{"id":46102,"date":"2021-03-11T09:15:20","date_gmt":"2021-03-11T14:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/?p=46102"},"modified":"2021-03-15T09:27:15","modified_gmt":"2021-03-15T13:27:15","slug":"mount-as-new-investor-network-is-not-an-alternative-to-divestment-says-divest-mta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/mount-as-new-investor-network-is-not-an-alternative-to-divestment-says-divest-mta\/","title":{"rendered":"Mount A\u2019s new investor network is not an alternative to divestment, says Divest MtA"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hear this story as reported on Tantramar Report, here:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n

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A few weeks ago, Mount Allison University\u00a0announced its membership in a new club<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Sackville school is one of ten Canadian universities to form the University Network for Investor Engagement (UNIE), a coalition that will, as Mount Allison\u2019s VP Finance and Administration Robert Inglis puts it, help schools, \u201ccollectively engage with companies in which they invest in the areas of environmental, social, and corporate governance, including engagement on climate change.\u201d<\/p>\n

The CEO of SHARE, a non-profit investor advocacy organization which is coordinating the UNIE, says Mount Allision and the other nine universities involved are, \u201cshowing leadership in addressing the climate crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nick Nauss dares to disagree. Nauss is a second year student in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Mount Allison, and a second year member of Divest MtA, a group determined to convince Mount Allison\u2019s Board of Regents to divest their endowment funds from the fossil fuel industry.<\/p>\n

Nauss in concerned that the move to join the newly formed UNIE is just window dressing, meant to detract from the fact that Mount Allison steadfastly refuses to divest itself from the companies controlling the world\u2019s remaining fossil fuel reserves.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt might sound good, in the wording of it,\u201d says Nauss. \u201cHowever, it\u2019s blatantly a public image campaign to make sure that they can look like they\u2019re being responsible in their investments.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nauss says there\u2019s no teeth to the UNIE approach of shareholder engagement. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing that these institutions can do that will effectuate enough positive change in the fossil fuel industry that will ultimately have an effect on reducing carbon emissions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Helen Yao is a third year Mount Allison student, also in her second year as a Divest MtA member. She doesn\u2019t buy the line that by joining UNIE, with its focus on shareholder engagement, the university is \u201cshowing strong leadership in addressing the climate crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we\u2019re looking at shareholder engagement with the fossil fuel companies, usually around 1% of their budget is dedicated towards shifting to sustainable energy,\u201d says Yao.<\/p>\n

Fossil fuels companies just aren\u2019t equipped to make the significant shift, says Yao. \u201cWe have seen no evidence in the past that they had any inclination of doing so,\u201d says Yao, \u201ceven when their own researchers and scientists told them that their actions would have significant consequences on the climate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we have seen is that they have funded misinformation campaigns, they have lobbied governments, they have continued to do things that secure their own profit,\u201d says Yao.<\/p>\n

TWO SCHOOLS IN UNIE HAVE COMMITTED TO PARTIAL DIVESTMENT<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Nauss points out two of the other universities involved in UNIE\u2013Concordia and the University of Victoria\u2013have already made partial commitments to divestment. That shows, he says, that this new network is not an alternative to actual divestment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one thing to be an institution to acknowledge that fossil fuel divestment is necessary and commit to it, and then also say, we\u2019re going to try to push for better environmental, social and governance factors in our investments,\u201d says Nauss. It\u2019s another to be an institution like Mount Allison, he says, \u201cwhich refuses to divest and then claims that this new network will effect positive change.\u201d<\/p>\n

MOUNT ALLISON\u2019S FOSSIL FUEL INVESTMENTS<\/strong><\/h3>\n

But how much does Mt A invest in fossil fuel heavy industries, anyway?<\/p>\n

Every year for the past four years Mount Allison has disclosed a list of its endowment fund holdings. The university invests in pooled funds and not individual companies so it\u2019s difficult to say at any one time to say how much it owns of, say, Google\u2019s parent company, Alphabet. But in its holdings report, the university represents \u201cthe value of the proportion of the stock or bond as if it was owned directly by the University.\u201d<\/p>\n

The last report like this was\u00a0issued for December 2019<\/a>. Divest MtA took that report and cross-referenced it with something called the\u00a0Carbon Underground 200<\/a>, a list put together and maintained by FFI Solutions which identifies the publicly traded companies with the most coal and oil and gas reserves, according to their potential for their carbon emissions.<\/p>\n

