Carbon charge no alternative to divestment

by Lee Smithey
This op-ed appeared in The Phoenix on Thursday 25 February 2016

This past weekend, the Board of Managers at Swarthmore College approved an internal charge on greenhouse gas emissions. We should mark what appears to be an initial step toward developing a carbon pricing model. However, while welcome, the plan is no alternative to divesting the institution’s $1.9 billion endowment of fossil fuels.

I have had the privilege of both co-authoring the white paper that underpinned the faculty resolution calling for divestment and joining the working group that developed the proposal for the new carbon charge plan. As I write this column, it is not yet clear to what extent the Board adopted the working group’s proposal, but let’s assume for now that congratulations are in order all around! The plan was designed to collect a fee from each department to begin registering the social cost of each metric ton of carbon (or its equivalent in various gases) that the college emits (limited for the moment to the physical plant, electricity use, and emissions associated with planned construction) in order to fund sustainability projects. It also calls us to bend our intellectual energies toward better understanding the social costs of carbon through our teaching, learning, and research and then apply our growing knowledge to the pricing scheme. Why is all this important? It urges us down the long road of building sustainable infrastructures that will be necessary, if we survive the climate crisis.

However, the carbon charge leaves invisible the role of investment capital in sustaining an industry that is playing a dangerous profit-fueled game with our futures, a game that we underwrite and legitimize with our investments. It leaves unexamined the strange fiction that the only appropriate metric for assessing financial investments is financial return, a position that wouldn’t bear scrutiny in most, if any, Swarthmore classrooms. Yet, it is enshrined in the Board of Managers’ 1991 guideline that the “Investment Committee manages the endowment to yield the best long term financial results, rather than to pursue other social objectives.” Do we really believe that our current investments have no impact on social conditions?

Alone, the carbon charge assumes that we, consumers of fossil fuels, are solely responsible for the dilemma in which we find ourselves as a species. Don’t get me wrong, we do bear responsibility, and the new initiative is a step in the right direction. However, we also know that corporations go to great lengths, through marketing and lobbying, to shape the political, social, and economic landscapes in which they operate. Rest assured that while we try to diminish our consumption, fossil fuel companies on the Carbon Underground list will be using our investments to make the task as difficult as possible.

The new carbon charge plan also assumes there is a glide path of declining consumption that can keep global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius (never mind 1.5 degrees). Sustainability initiatives funded by the carbon charge should be undertaken for the long term common good, but to address the climate crisis, they would have been more appropriate thirty years ago, when the public became aware of global warming. Unfortunately, the fossil fuel industry actively suppressed climate science, we let those decades pass, and we find ourselves in a catastrophically difficult situation.

Now, robust intervention is necessary. The mitigation scenarios that could keep global temperatures within 2 degrees Celsius require carbon sequestration technologies that don’t yet exist and a global price on carbon to have been agreed in 2010 … yes, 2010! Consequently, we need direct regulation of the extraction of fossil fuels accompanied by massive support for research and development of alternative energy, humanitarian aid, and preparation for climate impacts in vulnerable areas.

Through divestment, the college can join other institutions and use its privileged status to signal to world leaders that they can and must take bold steps to regulate the extraction of fossil fuels. Millions of vulnerable people are at severe short term risk (estimated by DARA and the Climate Vulnerable Forum at 6 million per year by 2030). Even the college itself is under threat.

Our students have already done the heavy lifting by launching and building an effective global campaign. We know this because our college representatives at the COP21 summit in Paris reported back that UN President Ban Ki Moon cited the importance of the divestment campaign as part of “a rising global tide of support for a strong, universal agreement,” declaring, “All of us have a […] duty to heed those voices.” Faculty, students, many alumni, and at least six distinguished honorary degree recipients understand President Moon’s perspective, and I expect some managers on the board do as well. After all, the optional Green Fund that the board established for new donations signals that the 1991 guideline is not water tight.

For those in civil society with cultural and economic capital, divestment remains an important tool in our toolbox, and we have a responsibility to use it. As we publicly demonstrate to our political leaders how to say no to fossil fuel companies, we should press them for an ambitious global carbon price, restrictions on fossil fuel extraction, and a plan to freeze the development of new reserves.

Constructive Conflict and Divestment at Swarthmore College

I have made a career (literally) out of studying strategic nonviolent action. Let’s face it. I am a fan. Increasingly, the best research we have shows that well-organized nonviolent action is one of the most effective tools for large-scale social and political change that humans have ever developed.

