The BU’s board of directors voted yesterday to begin selling the university’s stakes in fossil fuel companies, school president Robert Brown announced today.

In an email to the BU community, Brown said that effective now, school investment managers will no longer make any purchases in companies that sell carbon-releasing energy products and will begin to seek investments in carbon-free energy products. produced without fossil fuels.

The school will begin to sell the stakes it already owns in such energy companies, but over time, perhaps up to a decade, “to avoid large financial losses associated with the rapid sale of investments. private with limited life “.

Harvard announced a similar fossil disposal on September 9.

Brown added that BU administrators also asked the school’s investment office to look for ways to “measure greenhouse gas emissions generated by the underlying holdings of fund management companies. endowment “and find ways to offset the net emissions of these entities”, with the idea of ​​moving to net investments with zero greenhouse gases by 2050.

Brown continued that the change in investment policy, while important, is only a small part of BU’s overall plan to do its part “to prevent the global calamity caused by climate change” which includes the renovation. of all 345 school buildings to reduce their energy consumption, launching a wind power project to match the school’s energy consumption for the next 15 years and research by professors and BU students to develop “new technologies that have the potential to drastically reduce energy consumption and mitigate the worst effects of global warming.” He finishes :

As we have learned to live and work with the virus that causes COVID-19, we are faced with another silent killer who is ultimately more dangerous than a virus. We face the challenge of changing our way of life at an unprecedented rate if we are to preserve the Earth’s environment as we know it.