Put Your Money Where Your Mouth is: A SLUdent’s take on Socially Responsible Investing

By EMILY HARRINGTON
GUEST WRITER

“Try not to think so much about the truly staggering amount of oil that it takes to make a record,” sings Josh Tillman, the American folk singer behind Father John Misty. “All the shipping, the vinyl, the cellophane lining, the high gloss…”. The very material of your ‘quality over quantity’ taste in music, your radical preference for audio fidelity, your ‘back to the good old days’ musical setup, he melodically sings, are part and parcel of the system of “the jealous side of man kind’s death wish” wherein he, she, we, ignore the oil-laden nature of our lifestyles in exchange for enjoyment of the modern luxuries provided us by the petrochemical industry. Of course, Tillman is as dependent upon this industry as we all are. The fact of the matter, however, is that this lifestyle is running up against an environmental clock we cannot afford to ignore.
If you have not heard him, I urge you to give FJM a listen. His sound is reminiscent of the ‘60s and ‘70s where his musical inspirations were as prevalent on college campuses, as the demands by students and faculty that endowments be, “among the pioneering institutional investors to adopt new policies and institutions to address social and environmental considerations in investment.” Since then, endowments have become less and less active in the world of investor responsibility – to the point where today – divestment, and the social accountability it entails, seems as radical as the era in which it was born.

Socially responsible investing comes in many forms. Environmental Social Governance, or ESG, is the most pertinent to the conversation we are having on campus. In ESG, investors consider the environmental record and future impacts of companies they are investing in. Obviously, the extraction and burning of fossil fuels is inherently damaging to the environment, so following ESG, endowment managers would apply a negative screen to the endowment itself, sifting out the top 200 fossil fuel holding companies and replacing them with similarly lucrative, environmentally sound companies.

So let’s take a step back. Tillman points out explicitly how integral petrochemicals have become to the functioning of society – not just the lighting of cities or fueling of cars, but the production, dispersal and enjoyment of culture. We’re so dusty from coal, soaked in oil, high on natural gas, that it is uncomfortable to think about the global consensus on the environmental costs of fossil fuel extraction and consumption. However, these impacts and our role in perpetuating them are important to consider. Fossil fuels’ insidious scaffolding of the last 150 years of economic growth has serious negative consequences that are only now being manifested in global climate crises.

I would even go so far as to say that being invested in such companies is an example of socially irresponsible investing. Is it not fair to expect an institution such as St. Lawrence, which operates on the mission of shaping socially responsible individuals, to hold itself to higher standards of social responsibility than other institutions?

Of course no one would ever say that they are engaged in “socially irresponsible investing”, but at this point it is the status quo, and insofar as SLU claims to be doing its best to address climate change on our campus, we ought to expect them to make a concerted effort to do the same in their financial dealings. In an era of fossil fuel addiction, to remain neutral on fossil fuel divestment is to remain addicted to fossil fuel, the same way a junkie remaining ‘neutral’ on his habit is to remain a junkie.

Thus, I urge you to take socially responsible investing at face value and ask yourself, as a member of society, why it would be okay for any investing to not be socially responsible. “That’s just the way the world works” simply doesn’t cut it. We are all too intelligent and well informed to “not become too consumed with the criminal volume of oil it takes to paint a portrait” or, for that matter, support an endowment.