On Wednesday, Mar. 27, roughly 45 students marched through Dalhousie’s campus raising signs reading “Fossil Free Degree,”and “Net Zero by 2040,” from the Student Union Building to the office of Dal’s president, Kim Brooks. Says student campaign organizer Caitlin Lawrence, “we extended a formal invitation to President Kim Brooks but she did not attend or show up.”
As an extension of their class project for Kate Swanson’s Development and Activism course, students in the International Development Studies Program created the DalZero campaign in tandem with another longstanding student-led group at Dal, called DivestDal, to raise awareness of the university’s direct investments in the fossil fuel industry and the need to decarbonize both their campuses and their investment dollars.
At Wednesday’s rally, students from the class spoke about the need for their message to reach an audience with school administrators–and their willingness to act on their students’ behalf.
A statement provided to The Coast by Dal’s director of communications ahead of Wednesday reads that the school was “aware” of a peaceful student protest “to show their support for being carbon neutral,” and that in the coming weeks, students will be meeting with university representatives, “to chat about the university’s carbon reduction efforts.”
The statement acknowledges that students have asked to present their research and campaign at the upcoming President’s Advisory Council on Sustainability–or PACS–meeting that has been rescheduled for the first two weeks of April.
Reads the statement, “ the university looks forward to hearing about the recommendations from the students.”
In 2023, Dal’s $878.3 million endowment fund invested $30.2 million directly into oil and gas companies like TC Energy, Enbridge Inc., Air Liquide and others, according to research done by DivestDal based on Dal’s endowment investment reporting here.
Jude Sampson works with Divest Dal. Sampson says these figures are carefully extracted by DivestDal, which began investigating the spending of the endowment fund in 2013, and has recently been reinvigorated with new students to the school who have grown up in the school-strike-4-climate cohort.
Says Sampson, “what you initially find when you look up Dalhousie investments is a website that has a bunch of different links, titled ESG investing, Climate Change Charter 2020, and all of these things that make them look good. So, if you search ‘Dal investments,’ you see those things first, and you're gonna be like, ‘Oh, okay, they're doing fine,’ until you go through and find the actual report,” and spend hours cross-referencing company names to see which are oil and gas companies as Sampson and DivestDal has done, “and then you realize they're not doing fine.”
Dalhousie is a member of U15 universities, which are large research universities in Canada. Says Lawrence, “the University of Laval is already carbon neutral and they've fully divested from their carbon underground, so we do know that it's possible.”
Of the other 13 schools in the U15 designation, Lawrence says “seven of the U15 universities have already committed to decarbonizing their fossil fuel holdings,” with examples being the University of British Columbia, McGill University and the University of Toronto.
“We are asking Dalhousie to completely divest away from fossil fuels, and reinvest that money into community reinvestment,” which the DalZero group describe as “putting money and resources BACK into our community…instead of investing in fuel fuels…community reinvestment means mutual aid.”
Says Lawrence, “we don't want any more money being slicked with oil because it's 2024.
DalZero’s campaign is for the university to reach carbon neutrality by 2040–ten years earlier than Dal has committed to already.
“It’s undeniable we're in a climate catastrophe. If you look at Nova Scotia over the past summer, we had record-breaking fires, floods, and an increasing number of powerful storms and hurricanes,” says Lawrence. “DalZero, like all of us, are concerned about climate change and how it exacerbates injustice, and creates disproportionate impacts on marginalized communities in Nova Scotia.”
Ahead of a report on the PACS meeting: if you’re a Dal student, take DalZero’s carbon divestment survey here; as well, DivestDal meets Tuesday evenings at 6pm at the Mona Campbell Building, which is the site of the College of Sustainability at Dal.
