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The new divestment movement

Charles River divestment banner

This afternoon, Paul Weiskel watched Boston-area college students drop banners over the Charles calling for their schools to divest from fossil-fuel companies.

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Is doing something like this on a Sunday, during a Pats game, during Christmas prep season, when it's cold, on Soldiers Field Road the best day / way to do this? Who, besides uHub and the 5th page of the Monday Metro section of the Globe going to cover this? They should have blocked Boylston Street or JFK Street traffic. Many more eyeballs. Fair play to them, but How many of these people are going to fly home during Winter Break? Might defeat a lot of carbon offsets.

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The schools are obviously failing to teach these kids about economics and that petroleum is used in far more products than fuel.

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Were any petroleum products contained in their banners or used in the manufacture or transportation of them?

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The point of divestment isn't that a company is pure evil and needs to be wiped off the face of the Earth, but that they're doing some particular evil thing which they should face some sort of financial penalty for. Even a wildly successful divestment program wouldn't cause the Exxon Mobils to go out of business, so petrochemicals would still be produced.

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While you're invested, you at least have a say in what the company does. When you divest you lose any shareholder say in the direction of the company. Plus, in a place like big oil, your shares will just be bought by someone else - the company won't really know or care that you divest. Why not encourage investment is better companies. (and, of course, be ready to pay more tuition if that investment doesn't pay off as well...)

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but that they're doing some particular evil thing which they should face some sort of financial penalty for.

What financial penalty does a company incur when a group decides to divest? I can't think of one.
One very small possibility that a smaller demand for the stock might depress the stock price a teeny bit, but that really doesn't affect a company's financials.

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I'd assume it's the case that if you politicize your school's endowment then you necessarily lower the rate of return and force the school to increase tuition costs. So I predict a new banner unfurling soon bemoaning the high cost of tuition.

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Have you seen the way tuition has surpassed inflation by a mile? And the degree is still worth the same on the other side of 4 years.

Do you think the school really needs to point to divestment strategies to explain tuition hikes? Then what's their excuse been for the last 3 decades?

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...a Dean's gotta eat....(only the finest baby frogs, dew picked and flown from Iraq).

And besides my precious lil' snowflake needs to go to a school where the new high-rise dorms look like Sheratons, the gym far surpasses anything we can find in our town and the sports teams are well endowed. Anything less would appear conspicuously .... plebeian.

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Kids need to learn about global warming too. Water vapor has orders of magnitude more influence on global warming than CO2. Water vapor in the air is an average 20,000 parts per million, CO2 around 385 ppm. We can even perceive the effect of water vapor. When its humid or cloudy, the temperature drops far less at night than when air is clear and dry. Anybody yet notice similar effects with varying CO2 levels?

Do your part fighting global warming - turn down your thermostat to, say 50 degrees and hold warm thoughts about how you are saving the world.

*Update*

The good news is that USA green house gas production has been in decline for the last 15 years. The bad news is that China's continues to grow and will be double our's shortly.
http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=CO2ts1990-2012

Write the banners in Chinese?

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Will we be ever be able to use "ignore" to block all the posts of at least one poster?

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When I started moving from the old version of the software to the next, the ignore module was one of the ones I was planning to install. Then I discovered the version that goes with the new software was still marked as in development, and hadn't been upgraded in a long time, which didn't give me a lot of hope in it.

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Will watch for future developments. ;~}

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First they came for Markk...then they came for me? I actually enjoy Markk's posts. He reminds me of the guy who used to go around Park Street Station whistling "Yankee Doodle Dandy" at the top of his lungs, punctuated by the occasional rant about how all of us killed JFK.

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Just the ability to selectively "not see" things a particular poster puts out there.

If you want to see it, you will still be able to.

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Could all block your bike lane rants.

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Are you speaking for the collective "anon" or do you just happen to be a monarch in your spare time?

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Although you should be advised that having a log in prevents you from liking your own comment multiple times.

It would be really nice to "ignore" all comments from those who are not logged in. I hope that will be a feature.

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And more like asking not to have to sit next to your crazy aunt at Thanksgiving dinner.

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Except, luckily, I never had any relatives like this I needed to avoid.

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I'm a strong proponent of the "if you don't want to read it, then don't read it" however wholesale blocking everything a single poster writes is short-sighted. It's a "shoot the messenger" fallacy.

Sure, you may think 90% of everything one person writes is obnoxious and you are okay living without reading the other 10%. But you will miss out on the 10% which you might find insightful or useful, so you only hurt yourself.

It's also important that the broadest discussion be included to see the biggest picture possible. That includes the fringe and incorrect opinions too. Blanking them out doesn't make them go away...it just keeps you from continuing to recognize they're incorrect and that the correct path forwards is in a different direction.

Finally, on a more technical reason as I have seen on a number of online forums, you may blank out what he says, but all the responses will still end up in front of you. Then you have no continuity to understand why they would say what they did or anything else (and may even end up opening his post up again just for your brain to gain cogency around the thread).

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the thumbs down vote button.

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Millenials never cease to disappoint me. A couple of dozen kids on a bridge hanging a banner? *Facepalm*

When I was in college, we rallied and chanted and marched. We sat down and blocked doors to buildings. We got the job done. This effort is weak. I give it a D-.

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you didn't have Call of Duty back then!

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Makes a big difference when exercising one's first amendment rights could lead to some serious shit that will prevent your chances at future employment.

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...it seems graduation will prevent your chances at future employment.

