Betsy Bolton:	So good evening, everybody. Thank you for coming to the teaching on climate change and divestment. I'm Betsy Bolton. I teach in the English department, and my job is to welcome you all, thank you for coming, and to give you a little bit of background, if I can figure out how to work this. Yay! Little history. The Swarthmore divestment campaign was begun by Swarthmore Mountain Justice in 2010-11, I think that's accurate. Now joined by about 190 colleges and universities nationwide. The concrete goals, if I can figure this out, are to immediately freeze new investment in the Sordid 16 or 16 particularly dirty fossil fuel companies as soon as contracts allow. To divest direct holdings in those 16 companies over 2-5 years, to divest commingled funds from those companies, and then finally to institutionalize a collaborative process to enable socially responsible investing.
	So this is a complex issue on which people may take different positions. The faculty speaking tonight will not be speaking with one voice, nor do we feel we should be speaking with one voice. Each of us will give a brief, roughly five minute presentation. The economists get longer. We will pause for questions and discussion after every two to three speakers and my job is to cover the background.
	We've also been asked to stay at the podium for an audio recording so this is not natural for many of us, so forgive us please. I also ask permission in advance to kind of preach to the choir. My job is really to do very big and general background so that if anybody feels like they're coming in in the middle of a conversation, at least we've got some common ground here.
	So my opening questions are how big a problem is climate change? How urgent is it? What causes climate change? What can we do about it? And what keeps us from doing the rational thing? What keeps us from taking reasonable climate precautions? 
	Luckily we don't have to ask anymore is climate change real. We have consensus on that. Scientists agree. It is real, including famous, this is going to mess me up all the time, famous climate skeptic Richard Muller, who was funded by the Koch brothers for two years to disprove anthropogenic global warming. He's now a convert. He's like, "Yeah, it is happening, and it's almost entirely caused by human beings." So we're moving ahead.
	So how big a problem is climate change? How urgent is it? And I think the basic question here is, look climate change is happening. It's a serious hassle, right? Everybody's with that. But is it game changing? Can we deal with this problem at the margins or do we need to do something radically different to cope with the problem?
	So these days, you know, we might thing, yeah, it's game changing if your home happened one of the ones that burned when 200,000 acres burned in a single day, but marginal if food prices went up a little because farms burned in that process as well. Might be game changing if you lost your home to floods, but it might just seem like a hassle if some of your tax dollars went to rebuilding instead of to public schools.
	We've learned a lot about sea rise and extreme weather this last year. Again, it probably seems like it's a game changing deal if your entire neighborhood has vanished, but it's probably just a significant hassle if you lost power for a week, or again, if taxes got diverted to rebuilding. 
	So part of the problem is that people have different relationships to this idea and to the effects of climate change, depending on their positions. People in this country tend not to be noticing or at least talking quite as much about the fact that the global cost of food, according to some sources has risen 79% over the past five years, with tens of thousands of people dying of starvation, millions more at risk. I'm not sure we've noticed the increased spread of infectious disease. The rising water temperature increases the risk of a cholera outbreak 2-5%. Mosquitoes thrive and spread in a warmer world, so we are now getting reports of Dengue fever in Florida, which is a new treat.
	Who suffers from climate change? People who are less able to adapt, and those are the poor, the young, the old, the sick, the geographically vulnerable. Now the EPA mentions a lot of geographically vulnerable places, like where are we not geographically vulnerable in this country now? But they haven't gotten to the global South, to the least developed nations, to the island nations. So because they're not talking about it, we have to go to a really radical organization to tell us the truth about climate change. The World Bank.
	"Turn Down the Heat: Why a Four Degree Celsius Warmer World Must Be Avoided." This is a report from last November in which they said, look, we've all agreed, global warming cannot exceed two degrees Celsius. We're all on the same page there, except present emission trends and policies both current and promised put the world plausibly on a path toward four degree Centigrade warming within this century. That warning brings all kinds ... sorry everyone. All kinds of nasty effects: global food insecurity, inaccessibility of drinkable water, infrastructure damages, coastal inundation and laws. The burdens are borne by the most vulnerable. Disruption, displacement, and conflict will result. That must not be allowed to happen, says the World Bank. Only early cooperative international actions can help us avoid that.
	So it's a big deal. That's what I'm saying. It's a major exacerbation of existing inequalities, and it's about as urgent as global disasters come. I think this is the issue of our day. We cannot afford to be on the wrong side of this. So what can we do about climate change? We know what we can do about climate change. We reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, burning fossil fuels produces more than 75% of our greenhouse emissions. So we know that, but we're not doing anything. We're still on that path to four degrees Centigrade.
	So why not? What keeps us from taking reasonable precautions? Bill McKibben tries to makes sense of it this way. I can't use this thing, Peter, I'm sorry. He's saying 2%. It can stay under 2%. The most we can do is burn 565 gigatons of fossil fuel, and we're going to burn through that in like 16 years. But fossil fuels companies have almost five times that much fuel on their books already. Not just, oh maybe it's out there somewhere. They're counting on burning that fuel. 
	So this is a problem especially because fossil fuels and fossil fuel companies are highly profitable. So the top five companies had profits of $132 billion in 2011. This is from a report by Robert Pirog and Congressional Research Service, February 2012, and that is made worse by the fact that oil companies profit most from exploration and production. Exxon Mobil, 84% of corporate profits from upstream activities, exploration, and production. Chevron 92%, Conoco Phillips 66%. So that drives, that profitability drives these companies to extreme extraction methods: tar sands, mountaintop removal, deep water drilling, hydro fracking. These are methods that do dramatically more damage to the environment, the climate, and especially the people who live nearby.
	So what keeps us from taking reasonable climate precautions? There are economic disincentives for these companies. There are political disincentives: fear of voter response to the real costs of transition, lobbying and campaign contributions -- more than $5 million to Romney alone this past year. And I also think public misunderstanding of the scale and urgency of the problem and effective tactics for tackling it. 
	What's the way forward? We have to take multiple pathways. I think this divestment campaign is a local strategy and an educational opportunity for raising awareness and exploring options for overcoming disincentives. I hope everybody will join us, the mass action day in Washington, and the divestment convergence coming up.
	Peter?
Peter:	Okay. Give me just a chance to get going. Okay. Great. Thank you for the opportunity to say a few words about divestment early in the action. I'm doing something very simple tonight and I'm talking about environmental assessment. Betsy has made the case that every entity, whether it's human or whether it's an organization should be asking itself how much it's contributing to global warming and make strategic decisions on any changes that seem to be appropriate. 
	So how do you go about doing environmental assessment? Well, a couple of things that we've learned in this game. One is that you must look at all types of environmental impacts. You can't pick one and leave another one out. You must look at what entity you're assessing and take, be sure that all parts of it are going into your assessment. You can't just take half of it and do that one and say that's good enough.
	And then also, anything beyond your control, and what I mean here is decisions made by others, either because of your decisions or on their own are not part of your assessment. They are beyond your control. And environmental assessments are best done as comparisons. Determine the total impact from several courses of action and then make a decision based on both the outcome of the assessment and other priorities you might have.
	The important point is the following: one is not at liberty to ignore some environmental impacts, to exclude parts of the assessed entity, or to include considerations beyond one's control. So I thought I'd use an example here. We're all thinking about fossil fuel use, transportation. What about asking ourselves about purchasing a gasoline car or an electric car? Well, here are some of the numbers if you ask how much mass of CO2 will be emitted by the car during the periods it's being used. You see that an electric car with a typical, you know charging it with electricity coming from a typical mix in Europe of generated electricity, puts out 103 grams equivalent. A gasoline car 211 grams. So it sounds like it's a no-brainer that the electric car half as much of a carbon footprint. Why are we talking any further about it?
	Well, the use phase is not the only part. There's production, maintenance, and disposal of the vehicle. When you throw these in, the numbers go up obviously, but the electric car goes up to 197 grams and the gasoline car 258 grams. So there is still less of a footprint with the electric car, but it's not the factor that it was before, and that's because you've taken a look at the whole life cycle of that. And I give the source down here at the bottom of a recent article where I'm getting these figures from.
	So that's about making sure you look at the whole process. But you should go further. Your electric car can have more than one battery. These are two lithium batteries. Where is your electricity coming from? I use the example of a typical European, but you could get it from natural gas, you could get it from coal with your average being generated. And you don't have to stick to a gasoline engine. How about a diesel engine? Still internal combustion, but a very different style. And what about other environmental impacts besides CO2 emissions?
	And so when you ask these questions, it becomes a much harder task. And this is a chart from the article where they've tried to do that. The top row up here are the figures I gave you for a lifetime use and the amount of carbon emissions. But you can see there's many other environmental impacts. And some of them are quite different. This one, human toxicity, really has to do with what materials go back in the environment during the whole cycle, usually production, disposal of the car. And you see because of the metals used in these batteries and electric cars, it's actually quite a bit more than internal combustion engines.
	Also, notice that there's a big difference between diesel and gasoline. This is the type of environmental assessment that's being done now. Doing it completely, doing it under many different scenarios, and you can look at the numbers and it becomes part of your decision making process.
