Putting the Heat on Big Oil: Student divestment campaigns have made real gains in the fight to undermine the fossil fuel industry.

• Author: Cohen, Ilana

Roughly a decade ago, the first student-led fossil fuel divestment campaign launched at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania with a simple strategy: Expose the unethical political and social impact of fossil fuel companies. In the years since, divestment has evolved from a fringe effort to a vast movement sweeping the country and the globe.

In the past few months alone, divestment campaigns have secured a number of historic victories for climate justice, including getting Harvard, the world's richest and most prestigious university, to cut its fossil fuel investments.

The divestment movement now has nearly $40 trillion of assets committed to divestment and there is a growing recognition that the movement poses a material risk to the fossil fuel industry. Clearly, divestment is working; public opinion has turned overwhelmingly toward industry accountability and climate action. And, as a result, the industry's iron grip on the nation's centers of political power is finally slipping.

In 2021, climate activists made unprecedented progress in their quest to stigmatize fossil fuel producers. Now they are seeking to make 2022 the year in which we completely sever the remaining life support for this deadly industry.

This next level of organizing, sometimes called Divestment 2.0, involves a concerted effort to underline and dismantle the more insidious ways that the industry infiltrates higher education and the centers of public knowledge production, outside of just universities' endowments.

Divestment 2.0 won't be easy. Recognizing the divestment movement's success, the fossil fuel industry and its accomplices are doubling down on their opposition. Rightwing lobbying group the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, is pushing states to enact laws that blacklist companies boycotting the oil industry under the guise of "energy discrimination." (See companion piece by Jasmine Banks of UnKoch My Campus on page 49.) The industry has also led efforts to restrict fossil fuel protests.

Yet activists know what we're up against. We must build on the immense momentum of divest-

ment, and work against the lethal reluctance by policymakers including President Joe Biden to invest in a just renewable energy transition with the requisite haste. (Biden, a study by Public...