Bill McKibben picks up US $ 100,000 Norwegian prize - and asks Norway to close down its oil and gas industry

This week Eco-fundamentalist Bill McKibben took a high carbon footprint flight to fossil fuel rich Norway - "the country I love the most beyond my own"" - in order to pick up the Sophie Prize, "an international award (US $ 100,000), for environment and sustainable development".

One wonders what the Norwegians thought about McKibben's speech at the prize ceremony, in which he in effect urged Norway to close down to its entire fossil fuel industry - the source of the country's riches:

"And here Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, as the largest single investor on the planet, has a crucial role to play. It is time for Norway to end its investments in fossil fuel. Yes, that wealth was built on oil, mostly in a time when we didn’t understand its peril. But now it needs to be invested in the future, not the past.
Morality demands no less. If it is wrong to wreck the climate, then it is wrong to profit from the wreckage. And if Norway takes this step, it will reverberate. It won’t immediately end climate change; many other strategies are needed."

Harvard says no to Bill McKibben

Harvard says no to eco-fundamentalist Bill McKibben and other radical environmentalists who have demanded that the university with the world's largest endowment divest of its holdings in the fossil fuel industry. Although paying lip service to the global warming alarmist cause, Harvard president Drew Faust is in her statement quite clear about the university's position. Faust - quite rightly - even suggests that the eco-fundamentalists are hypocritical:

While I share their belief in the importance of addressing climate change, I do not believe, nor do my colleagues on the Corporation, that university divestment from the fossil fuel industry is warranted or wise.
Harvard is an academic institution.  It exists to serve an academic mission — to carry out the best possible programs of education and research.  We hold our endowment funds in trust to advance that mission, which is the University’s distinctive way of serving society.  The funds in the endowment have been given to us by generous benefactors over many years to advance academic aims, not to serve other purposes, however worthy.  As such, we maintain a strong presumption against divesting investment assets for reasons unrelated to the endowment’s financial strength and its ability to advance our academic goals. --

I also find a troubling inconsistency in the notion that, as an investor, we should boycott a whole class of companies at the same time that, as individuals and as a community, we are extensively relying on those companies’ products and services for so much of what we do every day.  Given our pervasive dependence on these companies for the energy to heat and light our buildings, to fuel our transportation, and to run our computers and appliances, it is hard for me to reconcile that reliance with a refusal to countenance any relationship with these companies through our investments.