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Harvard Divestment Activists Pour Molasses on Themselves to Symbolize an Oil Spill

Harvard Divestment Activists Pour Molasses on Themselves to Symbolize an Oil Spill

“The school has refused to divest its fossil fuel holdings in spite of sustained protests on its campus.”

This is one of those instances where the protest is really performance art and the spectacle matters more than the issue.

The College Fix reports:

Harvard fossil fuel divestment group stages mock oil spill on campus

In a bid to convince the university to divest its holdings in fossil fuels, activists at Harvard on Friday staged a mock oil spill on the campus, pouring molasses over their heads in order to simulate an environmentally devastating oil disaster.

The Harvard Crimson reports that three students—a freshman, a sophomore and a junior—all “sat on white sheets while three other Divest Harvard members, wearing placards bearing the names of oil companies, drenched them with a thick, brown liquid meant to symbolize oil.”

According to The Crimson, one attendee, named Miles Mcallister, said the demonstration was “amazing…really cool and special and powerful.”

Divestment has historically been a losing issue at Harvard. The school has refused to divest its fossil fuel holdings in spite of sustained protests on its campus. A petition that circulated last year calling for divestment snagged a vanishingly small number of signatures from the student body. A year ago, not even 10 percent of student voters wanted to see a fossil fuel divestment referendum on the ballot; the student government was forced to vote the referendum through on its own.

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Comments

I wish they could get diabetes that way.

RELEASE THE BEES

In Hawaii we actually have had some devastating molasses spills. ….Just saying.

The Friendly Grizzly | November 20, 2019 at 7:39 am

Coating yourselves with molasses? A rum do, that….

What is the purpose of “student government”? Why should some students have control over what other students see, vote on, etc?

Although these days a faculty vote deciding things could be even worse.

How tasteless to stage a molasses spill -in Boston- on the 100th anniversary year of the Great Molasses Flood . Couldn’t they use some other liquid?

https://www.history.com/news/the-great-molasses-flood-of-1919

…[A] refilled molasses tank ripped wide open and unleashed 2.3 million gallons of dark-brown sludge. “A rumble, a hiss—some say a boom and a swish—and the wave of molasses swept out,” the Boston Post later wrote. A fifteen-foot wall of syrup cascaded over Commercial Street at 35 miles per hour, obliterating all the people, horses, buildings and electrical poles in its path. Even the solid steel supports of the elevated train platform were snapped.

Over the next several days, rescue workers continued to sift through the ruins, shooting molasses-trapped horses and recovering bodies. The human toll would eventually climb to 21 dead and another 150 injured, but many of the deceased remained missing for several days. The remains of one victim, a wagon driver named Cesare Nicolo, were not fished out of nearby Boston Harbor until almost four months after the flood“