TO THE EDITOR:
The Daily Tar Heel’s editorial on Monday was absolutely right about the need for UNC’s endowment to create an institutional process for fairly evaluating student concerns.
As universities with big endowments like Duke and Yale have shown, factoring social responsibility into investment policies does not mean sacrificing returns.
To use our Blue Devil rivals as an example, Duke’s student government just unanimously passed a resolution urging Duke’s Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility (formed in 2004) to instruct their university to vote for shareholder resolutions that are conscious of conflict minerals within companies in which it invests.
That’s a dialogue we’re missing out on at Carolina.
UNC continues to ignore this gap between student concerns and investment practices, but coal is the perfect place to start this campus conversation.
Financially, coal is already a risky proposition, as coal-fired electricity loses out to natural gas and renewables; just look at the recent performance of coal mining stocks.
And the environmental, public health and climate impacts of coal at all stages of production are adding up to a massive domestic human rights problem with global implications.
The coalfields of West Virginia and the rest of central Appalachia, where mountains are being flattened into moonscapes, have correctly been described as a modern-day war zone.
