Adults in the Room Failed Us on Fossil Fuel Divestments

The people who run everything don’t have a realistic plan to address climate change at all, and even 2030 may be too late for aggressive goal setting.

by Coleen Bondy from LA Progressive
Jul 20, 2023

You know you’re in trouble when the Church of England beats you to the progressive punchline.

In environmental writer Bill McKibben’s enlightening op-ed in the LA Times on June 16, he lays out the case for California’s two largest public pension funds to divest from fossil fuel investments. It’s an airtight financial case, with the side benefit of literally helping to save the planet.

So far, CalSTRS and CalPERS are not having any of it. I am not sure what kind of evidence they are holding out for, but the latest science is convincing enough for the Church of England, not to mention nearly every top university in the United States, to finally decide to divest from oil companies.

It’s far past time for the state teachers’ retirement system to stop funding an industry that is actually killing our planet.

It’s far past time for the state teachers’ retirement system to stop funding an industry that is actually killing our planet. Not only is it a money-losing proposition, it’s morally indefensible.

Teachers teach…young people. The future of our planet. The ones who will inherit this mess we made. The ones we pay a lot of lip service to caring about.

When I found out about the extent of CalSTRS’ investment in big oil in 2021, I wrote to the board to protest and demand divestment from fossil fuels.

I received an email signed by “External Affairs” assuring me that the CalSTRS board does indeed care mightily about the environment, and it was aiming for a goal of a “net zero investment portfolio by 2050 or sooner.”

The rest of the email is basically filler-babble.

This coming school year will be my 18th with the Los Angeles Unified School District. In my time as a high school English and journalism teacher, and now as magnet coordinator of a social justice-based media program, I have tried to educate my students about climate change and also empower them to create the changes we need to ensure a livable future for us all.

Nearly 10 years ago I ordered a class set of McKibben’s book Eaarth, in which he argues that we have already altered the plant beyond recognition, and the best thing we can do is create community and do our part locally to create sustainable societies.

At the time, it was a fairly radical idea that we had altered the Earth beyond any easy fix, and even more radical to teach high schoolers about it.

I thought I was empowering my students when I told them that my generation, and all the generations before mine, had completely dropped the ball on climate change, and that it was up to the young people to save everything.

In the beginning, I think they liked the idea of an adult who not only told the truth, but apologized for our sins, and believed they had the intelligence and the collective power to save the planet. Pretty cool, right??

Now that same speech just generates indifference, irritation, or worse, anger.

At first I was puzzled, but then a student put it to me bluntly. “Adults completely stress us out when they tell us we have to fix this enormous problem on our own. If you couldn’t do it, how do you expect us to do it?”

Every year of teaching gets harder, for many reasons. But for me, the worst is that I no longer know what to tell my students to give them hope. I often feel angry and hopeless, too.

The fact that my own pension, my own hope for retiring securely, depends on burning the fossil fuels that will make my students’ futures even more hellish just makes my generation’s own hypocrisy even more unbearable.

Environmentalists have long been told that it was idealistic and naïve to think we could quickly transition away from fossil fuels. That it would hurt the economy if we transitioned too quickly.

Basically, we have been told for decades that the adults in the room were taking care of it in a grownup way, and we should just go back to eating our granola.

But the truth is, they weren’t. The people who run everything don’t have a realistic plan to address climate change at all, and even 2030 may be too late for aggressive goal setting.

I was listening to NPR recently and Tonya Mosley was interviewing Jeff Goodell, the author of the new book The Heat Will Kill You First.

Goodell does a great job of scaring the heck out of us about the many ways the increasing global temperatures could kill us all, and its link to climate change.

And then he is asked the requisite question in this kind of story…what about having children at this point in time? Is it irresponsible?

As a father of three children, he said that he believes children are the “hope of the world. They’re the ones who are going to change things. They’re the ones who have everything at stake.”

He pointed to Greta Thunberg. He said we need young minds to fix this. He stated the obvious…us old people aren’t going to fix it.

I couldn’t help it as I listened. I did my best impression of a jaded high school freshman and I rolled my eyes.

The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the LA Progressive.
climate changeFossil FuelBig Oil

By Coleen Bondy

Coleen Bondy is a former journalist and current LAUSD high school English teacher. She is also the coordinator of the Global Media Studies Magnet at Cleveland Charter High School.