Getting burned

One Welsh Assembly Member (AM) told us:  “This makes the councils look even worse after we passed that law (The Well-being of Future Generations Act {Wales} 2015).

If the university (Cardiff) is stopping doing it, why can’t they?”.

The dramatic news comes after it was disclosed that Cardiff University will stop investing in fossil fuel firms by 2021, following angry protests, and a week-long hunger strike was staged by two second year undergraduates, Frieda Lourken and Lucienne Billy, who said:  “They met our demands so yes, we are eating again”.

But Welsh councils have also hit the headlines for their investment policy.

It has emergerged that they are investing over £1 billion of their workers’ pensions in fossil fuel firms.

The revelation came as the world’s nations met for the 23rd annual ‘Conference Of the Parties’ (COP) in Bonn under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which aimed to “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”, ie halt global warming.

 

The report which revealed the information, Fuelling the Fire, was produced by Friends of the Earth, 350.org, Platform and the Energy Democracy Project.

It showed that:
• Welsh councils invested £1,027,843,384 of their pension funds in fossil fuel companies out of a total of £15,382,932,477.
• Torfaen and Dyfed local authority pension funds were among the funds with the highest percentage investment in fossil fuels.

Bleddyn Lake, climate campaigner at Friends of the Earth Cymru, said at the time: “It’s appalling that Welsh local authority pension funds are investing in climate-wrecking fossil fuels.

“This appears to fly in the face of their legal responsibility to consider the well-being of people and their environment in their decision-making”.

But Welsh councils are not alone.

The new data also reveals that across the UK, councils have invested a total of £16.1 billion of workers’ pensions in fossil fuels out of a total of £287.9 billion.

Compared to 2015 data, investments in fossil fuels have gone up in real terms (from £14 billion) and did not change significantly in proportion to the size of the pension funds.