The university-wide campaign called Fossil Free UC encourages faculty to sign a letter to request the UC Board of Regents to divest university endowments from fossil fuel stocks, an initiative largely driven by climate concerns. Seeking to engage the entire faculty of all UC campuses to address one of the most important issues of our day is highly commendable, and the leaders of the initiative should be congratulated.
Unfortunately, as written, the letter we are being asked to sign misses some critical issues and may act to reduce prospects for attaining better health for the poorest 3 billion people in the world. While we all laud efforts to bring climate change more to the attention of policy makers, this broad-brush approach is counterproductive. It needs to be redrafted to recognize the health implications of fossil fuels more broadly and to push investments into socially beneficial paths.
Painting all fossil fuels negatively with the same brush is not as simple as, for example, doing so with tobacco products. Unlike with tobacco, there are some applications of fossil fuels that provide major health benefits. Indeed, promotion of clean gaseous fuels (such as liquefied petroleum gas, or LPG, a product of both the oil and gas industries) is one of the ways, if not the major way, to reduce the huge impact — estimated at 4 million premature deaths annually — of biomass cook fuels on air pollution worldwide. Air pollution is the largest environmental health risk in the world and among the top risk factors of all kinds globally, including poor diet, smoking and high blood pressure. The climate implications of such deployment of clean fossil fuel would be minimal compared with the carbon footprint of major energy users, such as vehicles and power plants.
Similarly, there are major health and social benefits to be gained from electrification in developing countries, where 1.2 billion of the poorest people have no access to electricity at all. Such benefits should not be slowed or stopped by climate concerns because some of the electricity is due to fossil fuels. This is not to say that we should not promote clean renewables for power production but that continued health and social development should have priority. The fuels used to supply power to developed areas are responsible for many more effects on climate than any conceivable first use of electricity by the poorest. This is where we should focus.
It is a bit disingenuous for us in the rich world — having had unfettered access to fossil fuels for generations and thus bearing most of the atmospheric climate debt because of greenhouse gases — to say we now want to restrict fossil fuel supply to others who hope to follow in the footsteps of our development, especially when the very poorest and most vulnerable populations would gain huge social and health benefits from doing so. How many of us would go back to open-wood cook fires in our kitchens and give up access to electricity? It’s best to find ways to focus restrictions — to increase the efficiency of our own profligate use of fossil fuels and promote clean, efficient fuels for the poor.
I urge fellow faculty not to sign this version of the letter but instead wait until a better one is drafted that focuses divestment from the stocks of fossil fuel companies that market mainly in the first world and/or that exempts companies focusing on the clean fossil and other fuels needed for development. The defenders of the initiative may say their intention is to focus on rich country fossil fuel use, but the letter should make this clear. The current version is a bit like proposing to divest from the entire food industry because unhealthy fast food is part of its portfolio. Why not focus on the worst actors among the fossil fuels first and promote the healthy ones?
One way to do the initial divestment with a clear health and social focus would be to start by focusing on the most egregious of the fossil fuels — coal — which represents a major health risk globally as well as being the most carbon-dioxide-intensive major fossil fuel. This is what Stanford University has done in its divestment policy. If a metric of social benefit can be agreed upon, then perhaps other parts of the fossil fuel system can be targeted down the line. Finding ways to restrict coal in developed countries, however, would be a big step toward both health and climate protection.
Climate change is a serious threat, but that should not make us forget the obligations that university faculty have to find ways to protect the world’s poorest and most vulnerable today. Helping them achieve adequate welfare in terms of health, education and other basic necessities is not only the right thing to do but will also make them much less vulnerable to all insults they may face in the future, including climate change.
Kirk Smith is a professor of global environmental health in the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.
Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org or follow us on Twitter @dailycalopinion.