	This is a page or two figures actually from Swarthmore's draft of a climate action plan. And they're looking at the carbon footprint, so the caption is, "Greenhouse gas emissions coming from different parts of Swarthmore College's operations." And you can see they're doing a pretty good job over here. They're talking about travel, heat generation, even study abroad air travel is in there. So they're looking at the different entities, parts of the entity Swarthmore College operations to see what kind of carbon footprint we have. This is simply their map of how you get to zero carbon footprint by 2035. 
	But I submit there's something missing here. And what is missing is, in fact, the endowment. What do you suppose is the environmental impact of the endowment? Well, we shouldn't just say it can't be much. The annual budget of the college is $.1 million. The endowment's over 10 times more than that. I really like putting dollars in scientific notation. They look bigger. Okay? So if it's 10 times bigger and it's there every year, I'm guessing there is some environmental impact from the activities that were made possible by those dollars. That sounds like a question that can be answered.
	How does this vary with different investment strategies? That is, are there ways of investing that endowment that change the environmental impact of that many dollars. I think the answer is yes, and it sounds like a question that should be asked and answered. Only at that point can you go to the third question, how do you make decisions on investment strategies that address both financial performance, what the endowment's there for, and say CO2 emissions. Okay. I'm saying you can't make those decisions without knowing what the environmental impact is. And we haven't even talked about other environmental impacts like water quality, toxic compounds, pollution, any effects to marine and terrestrial life, land transformation. We were just sort of thinking about carbon dioxide emissions. 
	So I submit that this is exactly the right time, and I think it's beginning to happen, that the college enlarge its environmental assessment, include an assessment of the endowment, do it for different scenarios, and then come to the hard question: what do we do now that we have this knowledge? 
	Thank you.
Betsy Bolton:	Questions from this discussion?
Speaker 3:	How much time can we give?
Betsy Bolton:	10 minutes.
Speaker 3:	Well, we do want, you know ... It just annoys that we all practically rule up this.
Audience:	I was curious what can-
Peter:	Give up here, Betsy. Give up here. [crosstalk 00:17:13]
Audience:	When there's going to be a second president operating on the excuse that it can't be rectified, but it also that makes policy decisions or-
Peter:	It's sort of part of the strategy of doing environmental assessment that each entity looks at its own impact and doesn't try to calculate anything that might result from decisions they have no control over because of their decisions they've made. The idea that each entity should be so small or think of it so small, they only worry about what their impact on the environment is. As opposed to saying, well, if we decide not to buy that oil that's in the ground, someone else might buy that oil that's in the ground. If you start going down that line, you never get to an end of the impact because you don't know who's going to buy it, whether they're going to do. That's their decision to make, someone else. So that's what I mean by outside of your control. Once they're not decisions you make about your footprint, you stop asking questions.
	Yep?
Audience:	Is the environmental assessment you showed, those kind of assessments probably take, you know, a year to publish and go through every aspect of a single car. So how long do you think it would take to get an assessment of the endowment? You would have to be able to submit many layers deeper than that [bionomically 00:18:40]?
Peter:	I agree that it will not be done in a couple of months. Someone will have to look at the investments, make reasonable estimates about where the money ends up producing activities. Yes, I think this will be a very big project.
Speaker 3:	Sue hopes she doesn't-
Peter:	What?
Speaker 3:	Sue hopes she's in the audience.
Peter:	Yep. Okay. Let's go on. 
Phillip:	Well, I'd like to start out by thanking Peter for that wonderful introduction to the next topic that we're going to consider, which is the perspective of economists and certainly, I can't say that Mark and I speak for all economists, and I should emphasize that any comments I'm making tonight are representing my own views and shouldn't be attributed to anyone else. But I did want to follow up and talk about the endowment a little bit. And I think it's good in this type of discussion before you start to just know some basic facts about the endowment. I think that's going to be a useful background for us going forward.
	So with that in mind, I want to show you a picture of the college's operating budget. It's about $111 million at the end of the fiscal, this is for fiscal year 2011/2012. And what you see in this pie chart is how that level of expenditure is paid for. Some of it comes from student charges, about 45%, and then you see also contributions by gifts and others, they also could be various fees. And the remainder, 42% comes from the endowment. That is a draw on the endowment is necessary for us to run the college for one year. 
	The cost per student at four year at the college is about $82,000. Your tuition, room and board, and fees that you pay, even if you are a full pay student amount to about $53,000. And the remainder of that gap is made up by the endowment to the tune of about $29,000 per student. Okay? The total endowment spending for the year, using last year's fiscal year as an example, was $47.1 million, and you can see that the total student scholarships were about $29 million. So you can think of the bulk of endowment spending is actually going towards providing scholarships for students, and about $18 million is being used for other purposes. Okay? 
	So as these facts indicate, the endowment is important, but we can ask where did the endowment come from and what is it used for, just so you will have some feel for that. Well, the endowment, you can think about this in two parts. The sources of the endowment and the uses of the endowment. And donors give money to the college, and this has been true since 1864 and continues to the present day. The college invests this money in financial assets and other kinds of assets. Investment returns are then plowed back into the endowment, and over time accumulation occurs. And if you keep doing this for, oh about 150 years, you end up with $1.5 billion at the end of 2012, or at the end of fiscal year for 2012. 
	And you might ask, well what is this endowment used for? Well, it's used for current expenses in the present, things like financial aid, the library, curricular innovations like environmental science, a low student-faculty ratio, new biology and engineering buildings, and for study in many other things that I can name. That's in terms of present spending. But the endowment also has a very important function in terms of thinking about the future, okay? Access to and provision of high quality education in perpetuity is one of its main goals, to be able to provide that type of education that we enjoy, that you enjoy today.
	Well, that necessarily involves, and if part of the role of the endowment is to think about the future, it necessarily involves balancing the desires of the current students against those of all future students. That's part of what the endowment is there for. So, let me mention then some issues and concerns about divestment. 
	You heard the word mentioned by Peter of the idea or it may have been Betsy, actually, talking about the commingling of assets in the college's portfolio. That means basically everything is just all mixed up together, okay? That means it's very difficult to say precisely what percentage of the college's endowment is invested in fossil fuel depleting companies or industries. However, we do know that in terms of the potential investment opportunities available to the college, okay, as represented by this index of the world stock market, we have here various sectors like financials, information technology, consumer discretionary items, industrials, healthcare, and so on, of which energy is one. That energy represents about 10.4% of the investment opportunities facing the college. Okay. So this represents the universe that the college could potentially invest in and I would guess currently does invest in, this very large portfolio.
	Like most investors, in terms of understanding this investment opportunity set, the college faces a trade off between risk and return. Okay, a little bit of finance here. Greater return is compensation for accepting more risk. Why is this important? The only proven way to approve the trade off between risk and return is diversification. And diversification is the act of investing in a wide variety of assets so that poor performance in any one formal sector is not catastrophic for the endowment's overall return. Now because divestment would restrict the types of assets the college could invest in is likely to do one of two things, okay?
	One, it's likely to increase the riskiness of the college's overall portfolio. Or two, it will reduce the average return on the college's portfolio, holding other things equal. Now, if divestment's impact on the endowment is negative and the losses are not made up elsewhere, then the opportunity cost of divestment might include reduced financial aid, reduced commitment to environmental science, higher tuition, more students per faculty, smaller new biology and engineering buildings, less foreign study, etc. etc. etc. Okay?
	So these are all things that we have to take into account as we are doing our assessment and calculation. So in closing, let me consider the following question then. And that is currently, why do donors of many political and philosophical persuasions give to the college? And I would submit that the reason that donors, past and present, give to the college is because they, while having very different and diverse political and philosophical views, they in fact do agree on one thing. And that one thing is Swarthmore's key strengths as an educational institution.
	Quoting from page eight of the document "Strategic Directions for Swarthmore College," which was the outcome of a two year community process of planning for the future that involved alums, students, faculty, and everyone who cares about this college. We all seem to have come to consensus on these four points. 
	The first is that we agree on the college's singular commitment to academic rigor and creativity. We agree on our desire to provide access and opportunity for all students, regardless of their financial circumstances. We agree that our diverse and vibrant community of students, faculty, and alumni are very important to us. And we agree that in our conviction that applied knowledge should be used to improve the world. These are things that the Swarthmore community writ large agrees upon. And I think they really support why it is that people of many different persuasions give to the college.
	So I think these strengths are particularly relevant for our discussion tonight. They bring to my mind two compelling questions. One, how might we apply what we learn at the college about climate change to advance alternative energy technologies? And two, what legislative priorities that will move us closer to the goal of sustainability should we be advocating for?
	Thank you.
Mark:	Okay, so Phillip and I decided to divide up the economist portion. He was Mr. Inside and I'm Mr. Outside. So I'm going to talk about how divestment might affect firms. So firms sell shares to obtain financing to invest in capital projects. And so one argument for divestment is sort of starve the beast. That if you can lower their share prices, they won't be as able to sell shares and get funds so that they can carry out capital projects.
	The problem is in practice that's not what's happening. So what this graph shows is the darker blue line, net share buybacks. That's how much firms issue shares like the IPO of Facebook to get funds versus how much they buy back of their own shares. And amazingly, since about 1995, they've been mostly buying back shares. So the stock market isn't actually a source for funds to them. It's a drain of funds from them because they use up some of their funds to buy back their own shares. Why they do that crazy thing we can talk about that later. But that first avenue for divestment is not there. 
