As the COP21 negotiations enter their second week, UCL students have occupied a privatised space on our campus. We are demanding that our university takes action on climate change.
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The university has spent three years making excuses, avoiding negotiations, and delaying any meaningful action on divestment from fossil fuels. Faced with a stone wall from management, we have occupied to demand that UCL fulfil its responsibility to the future of its students, society and the planet by breaking all links with the fossil fuel industry.
Climate change is a form of colonialism. Though a few wealthy states bear the bulk of the responsibility for their emission, greenhouse gases respect no borders, and their impacts are felt far from equally. Those who find themselves at the frontlines of climate chaos aren’t the ones polluting or the ones profiting from pollution. Companies extract fossil fuels with no regard for the lives of indigenous peoples. After centuries of colonial oppression, many regions find themselves stripped of the resources they need to survive in their struggle to weather the effects climate change. How many cities in the Global South have their own Thames Barrier?
As more and more people are forced to flee the devastating effects of climate change, wealthy states and their ruling classes have closed their borders and turned their backs on the dispossession and displacement for which they are overwhelmingly responsible. However they might wish to ignore it, they have an urgent duty to end their carbon emissions, and curtail the effects of the one degree of global warming that has already proved so deadly – providing welcome, refuge and reparations to climate migrants.
UCL is a powerful, society-shaping institution. It demands exorbitant tuition fees from students and uses that money to fund the destruction of their futures. As a wealthy public body, UCL is uniquely positioned to take immediate, ambitious action to end colonialism, to fight climate change and to welcome refugees. Ditching investments in companies dedicated to exploring for, extracting and burning fossil fuels would be a vital first step. In the face of this responsibility, UCL’s willful silence on this issue speaks volumes.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has tentatively agreed to “limit” global warming to two degrees centigrade. This is two degrees too much and comes one degree too late. We have shared our lifetime with 21 COPs, one degree of average global temperature rise and no meaningful UN action on climate change. This process appears incapable of delivering action on climate change. Faced with stagnation and prevarication on an international level, it fall upon civil society, to build for change.
A full schedule of discussions and events is planned for our occupation – highlights include a discussion led by leading energy democracy researchers and an evening of climate-themed spoken word.
Guest blog written by Fossil Free UCL
Contact: fossilfreeucl@gmail.com, 07551 820 776
Send a message of solidarity to the UCL students in occupation – click here to tweet your support.