Divestment 101

While many universities are divesting from fossil fuels in response to the climate crisis, McGill University continues to invest about $40 million in oil and gas. The student activists at Divest McGill have been working hard since 2012 to change this, but McGill’s Board of Governors is not budging. In this episode, we discuss why fossil fuel divestment is important for the environmental justice movement, why institutions often claim that financial investments are not a political issue, and why McGill refuses to divest. We talk to Noah Fisher, a student activist at McGill, and Dr. Darin Barney, a former faculty representative on the Board of Governors, who resigned from the board along with Dr. Derek Nystrom in 2019 when McGill’s Committee to Advise on Matters of Social Responsibility (CAMSR) once again refused to divest. You can learn more about Divest McGill on their website, divestmcgill.com. Darin Barney’s work can be found at darinbarneyresearch.mcgill.ca and griersonresearchgroup.ca.