Chevron’s El Segundo, California oil refinery in 2007. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Jensen Kugler
Copy Editor
As the Voice reported last March, the College’s investment portfolio is considered “intellectual property” and is not shared in-depth with the public. This makes it difficult for students to gauge Wooster’s involvement with corporations responsible for ecological damage. What do we know? Well, in its most recent, publicly accessible yearly investment earnings from 2022, The College of Wooster profited from multiple companies tied to environmental damage and controversy such as Chevron and ExxonMobil.
This line of questioning relates deeply to recent efforts by the student-led “Divestment Coalition” urging the board of trustees to divest from nine companies associated with Israeli war manufacturing. These are Chevron, ExxonMobil, Home Depot, McDonald’s, Costco, Amazon, Google/Alphabet, Brilliant Earth and SoundThinking/ShotSpotter. Questions of divestment have societal relevance across countless social axes including issues of gender, class, race and religion. To that end, divestment has a deep environmental resonance that cannot be ignored. Of the nine divestment targets, six seem clearly connected to environmental harm.
Take Chevron, for instance. In March, The Desert Sun reported that Chevron agreed to pay $13 million after investigations of dozens of oil spills. At least one of Chevron’s oil spills is still running “21 years after it began” and the spills in Chevron’s Cymric oil field have produced over six million gallons of crude oil and wastewater since last June. The $13 million agreement only covers two million gallons of spills.
Chevron appears to be a company of questionable ethics in regards to environmental stewardship. This raises an important question — do we as a college community want to financially support further damage to an already dying planet?
ExxonMobil, another divestment target, has a storied history of climate change denial. As Bill McKibben notes in his chapter of The Climate Book, ExxonMobil knew as early as the 1970s what the environmental impact of their industry was. Rather than changing course, they hired experts in public relations to “instill doubt about the science in the public mind.” This resulted in decades of debate about whether global warming actually existed. ExxonMobil only publicly acknowledged the existence of climate change and its ties to the fossil fuel industry in 2007.
McDonald’s is one of the largest fast food chains in the world, and thus is also a prominent carbon emitter. Every two ounces of beef equates to around eight pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. McDonald’s’ near-constant production of hamburgers alone makes the company a significant emitter.
Amazon set a net-zero target for their emissions in 2019, aligning them with the UN-backed group Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi). As of 2023, Amazon’s emissions were up by “about 40%” and lost the SBTi endorsement for failing to implement a “commitment to set a credible target for reducing carbon emissions,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Greenhouse gas emissions are also an issue for Google/Alphabet. Google’s rush to incorporate AI has led to a vast increase in company emissions. CNN reported in July that “Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have soared 48% since 2019.”
The corporations in question here have also been associated with unethical practices. In 2020, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice announced that The Home Depot would be required to pay a $20,750,000 penalty for their nationwide failure to follow rules for conducting renovations involving lead paint. This suggests workplace negligence, mistreatment of workers and a serious disregard for public health.
Six out of nine divestment targets are within the top 100 of Forbes’ 2024 Global 2000 list — with McDonald’s at No. 222 — meaning that they are among the richest companies in the world. This is significant because the wealthiest 10% produce the largest portion of global emissions, while having the most material access to ethical, environmental practices.
So what does all of this mean for the College? Personally, I feel that Wooster needs to give more thought to what investments mean outside of profit.
As a campus community, we have the power to resist Wooster’s money going towards violence and destruction. Our resistance may be fruitless in the end, but I implore you all to try. I love this school, and I care about the people here. Let’s do our due diligence to ensure that we are really a community of independent minds working together.