How divestment became a ‘clarion call’ in anti-fossil fuel and pro-ceasefire protests

The divestment movement has a long history among US student activists, including in the overlapping movements of today

Cameron Jones first learned about fossil fuel divestment as a 15-year-old climate organizer. When he enrolled at Columbia University in 2022, he joined the campus’s chapter of the youth-led climate justice group the Sunrise Movement and began pushing the school in New York to sever financial ties with coal, oil and gas companies.

“The time for institutions like Columbia to be in the pocket of fossil fuel corporations has passed,” Jones wrote in an October 2023 op-ed in the student newspaper directed toward Columbia president Minouche Shafik.