Beginning in 2012, environmental activists
around the world, myself included, began
calling for institutions to divest their holdings
in fossil fuels. At first, we campaigned mostly
on moral grounds, and the early respondents
were small colleges and religious denomina-
tions. But the push quickly gained steam, be-
coming the biggest anticorporate campaign in
history. As of December 2019, some $12 tril-
lion worth of endowments and portfolios had
divested, according to Gofossilfree.org, in
part because the smart money had come to
realize that the fossil fuel sector was lagging
everything else in the market.
The institutions that have begun to divest
include New York City’s pension fund, half of
the colleges and universities in the U.K., the
Norwegian sovereign wealth fund (at more
than $1 trillion, the biggest pool of invest-
ment capital on the planet), the Rockefeller
charities (which descend from the planet’s
first oil fortune), and the vast University of
California system. Not a day goes by without
some new announcement: As I was writ-
ing this piece, Twitter flashed the news that
KiwiSavers, the primary retirement fund in
New Zealand, had joined the ranks. Together,
divestment has changed the dialogue, not
to mention the cost of capital: Coal execu-
tives complain it’s nearly impossible to raise
money because so many funds have divested,
and in last year’s annual report, Shell Oil
called divestment a material risk to its busi-
ness. As America’s favorite stock picker, Jim
Cramer, put it in a typically manic diatribe
on CNBC this winter, there’s no money to be
made anymore in fossil fuel stocks because
“we’re starting to see divestment all over the
world.” As a result, he said, fossil fuels were
“in the death knell phase.”
But that phase-out still isn’t coming fast
enough to meet the scientific targets neces-
sary to mitigate the climate crisis. As Carney
explained in one of his last appearances as
BofE governor in December, big institutionalinvestors tended to have horizons of two to 10 years. “In
those horizons, there will be more extreme weather events,
but by the time that the extreme events become so preva-
lent and so obvious, it’s too late to do anything about it.”
As a result, campaigners have expanded the divestment
drive one ring out, this time pressuring the financial insti-
tutions themselves instead of just the fossil fuel compa-
nies. We have mounted a fast-growing crusade to get the
BlackRocks and the State Streets, the JPMorgan Chases
and BofAs, the Liberty Mutuals and the Chubbs to end
what they call a “money pipeline” that has funneled at
least $2 trillion in loans to the fossil fuel industry since
the end of the Paris climate talks in 2015.
On the one hand, it may seem like an unlikely crusade:
These are, after all, the richest institutions on planet Earth;
even after the global financial crisis of 2008 they mostly
emerged unscathed and, in some cases, bigger than ever.
Do they have anything much to fear from scruffy protesters?
But the anger of the general public over climate change
is reaching a crescendo, especially as people have come
to understand the degree to which the fossil fuel industry
covered up its early knowledge of global warming. This
winter, a poll conducted by Yale researchers found that
fully a fifth of Americans were ready to “personally engage
in nonviolent civil disobedience” against “corporate or
government activities that make global warming worse,”
if a person they liked and respected asked them to. One
guesses that such sentiment is highly concentrated in
precisely the urban and suburban precincts where Ameri-
can money is highly concentrated—Trump may own the
bright-red electoral map of the U.S., but the money map
tilts in the other direction. And financial institutions needBill McKibben is an author, environmental-
ist, and activist whose books include The End
of Nature (1989) and Falter (2019). He is a
cofounder and senior adviser at 350.org, an
international climate campaign organization.56 FORTUNE APRIL 2020LEADING VOICES Departing Bank of England chief Mark
Carney (left) has been vocal about the financial risk of
climate change. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said in January
that sustainability would now be at the center of the asset
management giant’s investment strategy.LEFT: FABRICE COFFRINI—AFP/GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: STEFAN WERMUTH—BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGESESS.W.04.20.XMIT.indd 56 FINAL 3/10/2020 5:16:10 PM