Stanford, Oxford and Georgetown universities have won praise for promising to purge their endowments of direct investments in coal, embracing the fight against climate change. One detail gets lost in the celebration: the colleges have few, if any, such investments to sell in the first place. Almost three dozen colleges have announced fossil-fuel divestment pledges over the last three years, and their actions tend to have less substance than advertised. The divestment movement is letting colleges take credit for largely empty gestures, when it should be focused on energy conservation or measures such as a tax on the carbon emissions, that could curb global warming, some academics and environmentalists said.

June 23, 2015 ・ From Bloomberg Business