Students for Environmental Action (SEA) held an interest meeting last night to show support for and begin work with Refuel Our Future, a fossil fuels divestment campaign started earlier this year by graduate students at the Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The intent of the Refuel Our Future divestment campaign is to force the University to sell all coal, oil and gas stocks now in the endowment fund and reinvest the money in companies who are conscientious of climate change.
Refuel Our Future, which is headed by Katherine Jochim, Jessica Rhodes and Stephanie Van Dyke, graduate students at the School of Public Health, aims to gather students, faculty and alumni from every school and division within Hopkins to sign a petition requesting divestment.
“Divestment is a movement that has gotten a lot of interest recently thanks to 350.org which is a major climate change nonprofit.
“Our University has investments in stocks in companies that produce fossil fuel. And that’s bad because that supports companies that are contributing the most to global CO2 emissions, which hurts our future. The University’s goal is to invest in our future,” Jon Smeton, Membership Outreach Chair of SEA, said.
More than 200 members of the School of Public Health Class of 2013 have already signed the petition, and SEA hopes to get a thousand signatures from undergraduate students in support of the initiative.
“It’s a really big institution, and should Johns Hopkins make the decision to divest, then a lot of other schools will make similar decisions,” Jochim said. “Right now there over a hundred schools, including Harvard and Stanford and Swarthmore — you know, really great schools — that have divestment campaigns.”
The fossil fuels divestment movement garnered national attention on Tuesday with the publication of an article in The New York Times highlighting the campaign by students at Swarthmore to compel their administration to sell off its coal, oil and gas company stock holdings.
Refuel Our Future hopes to further these efforts at Hopkins and show that it is important to members of the community.
“[The University has] a huge endowment and we would be the first university of our size to divest from these fossil fuel companies,” Smeton said. “That would mean a lot. Technically the board of trustees has a lot of say over these investments, but we pay the University. They listen to us a lot more than they listen to other people. The University doesn’t know that we care about this. We must show them that [we do].”
The graduate students started the organization this past summer after they took courses on climate change and did independent research about mutual funds and investments, through which they learned about the urgency of the issue.
“You know, this will happen within our lifetimes. These are my children and your children and this is us. So we had to do something and this was the most practical thing. This was the thing that we thought could make the biggest difference,” Jochim said.
Smeton echoed the sentiments Jochim expressed about the pertinence of the issue.
“A lot of times when we think of climate change, we think of 10, 20, 30 years in the future and that’s where all the debates are, but really, this is where the debate is, and there really shouldn’t be a debate at all because we know it’s happening,” Smeton said.
Last night’s meeting was deemed a productive evening, helping to educate many students.
“I thought [the meeting] was really successful. I’m really looking forward to the changes next year. We’re totally going to get them to divest. We’re excited, we’re motivated, we’re strategic, but most importantly, we’re educated. There are people all across the nation who are educated just like we are and [are] working towards the same goal,” Thalia Patrinos, Publicity Officer for SEA, said.
Many undergraduates expressed enthusiasm for the cause.
“I’m really excited, I’m looking forward to getting involved. I’m not sure how successful we’ll be, but hopefully we’ll have some impact,” sophomore Bailey Richards said.
Jochim ultimately thinks that the organization will be successful in their efforts at Hopkins as the cause gains awareness.
“It was on the front page of The New York Times last night, that’s huge. I think that with this momentum that we’re starting to get, I do think it will be successful. Already schools are talking about it. Two schools have agreed to divest, Swarthmore is talking about it now. Granted they have a much smaller endowment that John Hopkins has, but if we make it just repugnant for them to support fossils fuels, then they will change too and ... follow public opinion,” she said.
