Did you hear? The World Bank Group pledged to stop investing in oil and gas exploration after 2019. I thought I’d try being topical again and take this chance to tell you a couple of stories (or one big over-arching story) about finance and climate change. It starts in my third year at university, nearly six years ago. Regardless of how cynical or optimistic I feel now about the World Bank Group’s announcement, back then I couldn’t have dreamed of such an announcement even being made. The story begins with Antoine. An economics student, he was a huge help in getting the Oxford-based environmental education project Teach Green off the ground. He told me about one of his campaigns, Push Your Parents. The idea is that it’s young people who will inherit a warming world and all the expensive and irritating problems that come with it (to put it mildly). But we hold so few assets and have so little leverage. Our parents, on the other hand, have most likely been saving up a pension – even a modest one makes them a stakeholder in a pension fund – and yet their savings are being invested in fossil fuel extraction whether they like it or not. But the first responsibility of a pension fund is to grow the investment, and since our society depends on cheap convenient energy, the fossil fuel industry is a pretty safe bet, right? Right…? The thing is, more extreme weather events, made more likely by climate change, put other investments at risk (think farms and property). Then there’s the risk of shares in the fossil fuel industry becoming stranded assets – that is, they spend your investment in digging up coal and oil and find they can’t sell it because the world has come to its senses and doesn’t want to burn the stuff any more. The point is, even if your parents don’t give a damn about you or the planet, there are cold economic reasons for trying to get their pension fund out of coal, and doing something different with oil and gas (turning oilrigs into offshore wind platforms, petrol forecourts into electric vehicle charging stations, not spending so bloody much on lobbying, that sort of thing). Does all that sound a bit convoluted? It kind of was, a bit. I could never get my own parents on board. Skip forwards two years, and I find myself with a job and a budding pension of my own. Great! I thought, I can cut out the middleman and make myself heard. So I hassled the lady from Fidelity who came to talk to us about pensions. Poor lady, she was only there to explain the salary sacrifice scheme and how to login to our accounts. Then I hassled the chairman of the board of trustees of my company’s pension fund. Poor man, he was so patient with me. A big problem was that I didn’t really understand what I was asking for. It wasn’t an ethical fund option that I wanted – the task was to convince them that climate change was about economics as well as ethics, because whom would an ethical fund help apart from me? And it wasn’t complete divestment from all fossil fuels that I wanted either – because once a pension fund divests, its representatives can no longer vote and influence the companies’ direction, and the shares get snapped up on the cheap by investors who probably don’t have the same concerns. Technological change is not all new companies out-competing old ones – it’s also big old companies switching the products they manufacture – like car-makers jumping on the electric bandwagon, energy companies shutting down old coal plants in favour of wind and solar farms, maybe even oil refineries getting into biodegradable alternatives to plastic – how do we tell genuine baby steps apart from cynical greenwashing? Back to the story. I learned a lot from the chairman of the board of trustees: the money I and the company contribute to my little pension pot gets pooled together, not just with other employees’ pension pots, but those of employees at many other companies too. This big pension pool is invested in lots of different things, none of which the chairman gets to choose. The pool is managed by BlackRock, with some advice and consultancy from Mercer. The chairman suggested I contact someone from there. After a little digging, guess who I find is Global Head of Responsible Investment at Mercer? Only Jane Ambachtsheer – the same Jane Ambachtsheer who was an advisor to Push Your Parents. It was all too bizarre and circular, I didn’t know what to do any more. The second story took place around the same time. It involves the Fossil Free movement – similar to Push Your Parents and ShareAction (sort of Push Your Parents, but for the parents themselves), Fossil Free was all about using the power of investments to fight climate change. But unlike the other groups, Fossil Free was very much about the ethics. Shame big institutions into selling all the shares they hold in the fossil fuel industry, shame them so hard that no one else would touch the shares they just sold - that was the goal. No surprise then that Oxford University became one of their targets. Fossil Free Oxford organised protests – occupying university buildings, giving a platform to famous alumni who threatened to hand back their degree unless Oxford University withdrew their considerable endowment funds from the coal industry. I told my mum what was going on (she works as a technician at the University). I mentioned it in emails to my old professors (those emails still make me cringe). There seemed to be a lot of resistance from the University. But eventually the folks in charge agreed to at least review the investments – and when they did, guess what? They no longer had any money invested in coal anyway. It was just that unprofitable. The decision clearly happened over the course of a normal day, with no thought of climate change, because no one seemed to realise until they checked. What could Fossil Free Oxford do, but ratchet things up and call for divestment from oil and gas too… So yeah. This is the story of how I repeatedly made a tit of myself, got up many people’s noses, and ultimately achieved nothing. And yet here we are, two years on from the Paris Climate Summit, the World Bank Group pledging to stop funding oil and gas exploration, Dong Energy ditching fossil fuels, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia talking about what to do in a post-oil world! I’ve heard it said that money is what determines which campaigns succeed and which fail. Feminism wins when film-makers and toy-makers see a captive market for more right-on products. Legalising gay marriage cost nothing. The statue of Cecil Rhodes still stands in Oriel College because rich alumni donors want it to. My experience would suggest it’s the same with climate change. Things change when it’s profitable for them to change. So, does all the campaigning and activism and cringey embarrassment count for nothing? I’m cautious of the campaigns that take credit for every vague momentous change in the world. But then, there are historians and sociologists out there, much cleverer than I, who are trying to tease apart these causes and effects. Even if it is all about money, what if the costs of renewable energy are falling so rapidly because research effort is being put into it… because the policy landscape encourages it… because some people somewhere think enough of us want healthy ecosystems, clean air and clean water, that we’ll pay for it (individually or through taxes) and make it worth their while… How on earth would they have got that idea? Hm... I still have a lot to learn about how to “get shit done”. I would not discourage anyone from participating in activism – as Antoine says, the goal is to get these issues into the mainstream public discourse. What people think of you as an activist is secondary to all that. (Though obviously try not to cause undue harm. No eco-terrorism, OK?) If nothing else, it’s a learning experience. And if you’re lucky enough to live in a country with a government that holds public consultations, please consider submitting responses! They ask for evidence, and as a civil servant friend explained to me, it doesn’t have to be scientific evidence – it can be testimony, like in a court of law. And yes, they do read every single response submitted (civil servant friend says so). The various UK government departments sometimes tweet about consultations they’re holding (I follow @BEISgovUK), and if there are issues particularly relevant to your place of work, maybe ask an administrator or nominate someone to keep an eye out and notify you and your colleagues? It is quite hard work reading through the consultation documents and working out how to phrase responses succinctly and relevantly. But you tell me if there’s a way to “get shit done” that doesn’t involve work.
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Susan's BlogIn which I scribble words about energy, the environment, climate change, and other science things. Views expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of the CDT staff or sponsors. Archives
August 2019
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