Denver Post Joins Media Chorus Against Divestment Radicals

On the heels of last week’s “Global Divestment Day,” Denver Post columnist Vincent Carroll penned an opinion piece explaining the “folly of fossil fuel divestment.” In it, Mr. Carroll correctly points out that divesting from natural gas, oil, and coal would be akin to divesting from modern life. Here’s an excerpt from his piece:

But fossil fuels actually are nothing like apartheid and tobacco — one a system of racial oppression and the other a product whose health effects are comprehensively bad. By contrast, were you to banish fossil fuels today with a wave of a wand, millions would likely freeze and starve to death as civilization as we know it essentially imploded.

How is it morally disreputable or a waste of profits to supply something that we all rely upon, however much we might wish to transition to non-carbon-based energy sources?

Is it a bad thing that 1.6 billion people were introduced to electricity in the 1990s alone, or a good thing that 1 billion people still lack it today? Of course not.

Recent media coverage of the divestment movement has been largely negative. A recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, for instance, slammed divestment as “feel-good folly” that can potentially harm low-income students by reducing university endowments, which are used to provide need-based financial aid.

Meanwhile, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby exposed the cynical tactics of divestment activists who “demonize the industry” because “it will be easier to turn Big Oil into a pariah than to convince the public to abandon its cars and smartphones.”

To read the rest of Vincent Carroll’s Denver Post column, click here.