Duke’s obsession with shareholder returns in a climate crisis
I have been active in the campaign to get Duke to fully divest from fossil fuels since I was a freshman. I went into it knowing it would be frustrating and that the work would rarely yield any significant results. Still, I’m graduating in less than a year, and I cannot stand the fact that I will likely be leaving having made no impact on Duke’s investment practices despite the years of hard work by Duke Climate Coalition’s (DCC) campaign. I have tried my best to be patient, to understand that the bureaucracy of a college administration can often hinder rapid change, but I am sick of being patient. As I write this, many island nations are facing the threat of becoming uninhabitable in the coming decades, millions of people are dying annually because of climate change and we have already passed the point of no return. Now is not the time to slowly let things happen at a pace that our current system feels comfortable with.