Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund — a state-owned investment fund worth approximately a trillion dollars — recently announced it was divesting from oil and gas exploration companies around the world. Not surprisingly, many oil and gas stocks declined following the announcement.
The Norwegian government has just mandated its sovereign wealth fund, the biggest such wealth fund, to divest from pure oil and gas explorers. This is a significant landmark in the global battle to abate global heating.
In the past few weeks students across the country have been demanding that their schools stop profiting from oil, coal and gas companies.
Many students have vowed to ramp up their divestment campaigns at universities across America this spring.
Divestment is strictly the selling up of all fossil fuel share holdings. However it is currently difficult to decide which fossil should have priority for this though gas is widely, though probably inaccurately, considered to be of less priority than the other fossil fuels, or even exempt from divestment*.
Several colleges and universities have completed the process of divestment. None has declared financial ruin. In fact, many, like Sterling, are seeing improved returns on their investments.
The dramatic slump in global oil prices has, as usual, caught governments, industry and markets off guard.
As international climate scientists warn runaway greenhouse gas emissions could cause "severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts," the Obama administration is abandoning attempts to have Congress agree to a legally binding international climate deal.
We used to think investing in fossil fuel was okay, but the new science has convinced us, and we don’t think that way any longer.
The Eco-Justice Working Group of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has announced that more than $2 million of assets have been divested from fossil fuels and reinvested in a new Quaker Green Fund offered by Friends Fiduciary Corporation.
The moral of this story: people in power and bureaucrats seem exceptionally obtuse when it comes to recognizing that the world has changed and the old rules no longer apply.
