To: The Board of Trustees & The Investment Committee
Divest Gilman School from Fossil Fuels
As a leader in education, Gilman School needs to advance in a sustainable direction. The Gilman community has already taken several steps to reduce our impact on climate change by installing solar panels and renovating buildings to be energy efficient. But now it is time to finish the job. We can no longer support climate destruction with investments from our endowment. It is not sustainable. We call on the investment committee to immediately halt any new investment in fossil-fuel companies, and to divest within five years from direct ownership and from any commingled funds that include fossil-fuel public equities and corporate bonds. We believe this is the right path for all Baltimore area private schools, and that Gilman, one of the best, should take the lead in protecting its graduates from a future of climate chaos.
Why is this important?
Climate change is accelerating. We are witnessing the increasing impacts of a warming planet more and more consistently; in this last year alone our country experienced record-breaking heat, droughts, and hurricanes, which impacted hundreds of thousands of people and cost our country hundreds of billions of dollars. Hurricane Sandy alone caused $50 billion in damages. Experts agree that global warming caused by humans burning fossil fuels will continue to accelerate and intensify these tragic climate disasters. The scientific consensus is clear and overwhelming; we cannot safely burn even half of global fossil-fuel reserves without dangerously warming the planet for several thousand years.
