BRUNSWICK

Students petitioning Bowdoin College to remove fossil fuel industries from its portfolio plan an open forum on the issue Saturday.

The student group Bowdoin Climate Action, a subset of the Green Bowdoin Alliance, will host Sierra Club Maine Executive Director Glen Brand, activist Bill McKibben and Unity College President Steven Mulkey for a panel discussion about how divestment works.

Nationwide, Bowdoin activists say, 256 colleges and universities are asking their administrations to divest from fossil fuels.

Middlebury College has announced plans to investigate the feasibility of divesting its endowment as part of the campaign. Closer to home, the Unity College Board of Trustees voted to divest from fossil fuels, and Hampshire College in Massachusetts has effectively divested by passing a sustainable investment policy, according to McKibben. Students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania also are petitioning for divestment.

Locally, a petition asking Bowdoin trustees to consider the issue had 470 signatures — nearly a quarter of the student population — at the end of 2012. Students have met twice with college President Barry Mills and have invited him to attend Saturday’s forum.

Mills is on record opposing any agreement to divest the school of fossil fuels, telling the Bowdoin Orient in December, “we’re not prepared to commit to divest from fossil fuels. … but I would never say never.”

“It is not something which at Bowdoin — or, frankly, any other institution — is subject to a large democratic effort as to how the money is invested,” Mills has said.

In the 1980s, Bowdoin halted investments in companies doing business with the South African apartheid government; in 2006, it did the same with the Sudanese government in response to genocide in Darfur.

Mills explained that, in these instances, “there was widespread national and international agreement that the subjects that we were dealing with were abhorred.”

Mills has said climate change has not generated the same consensus.

Bowdoin College has made commitments to pursue “carbon neutrality” by 2020.

“One college divesting of its fossil fuel investments doesn’t do anything,” Brand admitted. “But one as distinguished as Bowdoin doing it is a signal that we really need to make changes from the dirty energy path that we’re on.”

Saturday’s public forum — rescheduled from Feb. 9 — will take place in Kresge Auditorium in the basement of the visual arts center on campus at 7 p.m.

The event is free and open to the public.