Universities built for long-term stability shouldn’t keep student-serving funds exposed to the volatility of the fossil-fuel market.
The Strait of Hormuz is half a world away from Kingston. But when one chokepoint can send global energy markets into panic, it becomes a campus story too. The current war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran has sharply disrupted oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which handled about 20 million barrels per day in 2025, roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil trade. Universities aiming for long-term sustainability shouldn’t tie their investments to resources so easily affected by geopolitics.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) responded to the Strait of Hormuz closure last week with the largest emergency oil stock release in its history: 400 million barrels. The International Monetary Fund has warned that the conflict is adding trade disruption, higher energy prices, and financial-market volatility to an already uncertain global economy.
Oil has always been a geopolitical asset, but not a stable one. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, IEA member countries released emergency oil stocks twice in 2022 to calm markets. This month’s 400-million-barrel release is now the sixth coordinated action in the IEA’s history.
The pattern repeats itself: with escalating geopolitical conflict, oil markets convulse, and public institutions are left pretending this is normal portfolio behaviour.
In December 2025, Queen’s formally chose not to divest its endowment and investment funds from fossil fuels, arguing that its existing responsible-investing strategy is a better balance between climate goals and fiduciary duty. However, Queen’s is still defending continued fossil-fuel exposure at the exact moment the oil market is again showing how fragile it is.
Students have also been clear about what they want. In the AMS Winter 2025 plebiscite, 81.1 per cent of respondents agreed that Queen’s University should prioritize divestment from fossil fuels. That result was non-binding to the university, but it showed students’ unanimous position on the topic. If Queen’s wants to claim it is listening to student concerns about sustainability, it can’t keep treating overwhelming student sentiment as background noise while defending the status quo on financial grounds.
Queens isn’t being asked to pioneer a reckless experiment; it’s being asked to stop lagging behind institutions that’ve already moved away from fossil fuel investment.
The University of Toronto’s endowment was fully divested from direct fossil-fuel investments in 2022 and cut indirect exposure from 2.0 per cent of endowment net asset value at the end of 2021 to 0.9 per cent at the end of 2024, while also reaching 11.7 per cent in sustainable and low-carbon investments. The University of Guelph completed fossil-fuel divestment in its endowment portfolio in 2025, while being in a financial deficit itself, and said its analysis found the shift would not hurt performance if done prudently over several years.
The alternative shouldn’t be caricatured as moral theatre. Hedging away from fossil fuels can mean freezing new direct exposure to fossil fuel industries, setting a timeline to reduce indirect exposure and shifting benchmarks toward fossil-free indexes. It’s time for Queen’s to start allocating capital toward sectors that are both more resilient and more aligned with the future the institution claims to be building.
Universities love to say they prepare students for the future, but it’s time their portfolios start acting like it. Queen’s has every right to care about risk, returns, and fiduciary duty; there’s nothing prudent about pretending fossil fuels are a safe, neutral place to park money when history keeps showing the opposite.
The question is no longer whether Queen’s can afford to hedge away from fossil fuels; it is whether it can still justify its failure to do so.
Lael is a third year Health Sciences student and one of The Journal’s QTBIPOC Advisory Board members.
Tags
Geopolitics, investing, Middle East, Sustainability
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aayush mishra
nice read! amazing work lael :))