Environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben estimates that climate divestment -- the movement to pressure universities, churches, and other institutions to stop investing in, and thus profiting from, carbon-emitting companies -- has removed close to $15 trillion (482 trillion baht) from investments in polluting companies, marking a significant victory for Planet Earth.
That's an incredible achievement over the short span of a decade. However, climate divestment's increasing visibility has also cultivated an audience of detractors who argue that it is ineffective. Bill Gates is famously sceptical of the benefits of divestment because it doesn't directly stop carbon emissions the way innovation in new low-carbon technologies might. Other opponents claim that divestment cannot meaningfully change the demand for fossil fuels. Divestment might lower share prices, but according to these critics, those lower prices make them attractive to less ethical investors, making the strategy self-defeating. Going a step further, such critics even claim that divestment's economic harm to companies has always been minimal -- that it was so even in apartheid-era South Africa, where divestment as a tactic was born.
