Slashdot Mirror
Stanford Getting Rid of $18 Billion Endowment of Coal Stock
mdsolar sends this report from the NY Times:
"Stanford University announced Tuesday that it would divest its $18.7 billion endowment of stock in coal-mining companies, becoming the first major university to lend support to a nationwide campaign to purge endowments and pension funds of fossil fuel investments. The university said it acted in accordance with internal guidelines that allow its trustees to consider whether 'corporate policies or practices create substantial social injury' when choosing investments. Coal's status as a major source of carbon pollution linked to climate change persuaded the trustees to remove companies 'whose principal business is coal' from their investment portfolio, the university said."
They are not acting in the best interest of those the endowments are there to serve. They are using the financial clout of the endowments to make a political statement, often to the detriment of the endowment's beneficiaries.
Stupid.
maybe it is time for a digital, decentralized, cryptofuel.
like dogecoal, bitcoal, or cleancoal?
Owning a company or not isn't going to determine whether an industry is profitable.
Does this mean Standford will divest itself from the use of electricity too? Or is this just a hypocritical publicity stunt?
Those who can do. Those who can't sue.
You make investments based on financial data and analyses. Not politics. Fire the Stanford trustees. Morons.
Meh, I'll stock my stove with Sequoia logs.
In retrospect, everything that worked out looks pretty smart, doesn't it?
Everything that didn't work out? Nobody talks about it.
How much social injury does having no electricity cause?
Stanford University has an $18 billion endowment, but only a fraction of that is invested in coal mining companies. They're not just dumping $18 billion worth of stock.
How can a university have so much money?
Sorry, but it just seems wrong that institutions that are made to educate people and provide venues for scientific research, to become money hoarding corporations. How much research could they do with a fraction of that money?! The educational debt in the country continues to increase while all these universities hoard more and more wealth.
This is an amazingly stupid approach to look good and get into the good graces of green initiative supporters. But, I am sure, they are not going to stop producing coal from those mines. They are just going to sell it to another entity, which in turn will utilize "dirtier" methods to cultivate these mines and sell the same product to the public to cause the same amount of pollution. It is just plain dumb, but again this is a university suystem with roots in the most liberal of the places, San Francisco Bay Area. Good riddance to them.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
they are reducing the value of future offerings by becoming one less bidder for those shares.
Not by much, because the summary is WRONG. $18B is the value of their entire endowment. The fraction of that specifically invested in coal is a tiny fraction of that. If they are smart, they already divested, before making the announcement.
Coal might not be the best choice environmentally but at least its functional today. How much money has the country wasted on pipe-dream "green" energy that mainly was setup as an easy way for their exec's to make a quick buck? Instead of trying to make a political point, why not use their resources to actually CREATE a functional "green" energy source and give that technology to the public so we could migrate from coal.
My grumpy-cat side wishes the coal-fired power plants could be allowed to shut down for a week or two just to see the stupid looks on all these "activists" faces when their power goes out. Maybe a nuclear power plant will save them, you know we have built so many new and advanced ones lately.
To the contrary, Stanford is simply astute enough to be the first to sell, while the price of companies involved in coal are still high. Its now just a trickle, but soon it will be a flood. The smart ones always get out first. The rest won't be able to afford not to and will begin to sell as their portfolios in these companies as they decrease in value. With new solar technologies capable of energy capture at up to 70% likely to start hitting the market within 5 years and wind energy becoming cheaper and cheaper and the electric car industry just around the corner, fossil fuel dinosaurs will be returning once again to the depths. Only those locked in will ride coal and ultimately fossil fuels all the way to the bottom.
The energy barons of the future will be those that invested in renewables first. Its inevitable and of course, the reason that China is now spending 3 times more on solar ($147 billion in 2011) than the US ($52 billion in 2011). No one can say the Chinese don't know how to grow their economy, which will be the world's largest this year, if it isn't already.
If stanford really wanted to make a difference they would actually do something.
Selling stock for money will change nothing but their portfolio. It allows standford its to avoid a political liability. "COVER YOUR ASS" is the name of the game. Under no circumstance do you say or promote anything that will cause excess risk or expose any liability unless calculated and approved to be politically expedient.
