Colleges from around central New York will participate in a panel on Wednesday night to discuss the movement to divest from fossil fuels.

The panel, which is hosted by the Sierra Club Iroquois Group, will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday at the University United Methodist Church. Groups participating in the panel include fossil fuel divestment organizations from Syracuse University, the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, the State University of New York at Cortland and Onondaga Community College.

Divest SU, SU’s fossil fuel divestment campaign, will co-host the event with the Sierra Club. OCC has already committed to partial divestment and the OCC Endowment Foundation will offer an administrative perspective on divestment at the event, according to the Syracuse Sierra Club’s website.

The goal of the panel is to educate the public on their efforts toward divestment in fossil fuel stocks that contribute to climate change.

The discussion is an opportunity to learn more about this cause and to get involved in the campaign for divestment at SU and elsewhere, said Martha Loew, chair of the Iroquois group within the Atlantic Chapter of the Sierra Club.

Loew said acts of protest are the students’ way of saying, “We won’t support you if you won’t support us against climate change.” The campaign for divestment is ongoing at more than 300 college campuses in the United States and is active globally in more than 800 cities.

Don Hughes, co-chair of the Atlantic Chapter’s Beyond Coal Committee, said he believes that millennials need to pay attention to environmental issues. Each year, humans are filling the earth’s atmosphere with billions of tons of carbon dioxide, which causes the temperature of the environment to increase, he said.

This behavior is causing problems with the world’s weather system, Hughes said, leading to the melting of ice, disrupted ecosystems, a rise in sea level and an expansion of disease and that it is up to the next generation to see the club’s mission through.

“Divesting from fossil fuels is a powerful call to action that is much like the divestment movement that helped end Apartheid in the 1980s. Thousands of universities, churches and individual investors have decided to pull their investments out of the oil, gas and coal industries,” Hughes said. “In the long term, fossil fuels are a bad investment since they threaten the survival of future generations.”

Published on February 25, 2015 at 12:01 am

Contact: mpmoor02@syr.edu