Faculty Senate at U. New Mexico Demands School Divest From Fossil Fuels

Faculty Senate at U. New Mexico Demands School Divest From Fossil Fuels

The amazing thing about this is that the school has collected a fortune in revenues from the energy sector.

The Federalist reports:

University Of New Mexico Faculty Senate Demands Divestment From Fossil Fuels

The University of New Mexico Faculty Senate passed a pair of resolutions this week demanding the school’s Board of Regents divest from the state’s primary sources of funding: fossil fuels.

“Sometimes there’s a propensity to dismiss these types of resolutions as mere activism or political posturing,” Faculty Senate President Finnie Coleman said in the Albuquerque Journal Saturday. “Across the nation, there have been successful efforts at divestment, but there has to be a stomach for it.”

Divestment would put the university in company with several Ivy League schools and the University of California’s school system which also sold off their shares of oil and gas within the last 10 years. What makes the University of New Mexico’s decision stand out among the rest is the state’s continued reliance on oil and gas revenues primarily from the Permian Basin in the southeast, the world’s richest reserves shared with Texas.

The latest report from industry leaders shows revenues from oil and gas pumped $2.8 billion into the state’s coffers, making up a third of its entire budget. Much of that funding goes directly to New Mexico schools, where more than $1 billion went to K-12 classrooms and nearly $300 million went to institutes of higher education in the fiscal year of 2020, more than a third of which went to the University of New Mexico.

The school raked in more than $100 million from oil and gas revenues collected by the state for its six campuses.

“Unless each of these professors is willing to take a 30 percent cut to their paycheck, then this is nothing more than pathetic posturing,” said Larry Behrens, the western states director of Power the Future, an energy non-profit. “Perhaps these academics might want to research the phrase ‘thank you’ for New Mexico’s energy workers who are footing the bill.”

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