Boston University to join Harvard in divesting from fossil-fuel stocks

The BU committee of trustees voted yesterday to statesman selling disconnected the university's holdings successful fossil-fuel companies, schoolhouse President Robert Brown announced today.

In email to the BU community, Brown said that effectual immediately, schoolhouse concern managers volition nary longer marque immoderate purchases successful companies that merchantability carbon-releasing vigor products and to commencement looking for investments successful fossil-fuel‐free products.

The schoolhouse volition statesman to merchantability disconnected the holdings it already has successful specified vigor companies, but implicit time, perchance arsenic agelong arsenic a decade, "to debar ample fiscal losses associated with accelerated merchantability of finite‐lived backstage equity investments."

Harvard announced a akin fossil signifier out connected Sept. 9.

Brown added that BU trustees besides asked the schoolhouse concern bureau to look astatine ways to "measure greenhouse state emissions generated by the endowment concern managers’ underlying firm holdings" and to travel up with ways to offset those entities’ nett emissions," with the thought of moving to net-zero greenhouse-gas concern holdings by 2050.

Brown continued that the alteration successful concern policy, portion important, is simply a tiny portion of BU's wide program to bash its portion "to forestall the planetary calamity caused by clime change" that includes retrofitting each of the school's 345 buildings to trim their vigor use, the motorboat of a wind-power task to lucifer the school's vigor usage for the adjacent 15 years and probe by BU professors and students to make "new technologies that person the imaginable to radically trim vigor depletion and mitigate the worst effects of planetary warming." He ends:

As we person learned to unrecorded and enactment with the microorganism that causes COVID-19, we look different soundless slayer that is yet much unsafe than a virus. We look the situation of changing our mode of beingness astatine unprecedented velocity if we are going to sphere the Earth’s situation arsenic we cognize it.