Australian National University vice-chancellor Ian Young was, you could say, a sceptic about the fossil fuel divestment movement before the hysterical reaction to his university’s decision to sell its shares in seven resource companies, just $16m worth out of a $1.1bn portfolio. In fact that decision was driven, in part, by the university’s desire to resist a long-running student campaign for it to shed investments in fossil fuel companies, just as Stanford University has, backed by a referendum showing 82% of ANU students supported that idea. ...  the university council engaged the research company CAER and received its social responsibility assessments of the environmental, social, ethical and governance performance of 45 Australian companies in which it invested. CAER was chosen from a number of similar firms and, based on its advice, the university decided to divest itself of the lowest-ranked stocks: Iluka Resources, Independence Group, Newcrest Mining, Sandfire Resources, Oil Search, Santos and Sirius Resources. One giveaway that this was not about fossil fuel divestment is the fact that the ANU continues to hold major resource stocks, for example in BHP and Rio Tinto. ... Peabody has responded with a morality-based counter argument – cheap coal-fired energy is essential to solve the world’s “poverty crisis”; it is why the mining industry is lobbying for such an argument to be recognised by the G20; it may be why the prime minister is arguing that increasing coal production for many, many decades will be “good for humanity”; and it is almost certainly why questions about the process by which an Australian university took a relatively small investment decision has escalated into such a big national issue so fast. As for Young, he has told students the reaction to the ANU’s move has caused him to change his mind about the power of the divestment movement. He no longer thinks it is a sideshow; he thinks it is powerful. He told them: “Turns out you were right all along.”