Caroline Levine speaks to Reclaim Earth Day

Caroline Levine is Cornell University Professor of Humanities and a member of the team that pressured Cornell to divest its endowment. She is a leader with TIAA Divest, the movement to call on Cornell and other universities to divest their pension funds from fossil fuels. With her permission, we gratefully reprint her Reclaim Earth Day address on the Ithaca Commons.

Hey everyone. I’m so happy and grateful to be with you all here to celebrate Earth Day!

We often hear that we all have individual responsibility for the climate crisis. How many of you feel good when you recycle a plastic water bottle? How many feel guilty when you forget to bring reusable bags to grocery store?

There’s big a problem with this focus on individual action. Psychologists say we’re prone to “single action” bias—if we do one climate-friendly action, we feel we’ve done enough and can stop there. So, you say to yourself, I recycled that bottle—I’m a good person. But if we stop and think about it, most of us also know that recycling plastic really isn’t getting to the root cause of climate change. So recycling actually distracts us from other things we could be doing.

Big Oil knows this. They’ve actually been super deliberate about getting us to focus on own individual responsibility. The oil and gas industry deliberately pushed recycling campaigns—and not just to keep us hooked on buying plastic; they also believed that pushing recycling would convince us we were doing enough for the environment and wouldn’t need to create a mass movement to stop fossil fuels. 

I had a huge lightbulb moment when a student in one of my classes told me that it was British Petroleum that came up with the idea of the carbon footprint and launched huge ad campaign for it. This was a totally genius idea for Big Oil because it got us ordinary people to feel guilty about our own decisions instead of paying attention to their ongoing plans to mine and drill. 

We often say that climate change is a huge, complicated problem to solve, but actually, there’s a pretty small number of companies driving the climate crisis. About 200 companies are keeping the rest of us locked into fossil fuels. I always say, it’s much easier to change 200 companies than billions of people’s daily habits. So let’s keep the blame where it should be—on the companies who are still pushing to expand fossil fuels right now, against every warning from the IPCC. 

History shows us that organized collective pressure campaigns work a lot better than individual actions. We know Big Oil is scared of public pressure because they keep trying to get us to focus on our own actions instead. I’m here as a representative of the divestment movement, which has been great for building large-scale public pressure on Big Oil. I’m super proud that I was part of a group of faculty and staff and students that persuaded the Cornell Trustees to divest our 8 billion dollar endowment from fossil fuels. Lots of people told us it would never work, but our campaign won in just one year!

Now I work with an organization called TIAA-Divest. Cornell, Ithaca College, and SUNY all use retirement giant TIAA to invest faculty and staff retirement funds. TIAA has a great public image as retirement fund for teachers, but they have $78 billion invested in coal, oil, and gas. 78 billion! That doesn’t make any sense. I spend my whole life investing in students, trying to set young people up for a great future, while my retirement money is going to destroy that future! And what funds my retirement? Student tuition! So TIAA is using Cornell faculty and students to pour huge sums of money into fossil fuel industry secretly, behind the scenes. And they do it secretly.

So let’s keep focused collective action. Join any of our great climate orgs—Sunrise! Climate Justice Cornell! Cornell on Fire! 

Please also consider joining us at TIAA-Divest. Visit our website: tiaa-divest.org. You don’t have to be a client to join us. You don’t need to make a big sacrifice to volunteer either. An hour a month of action is great!

And just remember that we all need to keep saying, NO! to Big Oil. Say it with me—Hey hey ho ho, fossil fuels have got to go!