THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Cambridge university to dump fossil fuel investments by 2030

Cambridge university to dump fossil fuel investments by 2030

All this will do is hand a bargain to less loony share investors. It can't affect what the companies actually do. One wonders how the students behind this can be so brain-dead

It would make more sense to buy up shares in the company. By buying in you become part owners and therefore have some influence

Cambridge university’s £3.5bn endowment fund has pledged to divest from fossil fuels over the next decade, in a landmark decision that follows a lengthy campaign involving protests, hunger strikes and petitions by students worried about climate change.

The move marks a symbolic step for the UK’s second-oldest university, which, despite being a leader on science and engineering research related to climate change, has faced sustained criticism over its links to polluting companies.

Oil companies, including BP, ExxonMobil and Shell, have donated money to the university. The fund’s exposure to the energy sector, of which fossil fuel companies are a sub-set, stood at almost £100m at the end of last year. It would not reveal details of individual investments.

The fund, one of the largest of its kind in Europe, announced on Thursday it would reposition its investment portfolio to remove all direct and indirect investments in the fossil fuel industry by 2030 and aim for net zero greenhouse gas emissions from any company in which it invests by 2038.

Separately, the university said it would from now on vet all future research funding and donations, which totalled about £700m last year, to ensure that those giving money were aligned with the university’s objectives to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Stephen Toope, the university’s vice-chancellor, said the decisions reflected Cambridge’s desire to be “part of leading not following” in the move towards a zero carbon economy.

We know we have to get to net zero to avoid catastrophic climate change. We’re trying to align our investment strategy with the science

Universities around the world have come under pressure to divest from fossil fuels in recent years as concerns about climate change grow. According to campaign group People & Planet, £12.4bn of endowments across the UK higher education sector have dumped at least some fossil fuel stocks over the past few years.

Oxford university pledged earlier this year to sell out of fossil fuels across its £4.1bn fund. However, the university did not set a deadline. People & Planet currently ranks Oxford as having a partial commitment to divestment, having sold out of coal and tar sands but not other fossil fuels.

Tilly Franklin, the Cambridge fund’s chief investment officer, said it was incumbent on the university as a leader in scientific research to take action on climate change. “We know we have to get to net zero to avoid catastrophic climate change,” she said. “We’re trying to align our investment strategy with the science.”

She said the fund would measure emissions of every investment, from “food to transport to energy and manufacturing”.

Cambridge Zero Carbon, a group that campaigned for the endowment to dump oil and gas stocks, called the move “a historic victory”, despite coming “five years too late”.

The fraught divestment campaign at Cambridge, which has grown over the past decade, included students taking over buildings and disrupting the university’s annual rowing race with Oxford on the river Thames in London. Cambridge initially held its ground: in 2018 it ruled out divesting despite reviewing the matter at the behest of students.

But the appointment of Ms Franklin this year following an overhaul of the fund’s investment team in 2018 paved the way for changes. Further pressure was heaped on the fund in the form of a new university-commissioned report outlining the case for divestment “across moral, social, political, reputational, and financial dimensions”.

https://www.ft.com/content/8c9dafa3-542d-4582-8a72-28a388263113

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Cambridge university to dump fossil fuel investments by 2030

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