For college students concerned about their, and the globe’s, future in a warming world, the Center for Economic Justice (CEJ) and the Institute for Policy Studies' Sustainable Energy and Economy Network (SEEN) is launching a national campaign – the “Spank the Bank†Student Climate Justice Campaign – that will give them a powerful tool to stop global warming and environmental injustice. We will do this by tackling a root cause: university funding of dirty energy, especially through universities’ investment in the World Bank, the leading financier of fossil fuel projects, which lead to global warming.
We aim to build a national campaign among university students, raising awareness and urging accountability at the university level. Our strategy is to use university endowments’ investments in the energy sector, in addition to public attention and citizen mobilization, as leverage points to force changes in university investment policy which promotes climate-changing activities. More specifically, we intend to launch campaigns on strategic U.S. university campuses, mobilizing student pressure to shift their universities’ endowments to clean energy investments, to hold their universities accountable for their investments in global warming, and to get their universities to formally endorse the World Bank Bonds Boycott. We hope to work with regional and national student environmental and social justice networks and organizations, such as the Climate Campaign, Energy Action, and Sierra Student Coalition. This initiative will build a cohesive network of university organizations effectively challenging climate change and, simultaneously, the World Bank.
In the short term, the impact we seek is change in universities’ investment policy regarding clean energy. Another hoped-for impact is much greater public awareness and student mobilization around climate change, and how student’s tuition and tax dollars can have a direct impact on the issue. In the longer term, we seek a change in the energy policies of the World Bank and other public institutions.
Geographical Scope: National Added on 01-17-2006 Updated on 10-03-2007 |
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