Online voting started this week on a proposal to divest the University of British Columbia’s $1.2 billion endowment fund from fossil fuel investments.
UBC faculty will vote in an online referendum being held by the UBC Faculty Association this week and next week. The results will be released February 9.
“If these two groups vote for divestment, then the board of governors is obliged to consider fossil fuel divestment,” said George Hoberg, a political science professor at UBC who teaches energy policy and has been campaigning for divestment.
The UBC vote follows other successful divestment campaigns at North American universities, including Concordia University in Montreal. After students voted to divest at Concordia, the university announced it would create a $5 million sustainable investment fund.
In November, the board of governors at Dalhousie University in Halifax decided against divestment.
“Assets are priced, more or less, on the value of their future income stream. If a large number of investors sells some asset for reasons unrelated to the value of the asset’s future income stream, the sellers may push the asset price down temporarily,” Milligan wrote.
“But so long as there is one well-financed investor who wishes to take advantage of this mis-pricing, the asset price will soon be restored to its original level. This leaves no change in the financial position of the company, but leaves the original investors who have now divested in a worse position because of lost portfolio diversification possibilities. What’s more, this action has also provided a deep-pocketed financier (who by construction does not share the moral stance of the divestors) a profitable arbitrage opportunity.”
Divestment is not about trying to bankrupt big oil companies, Hoberg said. Rather, it’s intended to put political pressure on the Canadian government to adopt a national carbon pricing system.
“Why is that not happening? One of the biggest things is opposition to carbon pricing from big oil,” Hoberg said.
“We’re doing it to reshape power relations over government policy and send signals to policy makers that a lot of people are concerned about fossil fuels and the coming climate crisis.”