Regarding the May 5 commentary, "Plan to divest pension fund harms workers and taxpayers": As activists, in advocating divestment we do not expect to have a direct effect on the value of carbon stocks that are easily resold. Our goal is to stigmatize the fossil fuel industry by revealing its unsustainability as a business, and that this unsustainability is because of its increasingly immoral refusal to recognize that it is the cause of potentially catastrophic climate change.

The instability of this industry is not local but global. Our goal is to warn pension fund officers that the industry's decline is coming, and to filter out fossil fuel assets from pension funds sooner rather than later. Proponents of shareholder advocacy such as state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli argue for later, with faith that there is time to work together with an industry that has no desire or incentive to abandon its massive holdings and whose long-term awareness of carbon impacts on the climate has been intentionally obscured. The industry is eager to sell as much of its buried carbon as it can before it can't, and any strategy for delay, such as drawn-out shareholder engagements, is eagerly embraced.

Divestment illuminates the decline of a frozen, government-subsidized global industry whose one product has damaged and continues to damage our future. Divestment gives us the time to wisely reinvest in a sustainable future and adapt to the strong economic and climate forces that are coming.

John Ingram

New York City

The writer is a member of 350 NYC.