Post Carbon Fellow Bill McKibben was interviewed on Democracy Now! as news broke of University of California fossil fuel divestments.

From the interview:

“Well, it is, and it’s kind of a shock, I got to say. We started this divestment movement, you remember, three years ago. And when we started, it was small. The first college to divest was Unity College up in Maine, whose endowment was, I think, under $10 million, maybe well under $10 million. In the past two weeks, the California state Legislature has to divested CalPERS and CalSTRS, two of the biggest pension—two of the 20 biggest pension funds on Earth. And then yesterday comes the news, kind of out of the blue, that the UC system, you know, the iconic campuses at Berkeley and UCLA and Santa Barbara and Davis, beginning to divest at least from coal and tar sands oil. Their portfolio is not $10 million, it’s $98 billion. There’s a kind of just dramatic momentum behind this people’s uprising on climate change. We’ve finally gotten it through our heads that unless we push hard, our leaders aren’t going to do what needs doing, so now we’re pushing.”