No great Millenial-love from me, but c'mon....I'm assuming the "in my day..." comment was a joke or troll-bait. If you got the job done in "your day" this first line of snark wouldn't be necessary. Every generation sucks at one level or another. (of course Millenials suck a bit more, but there ya go.)

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It's a joke. As in "I'm Gen X and we're worse than boomers but better than Gen Y and definitely better than millennials" joke.

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I'm in the same generational boat as you and I'd say we're way better than boomers. (Definitely better than Y's and Millenials.) I'd say we're on a par with the lost generation.... The big thing that buggered us was the loss of a draft. Military service would have made us kick-ass (speaking for those of my generation who were like...'the service...? Fuck no.'). Military service would have been a good thing for me and other shitheads like me. With the added benefit that it also would have cut down on these pointless wars we've had recently. Blame the freaking boomers for that one too!!

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I'm going to answer this seriously even though I think your hyperbole is laughable.

I protested against the CIA and supported the Sandinistas so even though it was a million years ago in the '80s and we didn't have Gitmo, I wasn't exactly hanging out with an always peaceable crowd.

If those kids keep up their efforts and continue to protest the way their schools invest their money, I'll admire them for getting out there even if their goal is unrealistic. That's ok. Our attempt at getting Coca-Cola out of South Africa wasn't successful but at least we tried.

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...what did you accomplish?

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I protested many things in high school and college. In high school, my big cause was nuclear disarmament. I went to many rallies, some more peaceful than others. I was encouraged to be active by my high school teachers. It was a good thing back then.

I went to UMass/Amherst in the late 80s and we protested against nuclear proliferation and for an end to the cold war. We protested against apartheid. Anything against Reagan. I volunteered for Al Gore's 1988 presidential campaign. He didn't win the nomination but he did eventually become the Vice President.

One thing we accomplished by protesting and sitting-in at the administration building - the CIA was banned from recruiting on campus. We didn't like a lot of what the CIA was doing like propping up governments in Central America and playing a major role in the aforementioned cold war. We did get the CIA recruiters booted from campus. We didn't stop them from interviewing students -- they did them at a hotel in Hadley -- but they weren't on our campus.

Maybe you think that's lame but at least we got out there, in the hundreds and sometimes thousands, to stand up for our beliefs and to stand against what we perceived as wrong.

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At B.U. in the late 80s we protested ....the overnight guest policy!! Take that John Silber! You one armed, Texan mother-fucker!!!

I directly blame the pathetic "student protests" over that policy for Abbie Hoffman's suicide.

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US greenhouse gas emissions are falling rapidly... they are now at 1994 levels. The decline means that the US will likely exceed Obama's goal of reducing gas emissions by 17% of 1995 levels by 2020. Also the energy intensity of the US economy (energy consumed per unit of GDP) has never been better.
Germany because of its increasing reliance on coal is seeing green house emissions increase.

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Germany because of its increasing reliance on coal is seeing green house emissions increase.

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Well, I'll be damned for a number of issues (there was that incident with the nun, the industrial solvent and a banana for instance..), but I was wondering about this as well. I mean all those damned FaceBook posts about how much alternative energy sources Germany has been pushing, I just sort of assumed this was bullshit. But..... gee willikers.

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The situation leading to Germany's increasing, for who knows how long, reliance on coal are complex and perhaps there a people here who could explain what happened. However, I think in the end the government issued too many carbon credits; there is a glut of carbon credits and this has enabled power plants to buy them cheaply as an offset CO2 emissions.

Other countries, for example, Great Britain are in the same situation.... that is using more coal.

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... is that their parents are most likely paying for their tuition from mutual fund investments, 401k investments, etc that include these companies in their portfolios. Since pretty much every mutual fund includes these companies, it's pretty much a guarantee. They might implode if someone explained this irony to them.

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Hipsters love irony. The fuzzy feeling it gives them helps fill the empty spot in their head for intelligence and void where their soul should be.

/I keeed I keeed

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Not necessarily true, and you would know that if you had any investments. You can opt to NOT put your money into oil and other such industries. We did and our investments are doing quite well.

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As most of these same students will drive home in their Fossil Fuel powered vehicles.

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How would a Harvard student drive home to a dorm from the Weeks Footbridge? That makes no sense.

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let's see - it's not like that bridge is DIRECTLY NEXT TO HBS or anything... and who has ever heard of any Harvard graduate going on to do anything significant in the world? I certainly haven't.

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Yes, Harvard is important. Especially the members of the rowing crew, to whom apparently these banners hanging from the footbridge are meant to appeal.

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Many here seem to miss the point that this message was directed at the University administrations to encourage them to divest their endowment portfolios. So it was actually a fair place to stage the protest, as it was a pretty visible place as far as the University adminisrtation would be concerned.

Also, I wasn't aware that this blog had become so popular with the elderly. Those posters complaining about "those silly kids" not knowing how to stage a "real" protest, sound like Abe Simpson (that is a television character most popular in the 1990s, which I assume is a decade you are more familiar with). Congratulations to all of you for keeping up with your grand children and learning to use the internet.

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I'm happy you are using the toys mum, dad, and Al Gore made to keep you entertained and distracted while we worked. Yeah, where is a regex filter to pipe content through?

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Where's Dive St?

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I thought adjective, and that it was a little bit harsh, even if the bridge has seen better times.

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Given the passing of Mr. Mandela thinking about South Africa might be one way to answer the question.

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There should be a calendar of upcoming protests, with a rating for how many eco-hippie chicks I could meet there.

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