In May last year, a group of students stirred things up at the University of Edinburgh by occupying its finance building for over a week. The protest grew around a simple demand. Students argued that it was unethical for a public institution to invest in the fossil fuel industry because the sector is one of the main drivers of climate change, and called on the university to divest from companies involved in oil, gas or coal extraction.

Their campaign followed on from the success of similar efforts at Glasgow University, which became the first Higher Education institution in Europe to commit to fossil fuel divestment. Some have tried to discredit these students as idealists who don’t understand the hard world of finance.

In my view, they are pioneers. An idea that was born among campaigners in the US and UK has now grown into a global movement, with Scottish students amongst hundreds of groups calling on public institutions to start investing responsibly. The ‘Fossil Free’ campaign has so far pushed for an approximate 3.4 trillion US dollars to be divested from fossil fuels. The Rockefellers, The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, The World Council of Churches and the British Medical Association are just a few of the institutions which have opted for a fossil free portfolio.

The divestment campaign has highlighted issues that the big fossil fuel companies would rather push under the table. Oil, coal and gas are limited resources that are causing irreversible damage to our environment. Investing in them is not just irresponsible and immoral – it is financially short-sighted and makes for poor stewardship of funds. Recently, the Bank of England Governor Mark Carney warned investors that over-reliance on fossil fuels poses a profound risk to financial stability. In Scotland, this instability has already been felt by thousands of workers, whose jobs in the North Sea have been lost due to financial turmoil in the oil markets.

Following the success of student campaigners in Glasgow and Edinburgh, divestment campaigns are escalating at universities around the country. This week, student-led campaigning group People & Planet are running the Go Green week – a week of campaigning and action on campus and beyond.

And we certainly should be looking beyond campuses. There are billions of pounds sitting in pensions pots and other investment funds in the Scottish public sector. Friends of the Earth Scotland has estimated that local authority pension funds alone hold £1.7 billion in fossil fuels, and the Scottish Parliament’s pension pot has £2 million invested in oil, coal and gas.

The financial and moral risks posed by the fossil fuel industry ought to be enough of a reason to divest, but there is also a positive case for directing money to projects and organisations that will be supplying our energy in the future. There are a number of ethically sound, community-owned energy ventures underway in Scotland. They have the potential to bring down energy prices for consumers and should have a long, prosperous future ahead of them. But with cuts to renewable budgets from the UK level, they need all the support they can get to grow.

Some local councils are leading the way in cleaner, responsible investment. For example, Lancashire County Council has invested £12m of its pension pot in Westmill Solar Coop, the UK’s largest community energy cooperative, and the Strathclyde Pension Fund has committed £10m to fund community power projects.

These investment decisions take vision and guts in an environment where the powers that be would rather stick with the demands of the fossil fuel lobby. In England and Wales, the Tories are even attempting to intervene in local authorities’ investment decisions, meaning central government could veto some innovative new investment choices made by councils.

While the Scottish Government is busy chasing tax breaks for the oil industry and the Tories are giving a hard time to the renewable energy sector, the Scottish Greens want to pave the way for locally produced, clean, community-owned energy. Some of the money needed is already there – sitting in our pensions pots and public sector investment funds. We just need to muster the courage to step away from business as usual and opt for something new.