Divestiture: What if folks stopped going to DiCaprio movies?

Unless they change their ways, the following companies active in Pittsburgh can kiss good-bye to any chance of attracting Leonardo DiCaprio as an investor: Consol Energy, Dominion Resources, EQT and First Energy, to name the most obvious.

All are into fossil fuels and DiCaprio, a famous movie actor, won't stand for that in his portfolio anymore.

The star of “Titanic” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” said he and his charitable foundation will take their money out of any companies that produce oil, gas or coal. That is a lot of companies and some are handsome dividend payers.

But fossil fuels give off carbon dioxide when burned in cars, trucks, trains, planes and power plants. And this is thought to act as a “greenhouse gas” catastrophically warming the earth as a sort of atmospheric blanket, though there's very warm debate about that.

DiCaprio, 40, was hailed as a major celebrity recruit by the Divest-Invest Coalition, whose website claims 400 institutions and 2,000 individuals have now joined the industrial shunning. The world's 200 largest energy companies are the main targets, some 90 of which allegedly “are responsible for 65 percent of the carbon dioxide today.” Get them all to quit emitting and in theory the Arctic ice won't melt, sea levels won't rise and Earth may yet be saved in time.

Still, it seems like a stretch to expect Big Oil to abandon the oil business and try to make it in windmills or solar panels, just out of moralistic disapproval of its shares. Even cigarette stocks never got snuffed out and a fair number of investors like gambling stocks.

There's a futility factor too. Long before oil, gas and coal shares would crash to penny stocks, they'd be snapped up by bargain-hunters. The Chinese or Iranians would love to own ExxonMobil or Chevron if environmentalist boycotting would make it cheap enough. The global glut of oil, by mere market forces, has already done a pretty good job bringing oil stocks down. And don't even mention what Washington's war on coal has done to the those shares.

A more dramatic way to show carbon-spewers where to get off might be as consumers. DiCaprio and other Hollywood role models could quit driving their cars. Many live just a few miles from the studios anyway. They could go to work by bicycle. Or walk. And if they'd use only 10 percent or 20 percent of the electricity normally consumed in their mansions — in short, the kilowatts attributable to “renewable” sources alone — they'd hit the power companies where they live.

Elsewhere on the boycott front, a “Paris Pledge” is being circulated in advance of a conference of greens there. Its object: to press all the world's banks for pledges against financing coal mining or coal-fired power plants.

The downside of boycotts, of course, is that two (or 2 million) can play that game. Unemployed coal miners, oil drillers and power plant workers could organize not to see any more DiCaprio movies. And what a lot of popcorn that would leave unsold.

Jack Markowitz is a weekly columnist for Trib Total Media. Email him at jmarkowitz@tribweb.com.