This commentary is by Don Hooper, of Brookfield, who was a Vermont legislator in the 1980s-90s before serving as secretary of state. He is retiring as Northeast regional representative for the National Wildlife Federation after 17 years there. He is a member of the board of the Vermont Journalism Trust, which oversees VTDigger. The views expressed are his own.
[A]s a former Vermont secretary of state, I am a state employee pensioner who is concerned about the morality of my complicity in profiting from corporations whose business strategy is to harvest and burn every drop of fossil fuel on their assets sheets. And for 40 years, in the case of Exxon Mobil, to lie about the greenhouse gas and resultant climate change consequences. When I think about our current divestment debate, I keep coming back to four main points.
First, Vermont state’s divestment from South Africa is a great example of Vermont leading and “doing well by doing good.”
Second, representing the taxpayers of Vermont, the General Assembly has a longstanding role, interest in and responsibility for the funding and functioning of our three public pension systems.
Third, post-Paris accords, we must do our utmost to achieve the most aggressive emissions reductions possible. We must “strand” the very fossil fuel assets that will push global temperatures well beyond the 1.5 degrees we’ve set as a goal.
Fourth, the next generation is counting on us. Our legacy to our children, and their children, cannot be “business as usual.”
In February 1985, my freshman year in the Vermont House, the South African divestment issue ripened in Vermont when Republican Government Operations Chair Ed Lucas brought the bill “Divestment from companies doing business in South Africa” to the floor. House decorum strongly discouraged freshmen from speaking on the House floor before Town Meeting Day in March. But I had a pledge to keep that I couldn’t ignore.
For three years I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana, Africa, a democratic, black-ruled country surrounded at that time by white-ruled countries, including apartheid South Africa. As I left Botswana in 1972, my students urged, “Please, ‘Mothusi,’ (my nickname in Botswana means ‘helper’), if you’re ever in a position (of influence in the U.S.) please help free South Africa of apartheid.” I replied “Yes, I will.”
No one is proposing legislative micromanagement of Vermont’s pension monies. We just want an assertive Vermont commitment to an orderly, timely, responsible withdrawal from investments that stimulate climate change.
The nay-sayers were all lined up against us and pushed back hard: the fund managers, actuaries, the state treasurer, many of the pensioners, union reps, the Reagan administration, and the South African apartheid government. The pushback enumerated the same arguments you’re hearing today: divestment would be an abrogation of fiduciary responsibility; we’ll lose money by divesting; in the big scheme of things, Vermont’s pension fund is too small to make a difference; and the legislative “slippery slope” argument, “What divestment will be next?”
I made my maiden speech that day. This was a deeply moral issue for me, an issue of the “heart.” But it was also a practical one of the “head.” Amazingly, we lost narrowly 72-70. The following day, the Vermont Senate initiated a new divestment bill which the General Assembly passed into law in 1986.
We debated requiring the state treasurer to report each year to the Committee on Government Operations how much money the state had lost attributable to the dopey-do-gooder divestment foolishness. As luck would have it, four years later, I became the chair of Gov Ops. Each year, Treasurer Paul Ruse would come and admit with some chagrin, but also a smile, “Hooper, your darn divested portfolio beat our control portfolio again this year!” We, who had urged divestment, felt vindicated.
In September 1990, the National Council of State Legislatures called me and urging that I come on a two-week trip to South Africa with 14 Senate presidents and House speakers. Each night, at formal suppers hosted by the Chamber of Mines or the Chamber of Commerce, I would ask the same question: “Why did apartheid fail?” And the answer came each night from the assembled business leaders: “Apartheid failed because all your little divestments in Madison, Wisconsin, Cambridge, Massachusetts, the state of Vermont … You made South Africa an international pariah. Coupled with a worldwide recession, you starved us of the capital we needed to sustain economic growth. You broke us.”
It’s time now to turn those pressures on big oil.
No one is proposing legislative micromanagement of Vermont’s pension monies. We just want an assertive Vermont commitment to an orderly, timely, responsible withdrawal from investments that stimulate climate change.
The Legislature has the ultimate responsibility for the long-term health of Vermont’s retirement system. The General Assembly expresses that in at least three ways. First, we pay state workers and teachers with Vermont taxpayer money. Second, the Legislature funds (or underfunds) the pension system in the state budget it passes each year. Third, periodically, it sets new policy for the pension system. When I chaired Government Operations (1989-92), we overhauled the whole pension benefits system. The Legislature responsibly enacts retirement policy changes when they are warranted. I hope it doesn’t abrogate that responsibility.
Post-Paris, we’re confronted with the sobering question: “How do we tangibly reduce greenhouse gas emissions?” For the Paris accords to work, for us to actually keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, we must leave two-thirds of the fossil fuel assets discovered but not yet harvested, in the ground. “Stranding” those deposits will have a profoundly deleterious effect on the stock value of fossil fuel corporations which currently list them as assets on their balance sheets. “Stranding assets” is not something the fossil fuel industry likes. We expect them to fight most future regulations designed to achieve suppressed emissions.
To me and many others, getting out of fossil fuels couldn’t be more prudent. Interestingly, the Burlington Employee Retirement System (BERS) recently withdrew its $145 million portfolio from Vermont Pension Investment Committee management saying the management fees were “too high” and that their portfolio was “underperforming.” As BERS considers the rewards and risks associated with fossil fuel divestment, it will attempt to anticipate future risk associated with fossil fuel investment. This feels like a prudent approach. Our obligation ought to be to the long term health of our pension system.
Chief Seattle admonished, “We haven’t so much inherited this land from our parents as borrowed it from our children.” Wise counsel. Now, as a recently retired 70-year-old, I think increasing about my legacy. What am I leaving to the next generation, my kids and their kids in turn? Perhaps basic values like honesty, a desire to contribute, a public service ethic, a commitment to try to make the world better. My bet is that each of us shares these values and a concern about what we’re leaving our children and grandchildren.
Today, I try to listen, as perhaps never before, to my kids. I am worried for our overheated planet, with its violent storms, wild fires, flooding and droughts, sea-level rise … making parts of the earth “uninhabitable” for humans and thousands of species of wildlife. We’re in danger of leaving them an awful mess. It is they who will have to cope with the consequences of our pensive “business as usual” reluctance to take decisive action against climate change. Let’s be prudent, responsible, by divesting now from fossil fuels.