	The second thing that people talk about is that once the firm sells its shares, if it's a firm that gives out dividends, then it pays its shareholders dividends, but other than that, the firm has nothing to do with the existing shares. So in the stock market what's happening is simply some people are trading shares with other people and the firm is completely uninvolved in that. So these two facts that firms don't actually raise money on the stock market, that they mostly raise their money by either, they mostly carry capital projects from either their own retained earnings, that's their profits, or by borrowing, and the fact that once the shares are out there, the firm essentially has nothing to do with it has led some op-eds that I've read to say that well, divestment can't have any effect because basically the stock market's irrelevant to the companies.
	And I would say the answer to that is completely wrong even thought those two facts are true. Because executives are obsessed about their stock prices, in part because their compensation is very heavily tied to the prices of the stocks of the firms that they manage. And I do believe that if a divestment campaign could reduce the share prices of companies, it would have a really big effect on their ... potentially it would have a big effect on their decisions because one problem with American industry is that executives care too much about their share prices, not too little. Okay. So that's point one.
	However, the energy industry, fossil fuels, natural gas, and oil, the industry is unusual in a way I didn't fully, I definitely didn't appreciate until I started researching for this talk, which is that most of the energy industry is not actual companies that have shares on stock markets anywhere. Most of the energy industry is nationalized oil companies that don't sell shares. So, for example, the companies we all know about, so that's Exxon, BP, Lukoil, you know, the oil companies see when you go buy some gas is a Russian company but it's partially sold on the stock market as is Gazprom, but it's majority owned by the, Gazprom is majority owned by the Russian government.
	But also we've got 80% of all reserves are held by nations, in essence, and not companies. So nothing that happens on the stock market is going to affect that. If you look at, this is reserves where the rankings are extreme in the sense that Exxon Mobil looks really quite small. If you do production, the rankings change a little bit, but they're basically, there's a lot of different ways to measure how big an oil company is. But if you do production, it's still relatively similar to these rankings. The nationalized oil companies are the biggest players in the industry. 
	The second thing about the oil industry is that it's heavily not diversified, which like Frank Perdue, who only does chicken, Exxon Mobil only does fossil fuel, and the reason for that is this. Well, one reason. Well one of it's Betsy's picture where you saw how much profits they make. But the other reason is the corporation profits tax. So the corporation profits tax is designed to tax corporations, raise some money for the federal government, but there are so many benefits to oil and gas companies and mining that it actually ... This is effective rate, corporate tax only. It's actually a negative tax to them, so they actually get a subsidy from the corporation income tax. If we eliminated the corporation income tax, Exxon Mobil and all these oil companies would actually have less profits than they have now. So because of that, there's just a tremendous incentive for them to stay engaged in fossil fuel production because they make a ton of money that way. The corporation income tax heavily favors them like that. 
	So the reason those two facts matter is we actually have an historical event where we can look back to see what the effect of divestment was which is the fight against apartheid. I think as people know who've studied this, the fight against apartheid, there was divestment, but divestment was only a small part of the entire fight. There was a worldwide consensus that South Africa had to abandon apartheid. 
	And so one example of how widespread this view was ... in 1986, the United States Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, and so that included boycotts of various products from South Africa and embargoes of various products to South Africa and penalties on banks that did business in South Africa, so it was a pretty reasonably harsh measure. It was vetoed by Ronald Reagan. The United States Senate was controlled by the Republicans at that point, and the Republicans in the Senate overrode Ronald Reagan's veto to pass this legislation. If you think about the way the world looks now, it's unimaginable that that could happen. But that just shows the consensus, the degree to which there was widespread consensus against apartheid in a way that probably is not true with respect to fossil fuels. 
	The other point which is the fact that the companies are not diversified. So the companies ... so pressure was put on companies to divest their holdings in South Africa, and many, many, many companies did do that. But of the divested firms, the firms that under pressure sold all their holdings in South Africa, only 1% of their sales came from their business in South Africa, and only .67% of their assets were in South Africa. So by raising the pressure on them and causing them a lot of grief, they made a decision it's better to abandon that 1% of sales, it's better to sell off those assets than it is to continue to have to deal with all the investors who are making our lives miserable.
	It's unlikely that's going to happen with the fossil fuel companies because they're so heavily invested in doing just fossil fuels. If Exxon Mobil stops doing fossil fuels, Exxon Mobil might as well just hang out a sign that says, "Out of business" because they don't have a diversified portfolio of things whereas that companies that abandoned South Africa, that was really a small part of their business.
	Okay, so because we do have this historical episode, I went to try to look at studies to see what happened to the stocks of companies that were in South Africa that divested under pressure, that didn't divest, that continued to stay in South Africa. And so there are a bunch of studies. One reason I don't do empirical economics is because some of the studies say that the companies that divested were helped. When they divested, their stock prices rose. Some of them say that when the companies divested, their stock prices fell. And one study, which seems to me to be actually the most carefully done, showed that there was no effect at all. So I'm going with the no effect at all.
	So the question is how is that possible? Why is it, how can it be that if a whole bunch of institutional investors sell a company's shares that its stock price doesn't fall, which is what I'm claiming to be the best study showed in essence. 
	So I'm going to leave you with two economics words. One is externality. So externality is why we're here because global warming is this massive externality that's causing harm that the people who consume energy and produce energy are not paying for. So it would be a good idea to force them to pay the costs of what they do. But the other word is arbitrage. So arbitrage is when hedge fund managers or other financiers go in and buy things that are undervalued, or they think are undervalued to make a profit. 
	And so what I think is basically going to happen if you try to divest from fossil fuel companies, their stock prices are not going to be affected at all because as they start to fall a little bit, all these other less ethical investors are going to come to the conclusion, "Hey, Exxon Mobil's a bargain. Let's go buy some Exxon Mobil shares." And the end result of that is the share prices won't change.
	So I'll leave you with two other words: carbon tax. What we should have is a carbon tax. We should tax carbon. That's the single best tax we could institute in the United States or in the world because it both raises revenue for the government, which as you may know needs it, and B, it attacks this externality. Thank you.
	Okay, questions?
Audience:	At the very end, you mentioned that companies' shares would be bought back if we decided to divest in them. But if we go back to what Peter was saying, wouldn't that be something that we really don't have any depth of control over and therefore, in our assessment of whether or not to do this, we should probably ignore that factor?
Mark:	Well, it depends on your moral theory. So I tend to be a consequentialist, so I tend to look at the consequences of actions. The actions don't have any consequences, I tend not to think you should pat yourself on the back for having done something that has no consequences. So there is a cleanliness argument, right? I don't need fossil fuels, they're sordid and dirty. I mean, that's true too, but that we no longer have these things. But to me, I'm not saying you might not want to be clean, but to me that's not a huge argument. Because if it really has no consequences, you can't consider yourself a hero.
Audience:	Sorry. Just from a purely anonymous standpoint, I was just thinking about this idea of community and if Swarthmore wants to deal with you for as long as possible. But oil and fossil fuels are ultimately finite resources. We are eventually going to run out and so oil companies will actually fail, right? As far as not being able to access that resource?
Mark:	Yeah, we won't live to see that. Yeah, so I'm old. So I was your age in the 1970's and there was a movement then that argued that the limited resources, you're absolutely right. The resources are finite times infinite. Do the math. The resources ultimately run out.
Phillip:	You should mention the assignment then.
Mark:	Yes, well I'll let her get ... yeah, okay, I'll talk to ... right. Anyway, the point of his story, so that was what? Those people were called what? There's Forester, anybody as old as I am?
Audience:	Herman [Divecut 00:43:06] Daily?
Mark:	No. 
Audience:	Barry [inaudible 00:43:10].
Mark:	So now we have all the ... yeah, but what was the ...?
Audience:	Limits to growth.
Mark:	Limits to growth. Okay. So this was the limits to growth movement and they made exactly your point. So what actually happens, fracking. So what actually happens is as the price of a resource goes higher, people go looking for that resource in all kinds of places that you never thought it existed, like in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of the Arctic, and the top of the Arctic, way underground in clever and maybe bad ways of releasing the fossil fuels. And so that's Phillip's point. So there was this bet. So this is one of the famous moments in economics.
	Okay. So there was a bet between an economist, he wasn't actually, he was ... well, he was an economist. I guess we'll call him an economist. And Herbert Simon and an ecologist.
Audience:	Simon.
Mark:	Yeah, oh Julius, right. And a real ecologist was ...
Audience:	Ehrlich Polo.
Mark:	Ehrlich, right? Yeah, Polo Ehrlich. Okay, so what Simon said was okay, you think everything ... So basically Ehrlich was making your point that everything's going to run out. And so what Simon said was okay, I'll bet you, I think it was $10,000.
Phillip:	Yeah, yeah.
Mark:	This was back in the 1960's or 70's when $10,000 was a lot of money.
Phillip:	Now wait a minute.