In the face of the looming climate crisis, we desperately need large-scale political change. We need sufficient regulation of fossil fuels that will keep carbon in the ground and mitigate the potentially devastating climate change that is upon us. Thankfully, at Swarthmore College where I teach peace and conflict studies as well as sociology, we can play a role in helping to generate cultural change and political will through the stigmatization of fossil fuels.

A student group named Swarthmore Mountain Justice has taken the lead over the past four years, both on our campus and nationally, by calling for Swarthmore and other colleges and universities to divest our endowments from fossil fuels. Nine days ago, Mountain Justice launched an extended sit-in outside the Finance and Investment Office on the second floor of Parrish Hall. They have called for a commitment to divest over five years from the highest emitting 200 coal, oil, and gas companies (the Carbon Underground 200), and they are working to induce the College’s Board of Managers to engage in further negotiations.

Students have met with representatives of the Board many times over the past four years, but to date, the Board has insisted that its fiduciary responsibility bars it from using the endowment for political purposes and that divestment would be merely symbolic. With regard to the first point, a 1.9 billion dollar endowment cannot be inoculated from having political significance. Our investments do not only exist on spreadsheets that report risks and returns; they enable real activities in the real world that empower and impoverish real people. On the second point, politics has everything to do with symbols. Ask any political operative. By locating their sit-in at the Office of Finances, students are drawing our attention to the ways in which we are caught up in international economics, global politics, and powerful cultural silences about those relationships. Faculty have also endeavored to break some of the silence. Ninety-seven have signed a letter calling on the Board to make a public commitment to fossil fuel divestment. Last month, some of those faculty discussed divestment with Board members at a reception.

Faculty spoke with Board members during a reception in February and shared copies of the faculty letter calling for divestment from fossil fuels. Photo by Mindy Cheng

Notwithstanding my fascination with and respect for well-planned and thoughtful nonviolent action, one might say that I come from a long line of conflict avoiders. I do not take confrontation lightly. It does not come naturally for me by any stretch. As a peace studies scholar, who is deeply interested in conflict transformation and peacebuilding, I am committed to the work of building cooperative relationships across boundaries. However, as the terms “conflict transformation” and “constructive conflict” (the name of this blog) imply, conflict and peacebuilding are not mutually exclusive concepts. Sometimes nonviolent confrontation is necessary to “form and shape the soil” out of which more peaceful and just relationships can emerge, as the brilliant civil rights leader and nonviolent strategist, Rev. James Lawson, said a few days ago in California. To that end, I want to speak in support of the sit-in undertaken by our well-organized students.

Their proportional and legitimate action fits comfortably within the historical corpus of nonviolent civil resistance and offers an opportunity to integrate sustainability into our curriculum. Much as Professor Dorsey’s highly successful course, “Black Liberation 1969: Black Studies in History Theory and Praxis” produced outstanding research and an online archive about the 1969 sit-in at the College’s Admissions Office by the Swarthmore Afro-American Student Society (SASS), today’s sit-in allows us to examine in real-time another nonviolent struggle in a new and different context. Students in my “Strategy and Nonviolent Struggle” course will take a field trip next week to the site of the sit-in to compare what we have been learning about strategic nonviolent action theory with the unfolding divestment campaign on campus. (I fully expect that the current campaign will someday become one more case among the more than 1,000 cases our students have documented in the Global Nonviolent Action Database.)

Thoughtful nonviolent action sometimes disrupts business as usual and forces us to think more closely about the ways in which our daily lives are structured and intertwined with larger systems of power. The occasional emergence of this kind of peace and conflict studies lab on our campus offers opportunities to perceive the disconnects that so often go unspoken and feel the social, cultural, and economic sinews that hold us together and pull us apart.

Nonviolent struggle can also invite us to imagine new futures together. These moments can call us to practice conflict in ways that are respectful and productive, and when we do them well, we build relationships and bridges that serve us as an institution and a community in the future. Finding the balance between determination and humility will challenge us, as I think it has often done throughout the divestment campaign. However, we can still strive to be as artful as possible in our actions, intellectually curious, and open to new relationships as we work to dismantle unjust systems.

I plan to use this blog as a place to share my own teachable moments during the divestment campaign. You can also find me on Twitter at @peacesociology, and I am curating public information and social media about the campaign on Storify.

