San Diego Professor Taking Global Warming Fight to the Markets

A successful effort to convince CalSTRS to divest in fossil fuel stocks would be first significant economic victory in fight against global warming.

By Andy Cohen Most people accept that global warming is real and that it’s happening. But even for those who continue to willfully deny the facts right underneath their noses, it is getting more and more difficult to ignore the increased frequency and intensity of the superstorms that have devastated our landscape. The arguments against global warming are almost nonsensical, ranging from “God would never allow it” theology to ideological orthodoxy. Since global warming is the major threat to the recession proof oil and gas industry—an industry that represents enormous power and influence with the ability to sway policy on a whim—many climate change deniers simply reject the abundance of empirical evidence out of their own economic self interest. The decline of the oil and gas industry, after all, in their mind, is the demise of the Western World’s entire economic existence. Oil provides the energy that makes the world go ‘round. What would we do without it? To the true believers, fossil fuels are, and will continue to be, the lynchpin to the American and global economies.