Mark:	I'll bet you $10,000. You pick ten natural resources. You can pick any 10 you want, and I, Simon, say that inflation adjusted 10 years from now, they will be cheaper than they are today. So Ehrlich then picked 10 and 10 years later, sure enough they were cheaper than they were when the bet was made, and he had to fork over $10,000 to Simon.
	So how did that happen if the resources are running out? The answer is substitution. That's the analog of fracking that ... So Ehrlich said, "Well, yeah it was bad because I picked tin as one of my resources." So it turns out that tin cans are actually not made out of tin anymore. They were when the bet was made. And so what basically happened is as tin got more expensive, companies found ways to make cans not out of tin. And so the limits, there are limits to human ingenuity, but they're less limited than the resources. And I think what you'll see as things get more expensive is that people find very clever ways to substitute away from them. 
	So what will happen ultimately in the year two zillion, is when people get engaged, they'll give each other little rings with a glob of oil on them because oil will be worth like diamonds. But, you know, it won't ever truly run out of oil. It's just it'll become so expensive, you'll never use it for a car.
	Might ... yeah? I'm sorry, Duncan.
Audience:	In looking at the stock, do you see any evidence that they were themselves doing improper at the pinnacle level?
Mark:	You mean the major companies to actual ...? Yeah, so I don't ... This is not my field, guys. I just was ... someone said, "Can you come and talk here?" And I said, "All right." So I don't know how much Exxon Mobil does. I just don't know.
Audience:	I know that neither of you are political scientists, so I'm wondering how you would pass a meaningful carbon tax or any meaningful green legislation without a political movement? And do you think that we'd have to let us people create that before?
Phillip:	That's an issue. What my thought on that is that it has to do with sort of how you want to use your energies now. So, the logic of the question is that well this divestment movement is really a strategy for getting to a political outcome. And to my mind, I would wonder if there's a more direct method for doing that. That's why we lobby our representatives on Capitol Hill, we apply pressure, letter writing campaigns, things of that sort to have a direct impact on those changes. So I think the question that those who are interested in, and I think we all are interested in getting to a sustainable way of living. I can imagine alternative means of direct action being quite effective. 
Audience:	Two questions for you is you were talking about, like you said so the endowment being, one of them being intergenerational equity.
Phillip:	Yes.
Audience:	And I was wondering if in your economist's mind there was a way to reign climate into that? Because one of the big issues in climate is intergenerational lack of equity.
Phillip:	That we're using all of their resources today, all of the clean air, all of the that may not be there later on. Is that?
Audience:	So that's the resource shortage issue. The other issue is the warming world, so yes remaining in the-
Phillip:	Okay. So you want to know how I think about that? Okay, so I like the idea of the college being focused on education, and I like the idea of the college education people as we're doing tonight, as environmental studies does in general, so that they can then go out there in the world and create new technologies or alternative sources. And in that way, the college contribute to putting the tag on a path to sustainability. I'm very concerned about the college using the endowment for what some would perceive as a political purposes. I think people of all different points of view give to the college because they believe in the college's core mission which is education, right? And I think that we go into some perilous areas when we start to deviate from that core mission such that people who might want to contribute to that core mission start to think about us in a different way. 
	I am very much on board though with the activism of our students that are out there in the world, and they maybe can leverage what they have learned here so that they can make an impact out there in the world that's going to be life bread. So when I think about what to do with equity, I think we have to take care of our business here, educate the students, give them tools that they can go out there and impact the world so that again, if you just go off what our students read, it's clear and in that way it's sustainable.
Mark:	So, let me just, I know there's more, but just for Ben. So I totally agree with you that it would take a massive political movement. This could be the part of that. I just think you need to focus on goals that could matter, like the carbon tax. That's not going to be any piece of cake thing to get past the Congress. That's going to be a monster effort. I've always been surprised ... So Democratic Party is gun shy on several dimensions. But one of them is climate change. Even back in 2004, I could not understand why the Kerry campaign never mentioned climate change because I do think middle class Americans care about that as an issue. And so I don't think it's a losing issue for the Democrats, so we'll just have to see. But I agree it's going to be a killer to try to get it past. Yeah?
Audience:	So I have a couple of points. First related to what you were just saying about, and you know, what should our active target be? If what we really need is carbon tax, what should our actions be now? Recognizing that what we ultimately need is a mass political movement. I think that's something that we all agree upon. You drew the parallel to the Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986, and I don't know if in 1986 there was a mass grassroots movement to pass the Anti-Apartheid Act. There was a mass grassroots divestment movement happening on college campuses across the country, and bank institutions and pension funds, just like we have now with fossil fuels. The fact is for the last 20 years, we've already been seeing, you know, various organizations trying to mobilize the population to create a movement, to get a carbon tax or some clear action like that. And none of those have struck a chord and mobilized as many people as this divestment movement already has in less than a year really since it's taken off.
	So, just from a ... again, I know you're not political scientists, but from a political, social movement building strategy, it would seem that this has already been more effective than any of the efforts to lobby for legislation directive to have that. 
	On the second point, which is Professor Jefferson's point about, it was about, you know, what the donors. We need to respect the desires of the donors, and that's to honor the core mission of the college. It seems that we do ourselves a disservice as people who are thinking people and intellectuals to ignore the very real facts that we have absolutely no idea what the world will look like in 80 years. If in the lifetime of people in this room, maybe not the two of you ... So no, this is speaking as young people, we need to look and see-
Mark:	Yeah, when we leave, we're pulling the gangplank up.
Phillip:	Exactly.
Audience:	What is the objective facts about the type of world that climate change is going to create, and I hope that some of the other panelists will speak to that. And is the college doing everything it can, in an economic and political sense, to really create a future that people can live in? And recognizing that the research and development has been happening for years and are still heading down the path of the past.
Phillip:	Well, I would say that the ... okay, so as an economist, I believe in the notion, this is two other words of comparative advantage. Okay. And I believe that the college has a comparative advantage in education a bright, young, energetic mind like yours, okay? And so given that that's the case, I respect very much your passion for this issue and I would encourage it. What we can disagree with is how in this instant right now, the college is best serving your ultimate goals. Okay, my view is that the college is best serving your ultimate goals by sustaining you now, encouraging you, and providing you with the tools so that you can do very good things in the world and keeping itself in the position such that future students like you can come here and gain some of those same tools and advantages.
Audience:	I was just wondering if in light of what you just said, either of you could speak to the actual materials that divestment from apartheid, on the college's operating budget?
Phillip:	I'm not ... I'll be the first to admit I am not informed enough to do that.
Mark:	Yeah, so I'm also not informed enough, but that doesn't stop me from talking. So, but just from the studies I read about divestment in South Africa in general, if I had to put money down, I would say it had no effect on the college's endowment. It's very hard to carry out that analysis because ... well, there's two things. One, divestment from South Africa, because a lot of companies were pressured and they then divested their holdings, the endowment could go back and buy those things, okay? So there was a lot of companies that did that, so it's probably the case that within a very short period of time, you know, Phillip showed those various investment opportunities. That was those little bars and energy was like 10%. 
	It probably was the case not soon after, with enough companies divesting their holdings in South Africa, there was enough companies for the endowment to buy that it probably had to effect on the endowment. I mean, the return on endowment did not fall because of that. That would be my guess.
Audience:	So can you still stand by Professor Jefferson's point that divestment could affect financial aid or STEM salaries or ...?
Phillip:	Tick tock.
Mark:	Well, we're only a team in the sense that we're in the same department. We don't agree on abs- Ask us about real business cycles. No, I get it.
Phillip:	Exactly. So let me speak to that because I was trying to be careful but not too careful because this is a presentation and I didn't want to get overly technical. But I was trying to be careful in my language, okay? So what I was making a point in that example had to do with the issue of diversification. And what I said was that the college could, as a result of divesting say in energy, if you go back to that bar chart I showed you, energy was 10% of the potential investment opportunities. You could imagine ... you could do a thought experiment where the college withdrew from that sector totally. And then the question is, well then what you can say is that well, other things being equal, that would leave one sector that it's no longer investing in, depending on the risk characteristics and correlation and covariances with the other sectors.
	The college would be less diversified. And that reduction in diversification could cause the college endowment to have one or two effects. One, it would be more risky, okay? Why would it be more risky? Well, if we've diversified less and the college said, "Oh, we still want to maintain the same average return," the only way to do that would be to incur a riskier composition of assets.
	Another possible alternative would be that well we would accept the same level of a risk. We didn't want to become less risky. And then that would mean that the average return could have to fall. Now, those are just two very simple, possible outcomes in that scenario. And if we did something like that that caused the average rate of return to fall, then you're going to be getting less return on that endowment and its capacity to make a contribution to future operating budgets would be compromised. 
	Now there's some other technical issues I could go into in terms of the type of portfolio managers we would have access to if it were the case that we adopted a position of restricted investment that could also hurt our capacity to earn on the endowment, but that's very technical but true constraints that we would face that could impact the average return also.
	Yes?
Audience:	[inaudible 00:59:26]
Phillip:	Can you speak up, please?
Audience:	Yeah, sorry. At these type of ... I was wondering if it was possibly a better idea to asking about the case that have already had mass diversive appeal. Is it a matter of risk in nine different entry or ten, like how many would it be?
