John D Rockefeller and his great-great-granddaughter Valerie Wayne Rockefeller

New York, Sept. 22: In 1862, a young John Rockefeller invested in the promising new industry of oil refining, thus beginning an enterprise that made him the richest man who had ever lived.

Now his heirs are abandoning fossil fuels.

The family whose legendary wealth flowed from Standard Oil has announced that its $860-million philanthropic organisation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, is joining the divestment movement that began a couple years ago on college campuses.

The announcement, timed to precede Tuesday’s opening of the UN climate change summit meeting in New York City, is part of a broader and accelerating initiative.

“John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, moved out of whale oil and into petroleum,” said Stephen Heintz, president of the fund. “We are quite convinced if he were alive today, as an astute businessman looking out to the future, he would be moving out of fossil fuels and investing in renewable energy.”

Rockefeller was a sharp-eyed businessman in his early 20s when oil was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859. He invested in a refinery in Cleveland three years later and bought it outright at an auction when its finances faltered. By 1872, he owned nearly all the refining companies in Cleveland.

In the half century that followed, he amassed a fortune that made him America’s first billionaire. His tax return, in 1918, indicated a total income of at least $800 million, but he had also given away $500 million.

Rockefeller himself declared that he considered it a man’s duty to “get all the money he honestly can and to give all he can”.

The people who are selling shares of energy stocks are well aware that their actions are unlikely to have an immediate impact on the companies, given their enormous market capitalisation (the value of traded shares) and cash flow.

Even so, some say they are taking action to align their assets with their environmental principles. Others want to shame companies that they believe are recklessly contributing to a warming planet. Still others say that the fight to limit climate change will lead to new regulations and disruptive new technologies that will make these companies an increasingly risky investment.

Ultimately, the activist investors say, their actions, like those of the anti-apartheid divestment fights of the 1980s, could help spur international debate, while the shift of investment funds to energy alternatives could lead to solutions to the carbon puzzle.

“This is a threshold moment,” said Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund, which has coordinated the effort to recruit foundations to the cause. “This movement has gone from a small activist band quickly into the mainstream.”

In recent years, 180 institutions — including philanthropies, religious organisations, pension funds and local governments — as well as hundreds of wealthy individual investors have pledged to sell assets tied to fossil fuel companies from their portfolios and to invest in cleaner alternatives.

In all, the groups have pledged to divest assets worth more than $50 billion from portfolios, and the individuals more than $1 billion, according to Arabella Advisors, a firm that consults with philanthropists and investors to use their resources to achieve social goals.

Activism to divest from fossil fuel companies began on college campuses, but the record of success there has been mixed.

The university with the biggest endowment, Harvard, has declined to divest, despite pressure from many students and outside organisations.

Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s president, has issued statements that she and her colleagues do not believe that divestment is “warranted or wise,” and argued that the school’s $32.7 billion endowment “is a resource, not an instrument to impel social or political change”.

Stanford recently announced it would divest its holdings in the coal industry; Yale University’s investment office asked its money managers to examine how its investments affect climate change and to look into avoiding companies that do not take sensible “steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” The announcement did not satisfy students pressing for divestment.

Jenna Nicholas, director of the Global Divest/Invest Coalition, said: “Given their (the Rockefellers’) history, it’s really exciting that they are a partner in this and are leading the way.”

In an interview last week at the Rockefeller family’s longtime New York offices at 30 Rockefeller Center, Heintz, Valerie Rockefeller Wayne, the chairwoman of the fund and the great-great granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, spoke of the family’s longstanding commitment to use the fund to advance environmental issues.

Wayne said the family’s commitment is intergenerational, and continuing. She said that her eight-year-old daughter lectures her on the destruction of orangutan habitat to create palm oil plantations.

“If I’m wearing lipstick, she won’t kiss me,” she said, “because there’s palm oil in it.”