Nobel Prize Foundation urged to divest from fossil fuels

This week 14 Nobel Prize winners and scientists released an open letter urging the Nobel Foundation to divest its $420 million endowment from fossil fuels. Right now Divest Nobel activists are creatively protesting outside the prestigious Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm to make sure the message to divest is heard. After all, Chemist Alfred Nobel said in his will:

"Nobel prizes should be awarded to those who “shall have conferred the greatest benefit to [hu]mankind.”

In a prepared statement emailed today, a spokesperson for 350.org, the climate change activists, said: "The world is watching. Amplify the call to divest the Nobel Foundation right now: Tweet @NobelPrize or comment on their Facebook page.

World-changing physicists, chemists, journalists, lawyers and authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report all argue that Nobel "should not profit from the destruction of our planet’s climate," according to the statement.

Three fifity.org points out the irony that the Nobel Foundation, which was established to celebrate those benefitting humankind, should be partly funding its activities from companies doing harm - from BP to Shell to Lukoil. Laureates who are being conferred the great prize echo the sentiment in their letter: “As laureates and scientists embracing Alfred Nobel’s final words, it is our expectation that the Nobel Foundation also act in the interest of humankind which includes caring for the health of the planet which we all rely upon.”

You can add your own voice to the voices of the 14 Laureates and the Divest Nobel crew in Stockholm by tweeting here.

Photo: By Strakhov (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons