Catching up on responsible investment

By: AARON MARTEL

Posted: 9/13/07

Over the summer, in the wake of the Hopkins Energy Action Team's student movement, the University implemented a comprehensive climate change policy. This is great news, and it represents an historic level of student organization and administrative responsiveness to the need for an environmental policy at Hopkins.

In a July 25 letter to students, faculty and staff, President Brody wrote, "Universities must play a central role in meeting" the challenge of global warming. He not only identifies Hopkins' research and development role in mitigating global warming, but also commits to changes in operations and policy within the institution. By implementing new environmental standards, Hopkins is taking a step towards internalizing the cost of pollution.

The University did not wait for a political solution to climate change. Rather the University and its stakeholders are taking responsibility for the unintended side effects of energy consumption.

However this may result in unintended costs. Despite Hopkins' pledging to take action to reduce its footprint on the environment, it can still invest in foreign energy companies that directly fund the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Sudan. The University may become a leader on climate change, but regarding Darfur, most top institutions (Yale, Stanford and Brown) have left us in the dust.

Both the campus climate change movement and Sudan divestment movement are moving towards critical mass in the United States. The Genocide Intervention Network has proposed a policy addressing the financial and political concerns of universities.

Targeted divestment is a narrowly focused model that calls for shifting investment from the worst-offending companies to comparable firms elsewhere. It is a non-partisan, market-based method for genocide intervention, aiming to reduce violence against Sudanese civilians while minimizing the costs to investors like Hopkins.

Awareness among the general public - the Hopkins student body included - is abysmally low. Perhaps this is due to crisis fatigue, detachment or ignorance. Media and government attention is also marginal; there is an astounding lack of urgency about a conflict that is killing hundreds of thousands (400,000 since 2003) and displacing millions. Sadly there is no An Inconvenient Truth for Darfur making rounds through mainstream theatres.

There's no marketing plan for Darfur that Americans embrace, unlike the environmental policies that countless companies have promoted over the past several years. While many firms have embraced "green branding," they have not found marketing value or encountered sufficient public pressure on Darfur intervention. It's not altogether surprising, then, that the oil company PetroChina, a key source of militia funding in Sudan, ironically has an environmental protection policy.

The Johns Hopkins Institutions sponsor a voluminous amount of work on humanitarian crises, disaster response and refugee health care. Emergency response teams from Hopkins have conducted heroic relief programs in the aftermaths of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and Hurricane Katrina. But the University does not match these altruistic initiatives with a responsible investment policy on Darfur.

The school's reluctance to agree to a definitive investment ethics policy is simply inconsistent with the school's mission and work. Just as Hopkins' carbon footprint warrants scrutiny, so does its financial footprint on the world.