Teens are pushing their schools towards sustainable investment around the world (and how to get involved!).
As we hopped on our first ever call with the president of the endowment board, the nerves kicked in. The Nueva Fossil Fuel Divestment Team, a group of around 10 students, had already been active for about seven years when I (Ines Pajot, ‘25) joined the team. Yet, we hoped this meeting would finally kickstart Nueva’s Divestment process.
Our mission seemed pretty simple: convince The Nueva School, based in California, to completely divest its endowment from fossil fuels. Fossil fuel divestment, which is essentially the selling of fossil fuel stocks, had already widely occurred at the collegiate level. Harvard, the UC System, and the State of New York had famously divested from fossil fuels. In this initial meeting, we explained that fossil fuels were unethical investments because their combustion creates the climate crisis. Furthermore, they would become increasingly unprofitable investments as society approached Net Zero.
Only, the president saw divestment differently. He explained that since the world relied on fossil fuels, we couldn’t just divest because we didn’t want to use them anymore. In fact, if the whole world divested right now, there would be mass famine and the economy would crumble. No, divestment to make a social statement had to be from the specific fossil fuel companies that refused to change their business model in the face of the climate crisis.
At one point, he asked us point blank: “Do you think that Nueva should be invested in BP right now?” I thought to myself: “Well… this is complicated: BP currently invests 20%, maybe 30% of their profits in the energy transition. This is clearly a good thing, so maybe we should show our support for this company by investing in it. However, BP is still a fossil fuel company, so surely it would be unethical to still invest in them.” Clearly, this process would not be as straightforward as I had thought, and reaching a final decision would take many meetings.
The reason behind my uncertainty is that using investments to encourage societal sustainability is not a black-and-white process: it doesn’t necessarily constitute divesting from every single fossil fuel company on the market. At our next club meeting, we discussed the call and reflected on our mission. We realised that to our core, we hoped to accelerate the societal transition towards clean energy. Divestment was not the aim, just a potential tool. And indiscriminate divestment was a sloppy tool.
So what other tools are out there? Following hours of research (recommended follow-up reading: IEFA report on fossil fuel investments, JP Morgan on investing in the transition, Freakonomics podcast on ESG investing pros and cons), we decided to adopt a two-pronged mission for our investments:
The first step was indeed to divest from the fossil fuel companies that are hindering the green energy transition. Some fossil fuel companies lobby politicians for environmentally unfriendly policies, fund climate disinformation, and refuse to change their business model to produce low-carbon energy. In those cases, it is unethical to invest in these companies, and we should divest from them to stigmatise them, revoking their social licence (or “acceptance”) to operate. Many colleges, such as Princeton and Yale, have formed their own “blacklist” of fossil fuel companies that engage in these types of practices.
Second, invest in fossil fuel and renewable energy companies whose business models are (or are planned to be) primarily based on generating low-carbon energy. If a fossil fuel company is in the process of transitioning, for example by heavily investing in offshore wind farms, why should we stigmatise them? After all, they are doing the right thing. Similarly, it is critical that society at large invest in projects and companies that are producing clean energy solutions. For example, investing in wind farms, solar power, energy efficient building designs, local food systems, and transportation system systems will help us get where we need to be. The reason is that continuous reinvestment in cleantech drives its innovation, expansion, and implementation in society. In fact, the Energy Transitions Commission identified in 2023 that, “Around $3.5 trillion a year of capital investment will be needed on average between now and 2050 to build a net-zero global economy, up from $1 trillion per annum today.” We wanted our schools to be part of providing those investments.
With this in mind, the Nueva Divestment Team considerably changed our sustainable investing approach and we renamed ourselves the Nueva Divestment & Reinvestment Team. In parallel, we asked ourselves: “Why should divestment and reinvestment only happen at Nueva?” Why not encourage every high school in the United States to “Divest & Reinvest?” That way, systemic, large-scale change would happen.
And that’s why we founded the High School Clean Energy Investment Coalition. The name is a bit of a mouthful, I know, so we nicknamed ourselves hsCleanInvest. We expanded our coalition using the following strategy. First, we would pitch our cause to people from different high schools across the U.S. and encourage them to set up their own DivestReinvest teams. Persuading schools to join was relatively easy: our calls had an essentially 100% success rate. This is because most young people understand — no matter what state they lived in — the true impact of climate change and thus the importance of the green energy transition. Within a year, we managed to incorporate 20 private schools throughout the U.S. into our coalition. Private schools were our target as these schools typically have endowments.
What you don’t yet know about me is that I’m actually British. I had been living with my family in the U.S., but we moved to London ahead of my junior year of high school. Seeing an opportunity, I decided to bring London-based schools into the coalition. And suddenly, hsCleanInvest became international.
In particular, I looped in Henry Li (also ‘25) into the coalition. We had met through a mutual friend. His school, Westminster School, has many international students, so he was able to contact environmental leads at schools from all across the world, making our coalition truly global. As of writing, hsCleanInvest has more than 51 member schools in 11 countries around the world.
So, what does our coalition actually do? First, we help member schools through their sustainable investing journey by learning from one another, so that people who don’t have a lot of experience in finance but care about climate change (and by extension how responsibly their school invests its money) can create structural change. By sharing our experience, we have a lot of schools around the world achieving in a few months what Nueva managed to achieve over several years. Secondly, our coalition demonstrates that sustainable investing is a growing movement. We have found that many individual schools had already divested or reinvested, but existed in a vacuum before. By incorporating them into our coalition, we magnified their impact and encouraged other schools to do the same. Finally, we are a community: We advise each other, reach out to each other for help, and motivate each other if change is slow.
We encourage any interested students and schools to join hsCleanInvest. Email us at hscleanenergyinvest@gmail.com, and or fill out the form on our website, and we can set up a short Zoom call. If you believe that your school should be investing sustainably, we can help. Together we can use what influence we have to make a positive impact on the world.
Want more? Get a Glimpse Into Environmentalism in Spain From This Student Dispatch.