Phillip:	Well, it's actually, you know, I would flip that question to you all because it's actually quite complex when you think about it. You might ... The bar chart that I showed you has a degree of simplicity that may not actually be achievable in practice in that it sort of gives the impression that oh, I could just or the college could just divest all from that one sector, which is not really taking into account this notion of commingling and the involvement of firms and many different industries. So it would be a complicated exercise, which probably could be put in place by some investment management team, but the evidence that I have available to me suggest that some of the very top portfolio managers would not want to handle such a restricted mandate coming from the college because their objectives are quite different from what the students in this room might deem is the most desirable.
Audience:	Just based on to what you just said, one of our investment managers used, like one of the companies is managed by the chair of our investments group? So it seems like we have the power to divest thing. It would be a pretty easy thing to ask that person to take their pension firm and sort of establish it a strain for it. Given not even the ... they would probably mitigate some of the risk that you were talking about?
Phillip:	Now, the individual management firm could enact a strategy that you would want the college to adopt?
Audience:	Yeah, well and it seems like from my limited knowledge, when you have a fairly good relationship with our investment managers and we have a fairly large endowment and yet if we could work with them to develop a strategy with other things saying that we would they gave us the incentive-
Phillip:	Well, okay, now I'm speaking from a limited knowledge base with respect to how our endowment operates. But let me ask you a question based on my understanding, okay? While $1.5 billion sounds like a whole lot of money, and it is a whole lot of money, believe me, I'm not going to ... it is a lot of money. But in the investment world, when you have the Harvards and Princetons of the world, it's not that much money, okay? And so it is still the case that we don't have just one investment team handling our money. We have a wide variety of investment teams, and the portfolio is diversified with respect to who is handling it. And so it's not the case that we just give all of the money to one firm. 
	So it's really the case that you would have to approach a wide group of investment managers and say, "Here is what we want to do." Okay? And I think the pushback that you would get from them is that "Wait a minute, we want to invest worldwide. We want to pool resources from several endowments and other investment clients, and we want to be able to move in and out of the sectors that we want to move in in order to maximize your overall performance in the long run. If you restrict us from certain opportunities, then we wouldn't be able to specialize what we are doing just for Swarthmore." So we would probably have to find other investment managers, and right now we deal with some of the best in the world, and I would hate for us to have to move away from the best in order to ... because that could be risky in another dimension. [crosstalk 01:04:26]
Mark:	Okay, so why don't we do this. We have another set of professors-
Phillip:	Yeah, professors. Right.
Mark:	So we'll have them go and then if people still have economics questions at the end-
Phillip:	We'll handle it.
Mark:	We don't go to sleep till ... before midnight, so ...
Phillip:	Now again he's speaking for himself. Out of the way.
Mark:	I don't need that.
Peter:	I'm turning it off.
Cindy:	Hi, I'm a political theorist. I don't use PowerPoint. I use pen and paper, and I apologize. I have had a cold for the last three days so my voice sounds terrible. I would like to move into a larger framing question than the particularities of divestment and the endowment. I think that the real question of the consequences of a movement for divestment are not economic. I'm not sure that it's going to matter one way or the other whether we put our money in something else, either in terms of profit or risk for the endowment or for any impact it could possibly have on Exxon Mobil, not to mention Gazprom.
	I think we're in the middle of a much larger change than we realize, than we understand. And the pressures of climate change are far more urgent than we're completely willing to recognize or acknowledge. It's all very well to talk about intergenerational equity, meaning we need to sustain the money to have the education for future generations, but if the seas rise 25 feet, the college will be in trouble in different ways. 
	We have to take seriously that we're in a completely different situation now than that we've been in the last, well I think it's 200,000 years. And the changes that are happening on the planet right now are unprecedented. My generation felt that we had a lot of political tasks on our plate when we stepped up to the bench. We had the Civil Rights Movement. We had the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement, the peace movement, we had the women's movement, we have a gay rights movement, and we did pretty well with those. If you look around, a lot of us are here who weren't there before that.
	That was a very big accomplishment, I think, for our generation. I don't think we have it anywhere near the level of demand and task that awaits you guys. I think you're absolutely right. Long after we are gone, you will be facing the consequences of the choices that we made. Nobody who decided to take all the oil out of the ground and throw it into the air understood all the consequences of that. It seemed like a great idea at the time. We didn't know, even 25 years ago, we didn't really know that the climate was warming the way we know now. 
	And you have to understand how short we come in the whole span of evolutionary time. This has taken, this whole thing has taken a couple of hundred years after millions of years of evolution to get to this point on the planet.
	I want to talk about just a couple of our unexamined assumptions that underlie the way we think about the earth, about climate change, about education, about the future, about generations, about a lot of things. There are certain unexamined assumptions that come with modernity, with our world that don't exist in all other cultures and which are problematic and becoming even more problematic. One of them is that we are all separate, that what happens to them over there is too bad, but it isn't going to affect us. That really it's unfortunate if some people are poor, if some people have to move, if some people are under water, but as long as we're not under water, it's all right.
	It is not the case that that ... that turns out to be not true. That's false. I asked my freshman introductory class at one point, "What is it that all the people in the world have in common?" And they looked at me. They looked at me, and I said, "Oh, come on. What is it that all the people in the world have in common?" They don't speak the same language, I mean, they don't ... I said, "They have the earth. All the people in the world live on the earth, and they have night and day in common. They have trees and flowers and grass and rain in common." 
	All the people on the earth live on the earth, and if we raise the climate of the earth and we boil it off and we melt the glaciers and we rise the seas and we change them into acid and we bring the south to the north and we eliminate the ice of the north, we have eliminated water supplies, we have eliminated arable land, we have raised the disease levels all over the world, and we've also, by the way, slaughtered most of the great species of the planet. 
	In other words, the harm that we're doing is so enormous that the calculations of the things that we could do, we should do, the answer is every single one of them. Every single one of them. We have to fight for legislation, we have to fight for a carbon tax, we have to make a mass movement. And so then the question is, what does divestment have to do with it? Well if divestment isn't going to have any consequences economically, and I don't know the technicalities of that. I suspect it's not going to have much of a consequence economically. What I hope it has, what I think it may have is the beginning of a change in the way we think about oil companies. And that's really important.
	Let me take a brief diversion into sort of a systems analysis. The way we have thought about systems for a long, long time is as kind of black boxes. We put something in, something else comes out. It's all linear, it all works, it's like the internal combustion engine. It's a machine. You run it. We're not in that kind of world. Global stock markets, weather, internet communications, there's all kinds of biological processes, are not simple systems. They're complex systems that have become more and more and more complex. Complex systems are built not on stability, but instability. Not on predictability, but unpredictability. And we are in a world where most of the things that we can't control are what's making things happen.
	All of our decisions are in the context now of a world where we don't have control and can't in principle have control of all the different parts, all the different layers, all the different, multiple elements that will lead to a combustion that can change everything very fast. It can change it into new innovation, or it can change it into avalanche and to catastrophe, and that's what keeps happening. We have the sudden collapse of whole systems. In political science, the collapse of the Soviet Union is the obvious one. In economics, I think 2008 comes to mind. There are lots of system going on which we cannot predict and cannot control, and weather is one of them. Climate is one of them.
	So what is the point then of a campaign? The point is the political point. We need to make a movement. We need to have a movement, a worldwide movement, but certainly a national movement. And one of the things that colleges and universities can stand for, and especially colleges and universities like Swarthmore. They can stand for a moral position. Now, it is not the case ... I mean, I beg to differ with Phil. This is not a partisan issue. It has been made into one because of the mechanations of, I believe, the oil companies owning the Congress, but that's just me.
	The consequences are not ... Wait a second, I don't remember what I was going to say. I got ...
Audience:	It's not partisan, it's ...
Cindy:	What was it?
Audience:	It's not partisan.
Cindy:	Yes. Great. Thank you, great, great, great, great. See, it's not a partisan issue. It's not that people of all different political ideologies can disagree on this. They do disagree on this, but you have to ask why political ideologies disagree on this. Climate change is not a ideology. It's a fact. It's a reality, and how we deal with it has to do with who we are and how we respond to crisis and to fear, basically. Our challenge is to deal with fear and grief that the earth that we're living on is in trouble, is dying in many, many ways. That's what the issue is. And to make it an issue of Republicans and Democrats is really to trivialize the question. 
	The focus has got to be, in my opinion, on the fossil fuel industry. We don't need to overthrow capitalism. We need to have a non-carbon based economy, and that will be a hard enough job. One of the ingredients we have in our repertoire is a moral understanding that oil companies do damage, they hurt people, they destroy the land, they destroy the water, they destroy the air. The way to do that is to make a moral case, and I think colleges and universities have the capacity to make that case. To say we will not invest in companies that destroy the world, that destroy the earth, that displace people, that kill millions of people. 
	The apartheid issue is analogous in the sense that a moral issue was made against apartheid. It's also the way that the campaign against the tobacco companies. That at one point, smoking tobacco was cool, now it's forbidden. It's the way we change thinking that's important. And what the divestment campaign can do, among many other ways, is to change the way we think about fossil fuels and the way we think about oil companies, and that's I think why we need to do it.