Nick Nauss did the math, and found that about $7.5 million of Mount Allison\u2019s endowment fund was invested, through pooled funds, in some of the biggest owners of fossil fuel reserves in the world. That\u2019s about 4.6% of the total endowment fund, says Nauss, and it\u2019s been in that ballpark for the past 4 years.<\/p>\n

Nauss says it makes both ethical and economical sense to move these funds away from companies sitting on carbon reserves.<\/p>\n

\u201cFossil fuel divestment has gained a lot of momentum,\u201d Nauss says, \u201cand it\u2019s only going to increase. You\u2019re only going to see more institutions and funds be divested in the coming years.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo it actually does make perfect financial sense for Mount Allison to divest our funds from fossil fuel companies now, preferably yesterday, while we still can,\u201d says Nauss.<\/p>\n

Nauss doesn\u2019t accept the claim that the future for fossil fuel companies is still unknown. \u201cWhenever they try to say that we don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen\u2026 Well, I\u2019m pretty sure we can all see in the grand scheme of things, what\u2019s going to happen. It\u2019s only a matter of time before they realize this is the right financial, social, and ethical thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some have argued that a good portion of the fossil fuel reserves owned by private companies is actually \u201cunburnable carbon\u201d. It\u2019s a factor acknowledged even by one of the world\u2019s giants in fossil fuels. In 2015, the chief economist for BP,\u00a0Spencer Dale, wrote<\/a>\u00a0that existing reserves of fossil fuels discovered at the time would produce nearly three times the amount of carbon emissions that scientists have agreed should be our maximum, and which will raise global average temperatures by 2 degrees centigrade.<\/p>\n

RESPONSIBILITIES TO ETHICS AND SUSTAINABILITY?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yao is disappointed and frustrated that Mount Allison is continuing with its investments in fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor Mount Allison to continue its so-called engagement with the fossil fuel industry means really that they want to keep putting money and resources into engaging with these companies,\u201d says Yao. \u201cAnd they want to justify this engagement by using the language of environmentalism and sustainability.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a problem, says Yao, because the university\u2019s responsibility should not simply be to maximize return on its investments, but rather to exist ethically and sustainably.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur university shouldn\u2019t be run like a simply profit making institution,\u201d says Yao. \u201cWe have to take into account factors such as sustainability or ethical investments. We think it\u2019s important for the Board of Regents\u2026 to actually commit their money and their power and privilege towards shifting Mount Allison, and the greater community, towards sustainable investments.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yao says that the Mount Allison climate change strategy so far has focussed on small steps and individual actions, when something much more substantial is called for.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019ve kind of framed climate change as an issue of individual merits, and of incremental change,\u201d says Yao, \u201cwhen in reality, we\u2019re looking at how much time we have left to shift to a sustainable economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo build a sustainable future we do not have the luxury of the incremental changes that Mount Allison is proposing,\u201d says Yao.<\/p>\n

Instead, what Divest Mt A is calling for is full fossil fuel divestment within the next five years.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe only way to rid the university\u2019s complicity in the climate crisis is to completely and utterly remove all attachments Mount A has to the fossil fuel industry,\u201d says Nauss. \u201cIt\u2019s the only solution that we can take to fully align with the IPCC protocol.\u201d<\/p>\n

This Friday, Divest MTA, and other divest groups across the country who are part of Divest Canada, will meet with the parent group of the new UNIE network, the Shareholder Association for Research and Education, or SHARE.<\/p>\n

Next week, CHMA hopes to bring you more on that meeting, plus some reactions from Mount Allison University.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Hear this story as reported on Tantramar Report, here:   A few weeks ago, Mount Allison University\u00a0announced its membership in a new club. The Sackville school is one of ten Canadian universities to form the University Network for Investor Engagement (UNIE), a coalition that will, as Mount Allison\u2019s VP Finance and Administration Robert Inglis puts…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":46107,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[221,222],"tags":[],"radio":[227],"origine":[274,275,277],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46102"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46102\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46102"},{"taxonomy":"radio","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/radio?post=46102"},{"taxonomy":"origine","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canada-info.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/origine?post=46102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}