{"id":485,"date":"2012-11-29T19:56:24","date_gmt":"2012-11-29T19:56:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gofossilfree.org\/?p=485"},"modified":"2012-11-29T19:56:24","modified_gmt":"2012-11-29T19:56:24","slug":"vermont-gears-up-for-the-next-climate-war-offensive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gofossilfree.org\/divestment\/vermont-gears-up-for-the-next-climate-war-offensive\/","title":{"rendered":"Vermont Gears Up for the "Next Climate War Offensive""},"content":{"rendered":"

Vermont is home to Bill McKibben and where the founders of 350.org all went to school — you could say it’s a sort of spiritual center for our campaign. Which is why it’s really good to see some big coverage in Seven Days, Burlington’s alternative weekly, about the growing movement across the state for fossil fuel divestment.<\/em><\/p>\n

As this campaign heats up, we’re going to be working hard to connect students with activists off-campus so that we can all work to push for change at the city and state level as well (dozens of cities and states ended up divesting from South Africa during the anti-apartheid movement, making a major impact). As usual, Vermont is ahead of the curve.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\"\"\n

Bill McKibben Recruits Vermont for the Next Climate-War Offensive: Divest From Big Oil<\/strong>
\nby Kathryn Flagg<\/p>\n

Bill McKibben\u2019s new front in the fight against climate change is less about tree hugging and more about number crunching. The renowned climate activist and Vermont resident is headlining a cross-country bus tour\u00a0calling on schools, churches and governments<\/a>\u00a0to divest from fossil-fuel companies.<\/p>\n

Modeled after the successful campaign of the 1980s to divest from companies doing business in apartheid-era South Africa, the fossil-fuel divestment campaign \u2014 as led by McKibben\u2019s environmental group\u00a0350.org<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 is targeting the\u00a0200 top fossil-fuel companies<\/a>\u00a0in the country, among them Exxon Mobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell.<\/p>\n

Vermont climate activists are heeding the call, with groups such as\u00a0Vermont Public Interest Research Group<\/a>\u00a0calling on the state to strip its pension funds of big oil in favor of more socially responsible investments.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think financially we can cripple them. They\u2019re so big and so rich,\u201d McKibben says of oil companies during a phone interview. \u201cI do think we can have a very powerful effect on changing their status, on removing their veneer of respectability.\u201d Divestment, McKibben says, represents an \u201cinherently moral call, saying if it\u2019s wrong to wreck the climate, it\u2019s wrong to profit from that wreckage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vermont student activists have taken up McKibben\u2019s cause, with gusto. At Middlebury College,\u00a0five students made headlines<\/a>\u00a0after issuing a spoof press release claiming the college had divested its $907 million endowment from environmentally destructive companies. Members of a socially responsible investing club have pushed Middlebury for years to enact similar reforms.<\/p>\n

Click here to read the entire article at Seven Days.\u00a0<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vermont is home to Bill McKibben and where the founders of 350.org all went to school — you could say…<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gofossilfree.org\/divestment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gofossilfree.org\/divestment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gofossilfree.org\/divestment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gofossilfree.org\/divestment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gofossilfree.org\/divestment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gofossilfree.org\/divestment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gofossilfree.org\/divestment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gofossilfree.org\/divestment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gofossilfree.org\/divestment\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}