Lee Smithy:	Hi everybody. I'm Lee Smithy. And I think maybe I should have gone after Betsy, so maybe I'm a little out of order here, so I sort of take us back a little bit toward the beginning. I'm not really here to talk about divestment or even to talk in a sense directly about climate change. Maybe it's just me, but when I think of climate change, I think of those things that Cindy was just talking about, rising sea levels, rising temperatures, toxic water, etc. etc. Those kind of direct consequences of environmental change. 
	But I want to, in the few minutes that I've got, sensitize all of us to some other reasons to be concerned about climate change, political and social reasons. And I want to focus on a couple in particular. And that's militarism and security. And I'm a little uncomfortable here because I'm really on Professor [Chairney's 01:16:39] turf, you know, why we go to war. But he's on leave, so I'm going to take advantage of that. And many of you know that I'm associated with the peace and conflict studies program, and interestingly, the Peace and Justice Studies Association held its meetings this year at Tufts University. And they titled the meetings, "Anticipating Climate Disruption, Sustaining Justice, Greening Peace." And there were about 15 tri-college students, and I see a few faces here who were there, went up to Medford and attended the meetings. George went, George Leckey went as well.
	And some of the themes that emerged during those discussions were the military implications of climate change. And as a college with Quaker roots, this seems like a relevant consideration as we think about climate change and our response to it. And I often get concerned about the influence of climate change deniers, but it's got to be said that the Pentagon and the intelligence community are not among them. 
	In these circles, there's a real clear and growing acceptance and concern that climate change will affect our military and intelligence footing around the world. In fact, in 2010 when the Pentagon put out its quadrennial defense review, for the first time it identified global warming as a potential threat to U.S. troops and national security. In that same year, the CIA developed a center tasked with collecting information on climate change. And just within this year, 2013 and we're only in February, right? The National Academy of the Sciences has just released a report at the request of the intelligence community titled, "Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis."
	Now, the report focuses on situations outside the U.S. in which climate events have consequences that exceed the capacity of affected countries or populations to cope and respond. And so they're anticipating chain reactions of increasingly serious and frequent international and intranational disruptions and crises. And from a U.S. military perspective, they're concerned about pressures to launch humanitarian efforts, pressures to have to get involved in regional conflicts where there's severe political instability and state failure. They're concerned about a massive disruptive migration and what that means to security interest. They're concerned about some of the things that Betsy mentioned. In fact, water, food, and health security. 
	So clearly there is this concern about the challenges that the military are going to face on a warming planet. Some of these challenges may be humanitarian. Some may center around regional conflicts and may provide opportunities for the projection of U.S. influence. Perhaps in support of regimes that seem the most prepared to control potential unrest in their reasons, if history shows us anything. 
	At the same time, this is where fossil fuels maybe come in. The Department of Defense uses over 80% of all the energy consumed by the U.S. government. It spent about $11 billion in the fiscal year 2010 on energy for the execution of field missions. That's about the state budget of Tennessee, my home state by the way. And I think it's about, that's about, if my calculations are correct, about 21% of the total Department of Defense budget. So interestingly, the U.S. military is a significant contributor to the very global warming that it's saying threatens U.S. security. 
	So what does all this mean for us here at Swarthmore? I think merely that as we talk about and think about the importance of climate change that we not only think about the environmental impacts, but also the international, political, and human rights ramifications. And whatever you believe about the benevolence of U.S. security policy, it's worth noting that people in the business of constantly scanning, you know, for decades into the future and trying to predict broad future trends, they believe that climate change has the potential to lead to wide scale political, social, and economic disruption and crises. 
	So I'm proposing that, to the extent that through a divestment campaign or otherwise, our concern is to end or at least mitigate the destructiveness of climate change, and at a college with strong Quaker roots, one motivating factor should be concern about the sustenance of the military industrial complex and the projection of U.S. military strength in the poorest areas of the world, as Betsy also pointed out, that are also the most vulnerable to adverse effects of climate change. So that's my pitch about how to broaden our lens, so to speak, on climate change and the possible dangers.
	If I could, I think I've probably gone over five minutes, but if I can just take two minutes maybe, I've been sitting up here. This has all been very stimulating, this whole conversation. I've been sitting up here scribbling on the back of a piece of paper, and Phillip really got me thinking, you know, about the mission of the college. And I think, I really appreciate that he pointed out that we're about education, that that's really why we're here. In fact, that's why we're all here at 10:00 at night. And I also note his important mention of applied knowledge, that that's a big part. That was sort of identified as a main feature of our strategic orientation to education. 
	And sometimes I hear, and I'm totally open to being persuaded that I'm misunderstanding or I'm just misinterpreting, but sometimes I hear that there's this idea that we come to Swarthmore, we get educated here, and then we go out in the world to do important things, which I think is largely true. I mean, for goodness sakes, I'm still learning on a minute by minute basis here, and so I think that's largely true. But I can't help feeling like we are in this world, you know, right now. We're in this world, and we're all in this together and that means faculty and staff and students, on this planet that Cindy was talking about. We don't exist in a vacuum. We are admittedly a small, but significant institution. 
	How are we significant? I was going to say economically, but I'm not so sure anymore. We're a learning community. We're at least aspiring to be problem solvers in some way. I think, and I want to say this modestly, but that we have a certain reputation and respect as members of a much larger community, both, you know, within driving distance of here, nationally, even internationally, and in a sense the eyes of the world are on us. And I think we need to take that into consideration. 
	I also think that we're opinion influencers in many different ways that we influence opinion. I saw students interviewed on Al Jazeera last semester. I see students and faculty through all sorts of outlets influencing opinion. And at a Quaker institution, I think we can say that this might be considered also a matter of conscience. And I feel as if we have a responsibility as a community to leverage the ways in which we are significant. I think we want to be modest and smart and thoughtful about the way that we try to leverage ways that we're significant, but nonetheless, I feel that there's a certain responsibility connected to that or we risk losing something. I don't know what we want to call that. 
	We lose our soul, for lack of a better word. We lose our communal contract with one another, something like that. So that's a very undetailed sort of solution, but it's an appeal to continue this kind of dialogue, this kind of conversation in hopes that we can leverage our education to do something now in this world where we exist. Thank.
Cindy:	Any questions? Maurice?
Maurice:	I don't have any questions. I was struck by what you were saying about a campaign as a link. Thinking about what Lee was saying-
Lee Smithy:	It was inspired by Cindy. [crosstalk 01:26:20]
Maurice:	That probably broadly is our failure, not just our failure, but our failure as human beings and to actually realize that connection, that interconnectiveness that is a part of the whole of it. And it's even evident in this community. This beacon with the whole shopping still ways in which we see each other as society and individuals and so on. And if I have a question, I guess it is how through this kind of process in such a rare place as this can we parlay or realize it and understand it that we are connected to one another and the earth for such a time and inescapable way that we all perish together if we don't do something about all of this? How do we end that and our behaviors? I think that stuck in the minutiae of protesting about ideas that are there. We won't get to the fact piece of it. I mean, the most compelling thing I saw in extreme was the face of those starving people. And I feel them and that they were of color made it even more compelling.
	When we were at the 350.org event in Philadelphia, I was struck by how few black people there were in that meeting. 
Lee Smithy:	Me too.
Maurice:	And I've traveled in the South as a child, I was breathing the same air as the white people who didn't want me to eat at their counters. So I've seen a lifetime of our failure to match in this way, and I think that's one of the things that we are required to do here for and with one another is to really get a fear that we are, we here in this place are relevant. Why aren't there 1500 people right here in this room right now? We've got a big job to do here, and maybe focusing on the question about investments outside our school, yet there. But I really don't think you can get very far if we don't meet each other that this is right and [inaudible 01:29:10].
Lee Smithy:	Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how we do it. I think we do it here by having teach-ins and conversations and discussions and raising awareness. It's a question of raising consciousness. And consciousness grows from the bottom up. It's not something that you can impose from the top. It grows from the bottom up. It's like a tree, and you have to have it, it has to reach the point where it becomes something new.
	And we're in the process of doing that. I don't know how we do it. I think it is already happening in some ways, but not enough. I mean, we're not where we were 40 years ago in terms of who's in the room, but we've got a long way to go till we see each other as all in the same boat with a hole in the bottom of it. That's a different perception, and I think that our perception of each other has to change, but also our ability to face what's actually going on has to change and that will require us facing a lot of fear and a lot of grief for all the species, if nothing else that are already gone. 
	Before we even get to the race and ethnic sort of questions, as a social scientist, I would love to have another teach-in where we have psychologists, for example, weigh in because one of the most troubling things I've discussed and I've heard about climate disruption was an interview on the radio with some psychologist who were saying that we have some cognitive limitations about the way we can think about problems that span, you know, decades and centuries. And that's not a judgment on anybody. It's simply the way that our brains operate, and I would love to find out so what are the other workarounds to that sort of cognitive blind spot or limitation that we have because, I think, part of what you were saying was that the pictures maybe helped you get around that blind spot a little bit. 
	What are the ways in which we can appreciate the magnitude of the problem? Might that be a greater incentive to overcome some of the other barriers? I don't know, but I'd love to learn more about it.
