Determined to stay “as long as it takes,” students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Thursday are staging a sit-in outside the president’s office to demand that the university heed the call of thousands of its students and a presidential advisory committee by divesting from fossil fuels.
Sparking the direct action was a five-year climate action plan (pdf) issued Wednesday by MIT President L. Rafael Reif that shuns divestment and instead stresses the need to “bring [the fossil fuel] industry closer.”
Referencing the announcement last week by CEOs of ten of the world’s fossil fuel giants in support of the UN’s climate goals, the plan states: “We believe we have greater power to build on such momentum not by distancing ourselves from fossil fuel companies, but by bringing them closer to us.”
“The plan is too little, too late,” PhD student Geoffrey Supran, a member of the president climate advisory committee and of the student group Fossil Free MIT, told Common Dreams. “When it comes to divestment, the president chooses to ignore all the voices calling for climate action and does the opposite and brings industry closer,” he said as he was taking part in the sit-in.
The sit-in is “really about bearing witness to the failure of leadership at MIT to respond to those specific calls,” he said.
Those voices include over 3,500 MIT students who’ve signed a petition calling on President Reif to divest the university’s holdings from the fossil fuel industry, as well as the support stated (pdf) in June by three-quarters of the president’s climate advisory committee for divestment from companies engaged in coal and tar sands extraction.
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