By selling Stanford will put downward pressure on the stock of coal companies, which means they have less capital against which to borrow and pay executives their stock options. It will take more and more stock options to keep the insiders happy, which will put further pressure on the stocks as other stockholders recognized they are soon to be the last guy out and the one holding the bag. If owned stock in a coal company, I would be selling as quickly as possible and moving into solar, wind and other renewables, since these will be the growth industries of the future, while fossil fuels will be creating more and more pollution and health problems for more and more people, leading to more litigation, more calls for regulation and less profits, especially as the world grows hotter and hotter and the 99% figure out they are being stuck with the tab. Its bad enough that oil companies have been raising prices recently to fund lobbying and campaigning for their favorite republican candidates. As fracking leads to more earthquakes and health and water issues, expect to see the profits in the fossil fuels sectors decline as those in the alternative energy industries rise as new technologies power increase efficiencies and growing public acceptance. It will only take one El Nino to drive this point home to all but those most deeply in denial.
Stanford is simply selling coal stocks while they are high and moving into alternative energies, which are on their way up. From an investment point of view this is a no brainer.
Or they could have just taken all those "evil" profits they made off the coal stocks and set up solar for their entire campus.
No need to nationalize these industries. Alternative energy and natural gas are putting them out of business soon anyway. Stanford just doesn't want clunkers draining their portfolios going forward. Its not as if global warming isn't actually occurring.
Unless they want to turn off every light and computer on campus, they are still regularly using coal energy.
California has a pretty diverse power grid.
On another note, it's only early May and we are already having air quality problems here in Metro Atlanta.
We are all coal around here and big trucks.
And due to my health issues, I'm stuck indoors.
I just wish we could get away from this antiquated 19th century fuels and engine technology and move into the 21st century.
First of all, Stanford does not own $18B in coal stocks. 18B is the ENTIRE endowment amount. Coal stocks are a small fraction of the total.
Now that that little correction is out of the way....
Stanford seems to me to be making an entirely political statement. Selling all of their coal stock is not going to change the supply of coal by even an ounce. Someone else will simply buy the shares.
I wonder how many of those coal plants are producing electricity that powers all those Teslas that I see on the roads here? The electricity has to come from somewhere and there are not enough Solar panels to meet the need. Other options? Nuclear? Not in California.
Almost any way you slice it, power generation is a dirty business.
Shouldn't the responsibility of the endowment trustees be strictly fiduciary? In other words, manage the money and leave the political grandstanding to someone else.
I hope they got a good price! Er no, wait, that would be ba--- does not compute!!!
Yeah, god put the coal there for us to use, right? Fuckwit. Let's see how your bible saves you next time severe weather hits.
This is about the likely future value of such investments in face of regulatory hostility. If their fund managers thought the investments were long-term viable, they would keep them. They really should have quietly divested in early 2011, as did most hedge funds.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
>"Stanford's coal stock is half of my country's annual state budget"
Big deal! My country has $18 billion more in debt since you posted that!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
If they were really more concerned with the environment than politics, they would refuse to USE electricity generated from FOSSIL FUEL. This would actually help the environment. But if they did this, they would have no electricity at times.
So, they are quite happy to benefit from fossil fuels while publicly denouncing them as evil and harmful to the environment.
Stupid and shameful.
But no actual journalist (if there is such a thing anymore) would ever point this out.
Wow, you make a lot of assumptions here. First, you assume the author of the above post is Christian. Second, you impugn him/her with your own lack of wit.
Climate change is a fact. We all agree on this for the most part. Some people see it as a result of fossil fuels, some don't. Coal IS a resource we cannot ignore at the moment. The magical clean, green energy like wind and water is not far enough to sustain or scale to what the US or any other large nation needs. Sure, it can work locally, but the grid will always have fossil fuel sources in this lifetime. That's OK. No need to get angry over all of this. Discourse is only valuable if it's discourse.
Stanford's own Professor Mark Jacobson and twenty Stanford students demonstrated that California could be entirely fossil fuel free by 2050. Stanford should divest from all fossil fuel companies. http://www.stanford.edu/group/...
And, when Stanford divested from tobacco, it made it hard for tobacco companies to get Stanford Medical School grads to shill for them. Divestment has broad effects.