Cindy:	Well, time is a social construct. It's a cultural construct, so what we used to think of as the time is linear, ba ba ba to form time, we don't have that with evolutionary time. We have simultaneous time. We have all different kinds of time now. We're in a new time in which times are different. So I don't think there are inbred limits on how we think about time. We have to change the way we talk about time. Yeah?
Audience:	And it's true, I mean, Debbie is my grandma. 
Cindy:	Yes.
Audience:	It's not. I have access and I get it. We discussed this point even so desperate that we should all find a way-
Cindy:	Understand.
Audience:	Back to this assimilate to ... sorry.
Cindy:	Yeah. Yeah, no one.
Audience:	So, I'm academically make those efforts because people are naturally uncertain as to be deplorable or or even more and more translation about doing good. And I'm [inaudible 01:32:45] we are moral peers or we decide moral peers, but they have a role as humans. I think that it's more and more have a handle on what's going on in whatever you're actually leaving. Right now, we have one plus three because the college is refusing toward most of what's going on here and it's in many ways a lot of people are seeing this and it's, you know, impacts our moral. To me it's not that we can say we have to be the loudest. I think that what's more important for us is willing to seek no matter what and we get to choose if we're seen as human or leadership. Awesome.
Lee Smithy:	And let me just throw in one little comment there that I guess, I mean I maybe a world behind, but I would say that I'm not sure I would say refuses to. I think we're still in the middle of this, and I think there's still opportunities and I've seen faces from all sorts of different sectors in this room tonight. And I realize that things are pressing and that the movement is growing and that we've got choices about how we're going to be involved or not, not just for when we're at a conference.
Cindy:	Yeah?
Audience:	Another question then about this moral argument is that our committee has to have extreme material. And how far do we send that? So we agree you would start cutting fossil fuels entirely there, at least that prospect is seeming more, but if we use that same argument that downstream and you have to bundle up for use oil and you could use oil. And then I use that same argument that that doesn't blend. People have already taken this. It's happening again but at least in mind it's limited. Are we because I'm not a chemist. So why do we look at, they basically caved. It's not spoiled. It's converted into small bills, you can make that same moral argument there to say that the oil that they use is a better oil.
Cindy:	I don't think they're burning it, are they?
Audience:	If the ... it literally comes from the oil, we can solve this.
Cindy:	So, no, no, no. I don't think that we ... I wouldn't be arguing that we need to give up all oil. I would be arguing that we need to not burn it. All of the stuff that's in the ground has to stay in the ground. We can use oil for pharmaceuticals and for chemicals, but as long as it isn't going into the air.
Audience:	Well, most of it probably would go into the air. If you want to invest that subtle piece and they got to-
Cindy:	Okay. All right. So, I don't know. 
Audience:	It has the same for humans.
Cindy:	I know. I know. The question is where does it end? Where does it end? I know, and we're going to have to figure out a way to figure out how to convert it and to convert all of it as much as we can. Yeah. We got four more speakers, so ...
Audience:	Okay, I just wanted to respond to what you said and I think that, I mean, I agree with everything you said, and I think that one of the most powerful things that divesting can do because it is controversial and is ... but one of the most positive things it could do is change the conversation and that's exactly what it has done. You know, two years ago, we were the only school running fossil fuel divestment campaign, and now we're 250 schools across the country and that started at Swarthmore. And this is exactly what Lee was saying. We are the leaders right now. People are watching us. Like the CBS News clip went out tonight that 8-9 million people are going to see across the country and Swarthmore College and Swarthmore students are interviewed in that clip about what we're doing here. So I just want to just like point to the power that it already has exerted in changing the national conversation.
	Sheldon Whitehouse is a senator out of Rhode Island. He made a statement about what students are doing on the Senate floor about divestment. That stuff is happening, and divestment hasn't even happened here, so I just want to point to the power it's done.
Cindy:	Okay. We'll have some ... we've got a couple of other speakers. [crosstalk 01:37:08]
Mark Wallace:	Hi, I'm Mark Wallace. I teach in the Religion Department, and I'm also on the Environmental Studies Committee. I'm really happy to be here tonight, and I really, what I'd like to do for just a couple of minutes is echo some of the sentiments that I've heard. And I especially want to speak about the moral and even the spiritual dimensions of this conversation about divestment.
	I've heard a lot in the last half hour about the world's eyes are upon Swarthmore and everyone is looking at us. I play in a basketball league here in town, and this is the case. The college gets called by the guys that I play basketball with, "The People's Republic of Swarthmore." And people pay attention to what happens here locally, but beyond the confines of this area. 
	I want to talk about the history of the college, which we haven't really talked about much in this regard, and I want to situate the divestment campaign in relation to the history of the college, especially its Quaker and spiritual history. The college was founded, we know this now right, 150 years ago by Lucretia Mott, one of the co-founders of the college who had a vision for a learning institution with moral passion. And as an early suffragist and as an abolitionist, Mott wanted liberal arts education to be completely fused with moral and spiritual passion.
	Alice Paul, class of 1905. We have a dormitory named after her, pioneered the Suffragist Movement with special reference to making sure that we got a constitutional amendment to give women the right to vote. Alice Paul. "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God." Made it extremely clear that if a person lives out of his or her moral convictions, that's a way of changing the world, making education institutions do what's right, living out their spiritual vision.
	That legacy at Swarthmore College continued through the 20th Century through the Civil Rights Movement, the LGBT Queer Movement, fossil fuel divestment, mountaintop removal, climate justice campaigns. Matt Lewis Rosenberg, a recent Swarthmore graduate who's been arrested over 125 times for resisting mountaintop removal and similar Swattie's who have done the right thing according to their own moral convictions.
	Every generation has its special mission. Every generation has its calling. Every generation has, if you want to put it this way, its sacred responsibility. And as was the case with abolitionism and suffragism and civil rights and the queer movement and to today, our call is to stop and to break our addiction to fossil fuels. It's to find a way to extricate ourselves from our overdependence on big gas, big oil, and big coal. 
	That's what we're talking about. We're talking about strategies, tactics, attempts to do that. The college in its own way is trying to do that. The college has a climate action plan, and it's working hard in its own way to bring itself down to the place where it zeros out its carbon emissions. It's doing that through better use of current energy. It's doing that through buying carbon credits, and some of the talk that we heard earlier about carbon credits is actually being done here in its own way, the college's own way through the purchase of carbon credits.
	The previous president at the college didn't want to do that. He didn't want to subscribe to any kind of climate action plan as he said it would shackle the hands of the college and force it on a glide path to a policy that he thought would make the college less flexible in the future. But the current president changed course, and she decided that's something we could do. And so she committed the college to a zero emissions policy on a gradual basis. You can go to the college's website, you can read the climate action plan that the colleges now subscribe to, both internal to the college, and nationally she joined a consortium of college and university presidents committed to zero emissions.
	So, we can change. We've changed in the past. We went from one administration that said that we can't do this to another administration that said that we can. We've heard a really, to me, energetic contestation of ideas here tonight where people on both sides of the aisle are saying, "We can't divest. It doesn't make sense." And other people who say that we can. But what I'm suggesting to you is that this is what we do here. We did 150 years ago. We continue to do it today. So we shouldn't be discouraged that divestment, if that's the tactic that we use, seems impossible. Or that perhaps it wouldn't produce the direct results that we want it to. 
	Earlier we talked about ethics and one of the speakers said, "I think about doing things in relation to consequences." And that's one way to think about ethics. Consequentially, is this going to produce results? That's a great way to think about it. And another way to think about ethics is to do the right thing. You do the right thing. I won't use technical language, but ... Immanuel Kant called that de-ontological ethics, doing the right thing because you're commanded to do it by conscience. You have to do it. Here I stand. I can't do otherwise. And you don't calculate the results. You don't decide ahead of time what the end goal or the end game is going to be. You intuit on the basis of your own conscience what you deem to be right and you stand on that and you damn the torpedoes and you move ahead. 
	I come out of religious studies, and I wanted to conclude with some imagery. Poetic, rhetorical, metaphorical images about the earth that give me hope and courage and passion to do the right thing. It is really hard in the long haul to do something when the odds seem impossible to overcome. And one of my fears about this particular tactic, divestment in fossil fuel extraction industries is that we will lose hope and we will flag in our spirits and we won't see the results that we want and we'll give up the struggle. It's easy to burn out when you're committed to something that's looking at the long haul.
	We treat the earth today basically as a toilet. We dump our waste into it. We don't pay any attention as to what happens. We hope for future generations that it won't be too bad for them. The earth has become an exploitable resource. It's something we buy and sell like pork futures or toothpaste. The world's religions give me courage and hope to think about the earth differently. I'll conclude with three such images.
	In non-Western traditions, the earth is the lap of the goddess. It's our great mother. It sustains and nurtures and feeds us. We're all interconnected. All beings support our existence and in turn, we support the existence of all other beings. In Native traditions, the earth is a sacred hoop. It's a community of all our relations. Together the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds come together in a joyous fellowship of celebration and nurture. In the Western biblical traditions, the earth is the body of God. It's God's gift. God pours God's self into the world for our sustenance and joy. 
