The case for fossil fuel divestment

Abstract

In September 2014, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF) announced its decision to divest from fossil fuels, the original source of the foundation's endowment. The 800 individual and institutional investors who took the Divest-Invest pledge in September 2014 controlled, at the time, $50 billion in assets. Today, nearly 60,000 individuals and over 1,000 institutional investors with combined assets exceeding $12 trillion have pledged to partially or fully divest from fossil fuels. In this chapter, RBF President and CEO Stephen B. Heintz traces the brief history of the divestment movement- a history marked by extraordinary success. Through the RBF's own story, Heintz lays out the moral and economic case for divestment from fossil fuels and investment in the clean energy solutions of the future. Investors have an important role to play in the ecological and economic transition that the climate crisis demands. The time for them to act is now.