The Right Pushes Back: Conservative lobbyists are seeking to protect fossil fuel companies from divestment campaigns.

• Author: Banks, Jasmine

The oil billionaires are sweating. And it's college students who are turning up the heat. Texas recently passed a law to protect oil companies from divestment campaigns. It blacklists companies that have divested from fossil fuels because of what its sponsor, Republican state Senator Brian Birdwell, has called the "burgeoning fossil fuel discrimination movement."

After the act passed in June, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a fossil-fuel-funded lobbying group, tried to replicate it nationwide, calling it the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act. ALEC-drafted bills have been introduced in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Indiana. A dozen other states have signaled support.

Conservatives have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to influence young people and stymie progressive ideas on college campuses. So when I heard about this bill, I knew what it meant: The divestment movement is working.

Exporting Texas's anti-divestment law is standard for ALEC. The organization exists to draft and back conservative, hyper-capitalist legislation for state lawmakers who are willing to do the bidding of corporate lobbyists.

ALEC is part of the influence network built by oil billionaire Charles Koch. His collection of think tanks, policy shops, and lobbying organizations all work to push U.S. state and federal law into pro-market conservatism, placing profit over people and our planet.

Many of these laws are deeply antidemocratic. For example, Salon reported that starting in 2020 ALEC "drove a national wave of anti-protest laws" that aim to criminalize protests of oil pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Koch's entire business empire is built on fossil fuels; clearly, he sees something in the divestment movement that scares him. Students began targeting the fossil fuel industry back in 2011, after Democrats had failed to take any serious action on the climate despite controlling both houses of Congress and the White House for the previous two years. At Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, students decided they needed to directly confront oil, coal, and gas companies...