Hip Hop Caucus president Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jnr in a still from the DIVEST! film. Credit: 350.org

DIVEST! screening at Electric Palace on Sunday 8 December

For World Climate Day (8 Dec) the Electric Palace in Hastings will be screening 350.org’s film DIVEST! The Climate Movement on Tour plus four shorts from Divest East Sussex. Divest East Sussex’s Gabriel Carlyle reports.

The Electric Palace cinema in Hastings Old Town will be marking World Climate Day (8 December) with a special screening of 350.org’s film DIVEST! The Climate Movement on Tour, alongside several short films produced by local campaign group Divest East Sussex.

The screening will take place at 11.30am. Tickets can be purchased at the Electric Palace website.

Featuring Naomi Klein, Desmond Tutu, Bill McKibben and others, DIVEST! chronicles US climate group 350.org’s 2012 tour across the US as it launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign onto the US and ultimately international stage. Divest East Sussex is the local part of this global movement.

The 2012 tour laid out the moral and historical arguments for fossil fuel divestment, drawing on the findings of Bill McKibben’s 2012 Rolling Stone article ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math’.

A poster for the event. Credit: Divest East Sussex

Since then, over 1600 institutions, representing over $40 trillion in assets, have made some form of commitment to ‘divest’ from (i.e. stop investing in) fossil fuel companies.

Divestment campaigns aim to effect real-world change through a process of social stigmatisation, driving restrictive legislation on a company or companies – a strategy with a proven track-record of success.

Indeed, a 2013 Oxford University report concluded that: ‘In almost every divestment campaign we reviewed from adult services to Darfur, from tobacco to South Africa, divestment campaigns were successful in lobbying for restrictive legislation affecting stigmatised firms.’

The 8 December screening will also feature four short films from Divest East Sussex, including Hope in the Henhouse (a special song about East Sussex Pension Committee chair Gerard Fox, composed during one of the 2020 lockdowns) and This is a climate crime scene! (a one minute film about the December 2021 encirclement of County Hall with ‘climate crime scene tape’).

For the last eleven years, Divest East Sussex has been campaigning for East Sussex County Council and the East Sussex Pension Fund to stop investing in fossil fuel companies like Shell and BP.

The East Sussex Pension Fund, which covers Brighton & Hove as well as East Sussex but is administered by East Sussex County Council (ESCC), has consistently refused to stop investing in fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas). It currently has millions of pounds of local people’s pension monies invested in fossil fuel companies.

Hastings Borough Council passed its first motion calling on ESCC to divest from fossil fuels in April 2016.

The screening on 8 December will be followed by a Q&A with St Leonards-based researcher Dario Kenner (author of the 2019 book Carbon Inequality: The Role of the Richest in Climate Change) and local climate activist Jane Ripley (Scientists for Extinction Rebellion).

Local councillors who support divestment at the front of the “Climate Crime Scene” protest outside County Hall, December 2021. Photo: Emily Mott

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