A moment for nonviolent empowerment in Northern Ireland

In this piece by Sean Brennan, he proposes that the recent flag protests and the violent disturbances at Woodvale / Ardoyne in Belfast potentially mark a turning point for loyalism.  If these events can indeed be used to illustrate the futility of violence (subsequent demonstrations have been better organized), and if Brennan is right that a “Socially motivated ‘grassroots’ Loyalism” with “a new inclusive non-violent community action element” is emerging, then we might well anticipate a new lease on the prospect of thoroughgoing conflict transformation. 

I would like to highlight Brennan’s mention of “non-violent community action.” I still believe that an important dimension of conflict transformation is the nonviolent empowerment of all parties, through political engagement, and when necessary, nonviolent civil resistance.  Unfortunately, there has not been a historical tradition of strategic nonviolent action within PUL communities.  Now would be a wonderfully appropriate time for influential local leaders to become familiar with the extensive knowledge that has been developed about effective nonviolent action.  

Those who are interested might visit the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, the Albert Einstein Institution, and the Global Nonviolent Action Database.   

How to Start a Revolution

There are two local opportunities this week to screen and discuss the documentary “How to Start a Revolution” about Gene Sharp’s long career and groundbreaking work in developing the theory of nonviolent strategic action.

Pendle Hill will show the film on July 1, 7:30-9:00 p.m. as part of its First Mondays series.  I will have the privilege of facilitating a discussion about the film. Download a flyer.

Envision Peace Museum will show the film on July 3, 6:30-9:00 p.m. with a panel discussion afterwards including Arzu Geybulla in Turkey, Stephanie Ambar in Brazil, and myself Download a flyer.

Swarthmore College is privileged to be the home of the papers of the Albert Einstein Institution.

Identity Formation in Nonviolent Struggles

I’m happy to share that I had the opportunity to contribute a chapter on “Identity Formation in Nonviolent Struggle” to a new book edited by Maciej Bartkowski, Recovering Nonviolent History: Civil Resistance in Liberation Struggles. (Lynne Rienner Publishers)

My chapter serves as a theoretical primer on the social movement literature on collective identities and the under-explored connections with strategic action.  My fellow contributors cover a range of global, and often forgotten, cases of nonviolent liberation struggles where national identities have played important roles.  Here is what I’ve written about my chapter:

As other chapters in this volume illustrate, nonviolent resistance has often played an important role in nationalist movements for independence. These cases offer important opportunities to study the power potentials of strategic nonviolent action, and the prominence of nationalism in them compels us to ask how identity and tactical choice influence one another. This chapter draws on the sociological study of social movements to theorize ways of thinking about relationships between the nonviolent tactics that many nationalist movements have employed in conflict and their collective national identities. The relationships are probably much closer and more important than either sociologists or scholars of nonviolent resistance have realized. Identities can be publicly displayed for strategic ends. Tactical repertoires, including nonviolent ones, reflect collective identities or resisters’ cultural predispositions. Conversely, choosing certain tactics can influence the construction of collective identities as people adapt their national identity to incorporate new tactical rationales and justifications.

Here is the book description:

This unique book brings to light the little-known, but powerful roles that civil resistance has played in national liberation struggles throughout history. Ranging from the American Revolution to Kosovo in the 1990s, from Egypt under colonial rule to present-day West Papua and Palestine, the authors of Recovering Nonviolent History consider several key questions: What kinds of civilian-based nonviolent strategy and tactics have been used in liberation struggles? What accounts for their successes and failures? Not least, how did nonviolent resistance influence national identities and socioeconomic and political institutions both prior to and after liberation, and why has this history been so often ignored? The story that emerges is a compelling one of the agency of thousands and even millions of ordinary people as they used nonviolent force in the course of struggles against foreign subjugation.

For those interested in exploring the intersection of nationalism and nonviolence further, you might be interested in exploring Manfred Steger’s book, Gandhi’s Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power in which Steger examines the tension between Gandhi’s deployment of Indian nationalism and his universal philosophy of nonviolence.

Coventry Cathedral

This week, I had the opportunity to participate in a symposium on strategic nonviolent action or nonviolent civil resistance and the importance of overcoming fear, co-sponsored by the Peace and Reconciliation Studies program at Coventry University and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (Twitter hashtag #nvnofear).  Thursday evening, I was arriving at the gates of the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, slightly bummed that I was not going to be able to get inside for a look around, when Christof Ziemer, former superintendent of Dresden’s Lutheran Church arrived with his wife, Ljubinka. Talking with them about the relationships built between Coventry and Dresden and the Community of the Cross of Nails was a remarkable way to experience the powerful vision for peace and reconciliation that emerged from the horror of World War II.