While a Stanford undergrad, I was a member and co-president of Students for a Sustainable Stanford. Every year the question would come up about our boundaries: Should we limit our advocacy efforts to issues just on campus, or expand our efforts beyond Stanford? In 2009, for example,  we cared just as much about getting campus dining halls to compost as we did about advocating for an agreement at the Copenhagen climate conference.

This is the type of scale-spanning question that the Stanford community faces all the time. Such is the nature of a place that is “dedicated to finding solutions to big challenges and to preparing students for leadership in a complex world.”   

However, the recent answer to whether the University should divest its $22 billion endowment from the top 100 oil and gas companies needs no such equivocation. The decision to divest is the perfect moment for Stanford to put the full weight of its words, money and aspirations for global leadership into action.

Stanford scientists have been at the forefront of tracking rising greenhouse gas levels and their correlation with fossil energy usage. They have also proven the negative impacts of climate change on natural habitats and ecosystem services. To summarize their conclusions and the consensus view of scientists worldwide: Our modern energy system is undermining the global ecosystem on which humans rely.

As this reality sinks in, so does the reality that business practices and human infrastructure are just as much a part of the earth system as the oceans and atmosphere. The task of aligning human-made systems with the finite limits of our planet is cumbersome, and I know that there are Stanford alums working on every bit of the transition – from simple living campaigns to renewable energy. I personally have been working on urban agriculture initiatives here in my hometown of Chicago.

So, knowing the many issues tied up in climate change, why am I so fired up about this one issue of fossil fuel divestment? Divestment is by no means a silver bullet, but it does manage to touch on many issues of top concern, namely climate science, energy infrastructure and business models.

Removing the Stanford endowment’s connections to the world’s top oil and gas companies would send a powerful message that there are moral limits to how financial capital may be rightly put to use. If fossil fuel companies do extract and sell more than 20% of their current reserves, the global climate will reach a dangerous tipping point. Because these companies’ business models are based on such a move, their work puts the earth, and humanity as we know it, in danger.  Stanford pulling its endowment from fossil fuel  investments isn’t just a moral indicator, it’s a financial one; it would force business limits, to some degree, to fall in line with ecological limits.

As an institution of scientific excellence and global leadership, Stanford should seize the moment to wield its academic and financial powers to address this critical issue. Without doubt, the future of our planet, and humanity as we know it, depends on such impressive measures. I am tempted to end with a Captain Planet quote: “Let our Powers Combine!” (I figured The Stanford Daily would accept nothing less quirky.)

Signed,

John Mulrow

B.S. Earth Systems, ‘09

PhD Candidate, Civil Engineering

University of Illinois at Chicago