Educational Media Reviews Online

Divest! documents veteran climate change activist, environmentalist, and 350.org founder Bill McKibben’s earnest campaign to push climate change activism to achieve new goals. With the help of various collaborators and supporters, McKibben charts a cross-country tour to “do the math” and compel various organizations and institutions to protect the environment by divesting financial support from fossil fuel companies. McKibben and Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything discuss current climate science in succinct and stark terms, and acknowledge that following many years of ineffective political and moral appeals, those serious about mitigating the effects of human-caused climate change must now use financial tactics. Seeing the math, divestment advocates hope institutions and organizations will be compelled to reduce or eliminate their fossil fuel investments, forcing fossil fuel companies to limit their use of the remaining carbon energy stores on the planet.

Divestment as a financial tool proved its value as institutions and governments withdrew investments from apartheid-supporting South African businesses. Archbishop Desmond Tutu notes, “The divestment movement played a key role in helping liberate South Africa. The corporations understood the logic of money, even when they weren’t swayed by the dictates of morality. Climate change is a deeply moral issue too, of course. Here in Africa, we see the dreadful suffering of people from worsening drought, from rising food prices, from floods--even though they’ve done nothing to cause the situation. Once again we can join together as a world and put pressure where it counts.”

By proposing a freeze on additional fossil fuel investment and a 5-year wind-down for current holdings, the movement to “go fossil free” (gofossilfree.org) aims to slow our increasing consumption of the planet’s remaining fossil fuel resources. Divest’s message and technique is recommended especially at this time when the United States’ political landscape is poised to change significantly for the first time in 8 years, and political and moral will to enact further climate protections seems unlikely.