Blowing Hot Air on the Wrong Target

David Howden

July 20, 2016

Professor Pierre Desrochers, who will be lecturing this week during Rothbard University, sets the record straight on the Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement:

The fossil fuel divestment campaign has become this generation of idealistic students’ defining cause who have pressured academic trustees and administrators to sell or part way with stocks and other funds invested in corporations engaged in the extraction of coal, crude oil, bitumen and natural gas. Invoking computer-generated catastrophic climate change scenarios, they insist that most economically recoverable carbon fuel reserves be left in the ground.

As discussed by Professor Desrochers in his latest policy paper https://fcpp.org/fossil-fuel-divestment-movement , however, the divestment activists’ rhetoric and policy prescriptions are morally questionable because they imply no personal sacrifices on the part of wealthy individuals and will hurt primarily poor people. Even if the activists were to achieve their goals, their actions would have no impact on the value of corporate stocks and the production of carbon fuels. In the most original section of the paper, Professor Desrochers discusses in some depth how drastically curtailing fossil fuel use in the absence of better alternatives will harm both human society and the environment.

Give it a read, and if you’re in Toronto this Friday afternoon, swing by Rothbard University to hear him lecture about this first hand.