Fossil fuels are polluting the planet.

By Patrick Gallagher

Recently, lots of energy has gone into trying to convince universities to withdraw support from the fossil fuel industry. Polluting for profitability is slowly becoming as attractive an investment as apartheid or a slave-based business model.

Student and activist efforts have begun to sway the investor culture we live in while farsighted analysts are beginning to perceive murky futures for securities that rely on profits from smokestacks, pipelines, industrial runoff, groundwater degradation, air pollution and mountaintop removal.

In Silicon Valley, at the heart of 21st century emerging industries, Stanford University has joined 11 other colleges and universities nationwide in removing coal from its investment portfolio.

Foundations, cities and states are recognizing they are made up of people who want to breathe clean air. Seattle, San Francisco and Portland are climbing on board the divestment train, having decided to join the smarter money by divesting of coal and investing elsewhere.

During Hurricane Sandy, many buildings around Wall Street in lower Manhattan could be accessed by pontoon boats via second-floor windows. This winter, the UK experienced otherworldly flooding attributed to carbon-driven climate change.

Worldwide banking customers are persuading their banks to not lend to fossil-fuel producers.

Major financial player Blackrock has teamed with the Natural Resources Defense Council NRDC to create a fossil free stock index. Blackrock is not chartered or known as a green or particularly socially responsible index group, but it is the world’s largest asset manager with $4 trillion (with a T) in assets.

The London Financial Times calls this move a sure signal that the global campaign against fossil fuels is entering the financial mainstream. Strictly business. In fact, options for alternate investments are now easily available with all the data to support wise decisions at hand for review. The fossil-free indices exclude companies that extract or explore for fossil fuels.

It’s an absolute truth that for the moment we all share the sun and that alternatives energies of all stripes are rapidly achieving parity with fossil fuels.  At this point, the first steps towards clean and sustainable energy independence are going to have to come from a sea change in how we subsidize the choices we make.

Divestment is right in front of us. Clean, renewable choices are at our fingertips.

To me it’s very simple.  I will not invest in handing a cup of dirty water to any of the kids in my neighborhood. I don’t wanna and I’m not gunna. If there are two canisters filled with oxygen and one is polluted I want the clean one. If the earth’s atmosphere is the only canister available I want it to be cleaned up.

I’d also like to share it with my neighbors.

If I can eat real food that is not densely laden with hydrocarbons and grown in mercury-rich soil brought to me by coal emissions from neighboring states, I’d just rather have the local healthier stuff, thank you very much.

I ‘m not interested in a dirty atmosphere in my home so I need to act accordingly by withdrawing my implicit financial permission in the form of investments from extractive and pollutive industries.

In taking this approach, we can launch a truly new era of investment and job creation that broadens the opportunities for the generations that will be forced to clean up this mess.

Ask the 300,000 folks in Charleston, West Virginia, if they wanted to divest themselves of the entire cities supply of contaminated drinking water last February and then maybe ask yourself, “What’s in my wallet?”

Patrick Gallagher lives in Warwick.