The smart investors are the ones who hold on until *right* when the stock begins falling. (It's impossible to know where the "peak" is in advance, so realistically, investors can't ever be expected to be able to sell at the absolute optimal place. If that happens, it's sheer luck.) If you always let go of investments because you feel that in the long-term, they're going to taper off and eventually die -- you're probably kissing a lot of potential revenue goodbye.
Right now, Mobil is right at the top of the charts for profits made annually or quarterly, and they're not one of the environmentally green providers of alternative energy. They're selling good old fashioned oil and gasoline.
If the new solar technologies you're talking about will take 5 more years to come to market, you can bet it will be another couple years at least before they're implemented in a major way. (People who already invested in older solar technology won't always be in a position to do an upgrade, and others will need some time to put it online.) So now you're talking maybe 7 years before that has a real impact on something like coal sales? That's a long time to keep making money on your coal stocks, IMO.
It's too much money for that. Coal is on the way out. Real "Clean" Coal is expensive as hell. Solar has gotten cheaper if you're not offsetting the costs by dumping pollution into the air and water and letting the gov't clean it up. I think they're just going to sell off what they've got while they stock price is still pretty high.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
BUt hey, it makes a great statement. So now they can invest in carbon free nuclear? No, they don't understand nuclear, being propagandized against it long ago. It seems the Ivy League is nothing if not ignorant. They don't know the capital of Israel. Just ask Jay Carney. They can't pronounce the word corps - just ask the prez who pronounced it corpse.
and it really worked cause no one smokes anymore.
And this is the only way . . .
cause the coldest 6 months in anyone's lifetime
passed in April. The globe really is getting hot ~~ not.
But it is great they are getting rid of fossil fuels - and burning methane instead.
Good thing they are getting rid of carbon and burning CH4!
Based on the learned statements on here
I think you are all from the Ivy League.
They may just invest that money into something else that will give a better return. You'll have to wait some years before you can make such a statement in retrospect. If you can already predicting that they will fail to find a better investment, you should be working for an investment company and not posting here on SlashDot.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
oh fuck off, being an AC troll is a mental disorder, what mind numbing arrogant shits they are...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
What is the supposed relation between liberalism and the man-made global warming hypothesis?
I'd actually guess that most climate sceptics are liberals or conservatives. At least where I come from, it are mostly the left wing parties and their voters that support measures against targeted towards reducing CO2 emissions.
it's about money and investment. Education - or schooling - are just the means.
Divest (and stop buying!) anything even partially owned by the fucking Koch brothers.
Divesting from coal BEFORE the fossil fuel energy bubble collapses is a smart investment move. Renewable energy is already at near cost parity and doesn't require raping the planet for resources and then poisoning it with greenhouse gases. And that near cost parity was achieved without the gigantic subsidies the fossil fuel industry received, including trillions of taxpayer dollars to safeguard Iraqi oil. It won't be long before fossil fuel energy will be just too expensive to be economically competitive. Best to divest from it sooner rather than later.
Perils of being a Stanford grad!
Chart here . 50% if you include other carbon.
so they sell shares of their evil coal stocks but dont cut the power lines coming into their campus. Yawn... more pr bullshit from academics....
For all the comments on this being a bad decision, an attempt to make a political statement, it can also be seen as forward thinking. The investors involved in nurturing the endowments probably see the writing on the wall. With clean energy coming into its own, coal will be increasingly seen as unneeded and detrimental to the environment and humanity in the longterm. Battery Technology is about to explode with the introduction of Tesla's battery factories and silicons replacement, carbon nanotube materials that conduct electricity so much better. From my observance of news and company postings home battery use will increase and solar and wind energy storage will be enough to offset the need for coal power plants to take up the slack when the sun is down or the wind is not blowing. Stanford is well placed to see this movement at least in California, where Californians have been burned by the last decades brownouts and greedy manipulative power industry fat cats.
Put it that way (seeing him run) is what. He'll run out of modpoints, which are limited and finite, and he'll run out of sockpuppets with them too eventually is what. He likes tossing names? Funny he can't back them up, now can he?? Nope. Google & Bing'll shiow that, soon enough. I win. Always.
From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
From a fair challenge like a chickenshit blowhard http://slashdot.org/comments.p...