint appointment at the McGill School of Environment and Department of Philosophy.  The research and teaching I did in that position for 18-plus years gave me daily exposure to information about the collapsing state of the global ecosystem, driven by an exploding global economy.  In late 2012, a request for help from a then-new student group Divest McGill gave me a chance to join an important part of the struggle to relieve and reverse those adverse global trends.

As of March 2020, nearly 1,200 institutions around the world – including 175 institutions of higher education – have rid their investments, worth a total of nearly $20 trillion (Canadian), of stock in the fossil fuel industry.  In January 2020, more than 11,000 researchers from 153 countries signed on to an article identifying this divestment campaign as one of a few "encouraging signs" amid all the "profoundly troubling" statistics cited in their "World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency".  The goal of this campaign is the same as in other successful divestment efforts, such as from South Africa and tobacco:  to create political pressure for governments to finally take the kinds of action needed to tackle a pressing societal problem.  In this case, strong government action is needed to keep global warming below 1.5° to 2.0°C.  This means compelling fossil fuel companies to abandon the vast majority of the underground reserves they have already discovered.

Over the course of seven years, Divest McGill convinced organizations collectively representing all students and faculty on campus, along with most non-academic staff, to endorse divestment.  Unfortunately the central administration and Board of Governors have bitterly opposed divestment.  That Board decided in 2013, and again in 2016, to continue investing in fossil fuel.  In 2018, I submitted a pro-divestment motion to the McGill Senate – the largest and most representative body for the university community as a whole.  Despite attempts by the principal and provost to prevent it from even being discussed, that motion passed by a large majority.

The Statutes of McGill University – a kind of campus constitution – require that in such cases of disagreement between the Senate and Board, a joint committee convene to resolve it.  Instead, the Board referred the matter back to their own committee, chaired by a former Petro-Canada executive.  After stalling for more than a year, the Board refused for a third time to divest the endowment.  Instead, they proposed to partly "de-carbonize" McGill's investments.  Whereas divestment aims to keep most fossil fuel in the ground, what the Board calls "de-carbonization" only holds fossil fuel companies responsible for how efficiently they extract their product from the ground.  We can compare this insultingly late and weak response with the University of California Board's turnaround to full divestment just two months after their own Senate resolution in 2019.  When the McGill Board defied not only the scientific case for divestment, but also the overwhelming democratic mandate from the campus community, and even the university's own ground rules, I could no longer work there in good conscience.

The McGill travesty is a microcosm of an ecocidal contradiction at the heart of Canadian federal policy:  claiming to cut fossil fuel consumption, while recklessly expanding fossil fuel production.  Both McGill and Canada have committed to ambitious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions over the next few decades.  Meanwhile however, the people who run McGill are directly investing the university's money in roughly 25 of the world's top 200 coal, oil, and gas corporations.  To invest in something is to bank on its expansion.  At the federal level, our government is spending billions of tax dollars propping up failing pipeline ventures, and otherwise expanding some of the world's most polluting extraction projects.  One monstrous example implicating both the university and the government is McGill's several-million-dollar investment in TC Energy – the pipeline company on whose behalf the Royal Canadian Mounted Police invaded indigenous land in February 2020, touching off country-wide protests.

For both McGill and Canada, the fundamental problem is corporate control.  The majority of McGill's governors do not represent students, faculty, staff, alumni, or even Québec or Canadian society.  Instead, they represent a corporate elite, who simply do not care as much as the general public do about our deteriorating biosphere.  Meanwhile, this same ruling class are stifling Canadian environmental policy.  It is time for the rest of us to fight back, and exercise our democratic rights to policies that truly protect and promote life, on the only planet in the universe known to sustain it

Comments

[Barbara Wimsatt]

Greg, we so much admire and applaud your amazing efforts and courageous stand while the rest of us just wring our hands. We hope you are well and taking care of yourself . We are inspired.

[Bruce Patterson]

You've taken an amazingly principled position, one whose moral and ethical bases are easy to perceive and whose purpose is vitally important. One wishes this Covid pandemic did not prevent crowds of people from joining together, because this is an issue that galvanizes people. Large public demonstrations might move the needle of Board room decisions where rational argument and Senate resolutions have failed. I hope you're okay financially and know you will not be plagued by doubts or second thoughts going forward. I salute you!