	And that's why using images like this, I'm suggesting maybe we can power ourselves into the future. We can ignite our imaginations and we can strengthen our wills to do the good work that's in front of us. I love Alice Paul. "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God." Let's do that good work.
George:	This is my sixth year here, and I've never been so inspired. Thank you, Mountain Justice. If this is what happens when people take on a tough issue and get very honest with each other about it and contend and engage in struggle, hey, at least this is what I've been waiting for six years. 
	There's a myth widely shared, I think, at Swarthmore that conflict is opposed to community. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I'm old enough to remember the Civil Rights Movement. Within the movement, there was tons of conflict. People fighting about strategy, people fighting about tactics. And we experience more often there than in any other context I've had, the beloved community. 
	Sociology is full of studies showing that community grows out of conflict, out of struggle. And I even taught a course on it last semester trying to convince students to dare to argue with each other. An assignment, remember, an assignment was between now and next week's class, go start an argument. And people looked very grim as they left that day and some still looked grim when they came back the next week having failed to accomplish the assignment. So I said, "Guess what next assignment is? Go out and start an argument."
	This college has so much to gain from arguing with itself about this and other big things. I mean, there are small trivial arguments. I suppose they're okay. Warm up on those. But this is big and I so am grateful for Cindy and the other who emphasize, Lee and the others that this is very, very much bigger than, I mean, even on my best days, I can't still wrap my mind around the moment, the historical moment, the next 40, 50, 60 years is occupying for us.
	Sometimes I say to myself, "Okay, George, it's like the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and the universities and their extreme difficulty in understanding what their historical moment was." And by the time it unfolded and unfolded, well the universities didn't distinguish themselves, did they, in Germany? Because they weren't ready. They didn't see what was in front of them. They didn't see the magnitude. Oh, it's this crank. I keep looking for ways of trying to jar myself and others into the sheer scope, which means massive redesign. It means our very most visionary thinkers. It means enormous taxing of our intellectual resources to redesign economies that were never set up to handle what is coming now.
	Even in Norway, which is the subject of the book I'm writing now, where they've gone light years ahead of the United States on many, many fronts. I still run into economists there who say, and of course, we need to increase our economic growth, right? No. I don't think so. I think we are talking about major redesign. I don't know a single country in the world that's ready for it. 
	So to my mind, what we need to do as we tackle the divestment issue and everything else is to be in a place where we inspire each other to be bolder. Caution isn't going to work any more than it did for the universities in emerging Nazi Germany. Caution is not going to work here. It's misunderstanding the nature of the confrontation that we're engaged with in history. We need to inspire each other. I think we need to inspire each other personally in terms of less carbon footprint, and institutionally I'm so glad for the planning that's going on. And turning off the lights and all of that, yes, yes, yes. But it's also inspiring each other to use our collective assets where it will most inspire other colleges.
	I'm just terribly grateful to Mountain Justice for igniting this movement around the country. I do run into alumni. I was in Boston a couple weeks ago playing Broadway for alumni, Swarthmore alumni. I saw this weird kind of gay for a professor but anyway, it's my night job. I play piano for Broadway and for Swarthmore alumni. And they were shocked to hear that there's not a social screen on investments at Swarthmore. Shocked. I was shocked too. I've run into professors who were shocked. I've run into students who were shocked. Shocked. Philadelphia. Philadelphia's run by politicians. Who would expect politicians to lift our moral standards? Maybe, especially Philadelphia politicians, all right?
	So there's this gun concern going on, and what do we immediately hear from the pension fund managers of Philadelphia is, "Oh, we're going to have to do something about that. We're going to have to look into our pension funds and how they are invested in guns and gun companies." The same with Chicago, other states and so on. Why are politicians being more responsive to moral issues that face us in a life and death way than some of the people associated with Swarthmore College? I don't get it. It's not politicians who I expect to lead us. I'm very cynical about politicians. I'm expecting better of liberal arts colleges and certainly as a Quaker, I'm expecting better of a college with Quaker roots.
	Now I'm not saying that we have it all figured out on the technical side of all of this, but the inspiring of each other in various ways. Thanks for bringing up ... who wrote? Mark, you brought our Swattie 125 times arrested. We've got to inspire each other to take bigger steps because if we don't, we're just going to miss out completely. And of course I have to quote Lucretia Mott, right? Thanks to Rebecca Chop, it's now in fashion. "Any great change must expect opposition because it shakes the very foundation of privilege."
	I was so grateful to President Obama in his address about talking to Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall, 3 S's, got to love that. Stonewall affects me as a gay man. I cried at that point. There's a fourth S he left out: Seabrook. Seabrook Occupation, 1400 people. The untold story of the stopping of nuclear power plants in the United States of American by an environmental movement that was willing to inspire each other to be bolder. I was part of that movement.
	After that movement had done its job. In some respects, there's still stuff to do, but anyway, largely done its job. It was amazing to me how many environmentalists stopped talking about that. But then there are a lot of people who don't talk about the Civil Rights Movement either or Stonewall or Seneca Falls. All of those movements accomplished what they accomplished because of confrontation, non-violent direct actions campaigns. Every single one of those accomplished it through non-violent direct action campaigns. Is that why sometimes people benefiting from those movements then don't talk about them? Because they're afraid that those movements will inspire us to go farther than we otherwise would? That's my cynical view. Maybe it's just the historical amnesia because when I work in other countries, people keep saying, "Your people keep forgetting about their own history. Why is that?" 
	In any case, let's use our history. We have a lot to be proud of at Swarthmore. Thanks for the reminders. Tonight's very present for me. Let's remember tonight and inspire each other to be bolder in every way we can. Thank you.
Giovanna Di C:	Sure. Yeah, faculty agreed to each talk for five minutes. Hi, I'm Giovanna Di Chiro. I'm really happy to be here. I'm visiting here as the Lang professor for this year, and it's exciting to see everyone here at 10:30. It is so way beyond my bedtime. I cannot even describe this to you. And I'm impressed with the explosions of energy and excitement. And I don't have a lot to add because I really do want people to talk because all these professors here, you know ... added a lot of great ideas. 
	But I also really want to, I mean, this actually doesn't really like a teach-in that I'm used to. Back in the University of California at Santa Cruz, I mean, people would be lying around on mattresses, smoking pot, eating a lot. I actually did bring snacks. We had sort of talked about bringing snacks. So I do have some popcorn back there if people want it. Maybe Joy, you could open it up and start passing it around. One bag isn't going to go around too far, but take one or two kernels or something. I hope it's not genetically modified corn, but ...
	So I did ... the comments that I want to make tonight actually are limited to a very few ideas although certainly there have been a lot of ideas that have been shared tonight that we can talk about more. But I was just, before this teach-in, I was at the panel honoring Black History Month that was discussing what would be the possibilities or desirability of imagining a post-racial society. One of the things that I will say is that the audience was slightly different than the audience that's here on a teach-in focused on climate change and divestment. 
	So one of the observations ... I'm a newcomer here to Swarthmore. This is ... where are we? February. This is the beginning of my second semester, but it's not at all unusual as Maurice noticed at the Bill McKibben 350.org conference a couple months ago that the climate movement tends to be a little bit monochromatic. It tends to be even what Vandana Shiva would call a monoculture, and so in some ways we want to ask ourselves what are the risks and perils of this kind of monoculture, and also why our broader base coalitions seemingly unsustainable or difficult to create, imagine, and sustain.
	I actually did have a PowerPoint presentation, but I didn't get it to Peter in time, so this will be my sort of informal protest against the global hegemony of the Microsoft Corporation, and I won't have any PowerPoint, but what I wanted to say and I actually did have some quotes up here. But in honor of Black History Month, I wanted to actually cite one of my heroes, Bernice Johnson Reagon. And Bernice Johnson Reagon is a longtime civil rights activist, songwriter, Professor Emerita of history at American University, a feminist, environmental justice advocate and a founder, many of you may know of the acapella singing group, Sweet Honey in the Rock in Washington D.C. in 1973. 
	And I actually did hear Sweet Honey in the Rock in 1973 as a high school student. I lived in the D.C. area, and so Bernice Johnson Reagon and Sweet Honey in the Rock's approach to coalition politics was something that really inspired me as a high school student. And I really think that at the core of Sweet Honey in the Rock as a musical group that uses music to inspire and to bring people together, at the core of Reagon's scholarship and activism and cultural work was really a commitment to fighting social injustice in all its forms and including the injustices of social and economic disinvestment. 
	So in many ways, I would like to suggest that one of the questions we want to ask is how do we build coalitions by focusing on social and economic disinvestment that has been a cornerstone of neoliberal economics, at least ratcheted up during the Reagan and Thatcher era of the 1980's? And in some ways, how do divestment and ... what are the connections between divestment and disinvestment? And how can looking at those two things, disinvestment and government responsibility for social programs for public school education, for public health, the privatization and deregulation that happened during the 1980's and beyond that resulted in many communities, including the community that I've been working in for the last 10 years in Holyoke, Massachusetts, and which is an extremely impoverished community that suffers high environmental illnesses, environmental illness rates like asthma and cancer, high unemployment rates, very low graduation rates in the public school?
	All outcomes of decades of disinvestment in social entitlements and benefits and the responsibility of government ...