Our fossil fuel divestment group aims to influence Leicestershire and Rutland County Councils and Leicester City Council to stop investing an estimated £154million into fossil fuel companies through the Leicestershire Local Government Pension Scheme (LLGPS), and instead invest in local joint solutions to climate change and fuel poverty such as renewable energy and home insulation. We’re doing this by writing to the pensions committee, asking them questions, attending their meetings, and generally making sure that this issue is in their minds as they make decisions. We are trying to build a group of people – both pension fund members and council tax payers – willing to join our work by writing letters, signing petitions and getting involved. This talk outlines our campaign and the issues around fossil fuel investment and divestment.
What you can do:
- Sign and share our petition asking the Pension Fund to stop investing in fossil fuel companies andinstead in solutions to the climate, energy and cost of living crises. You don’t need to be in the pension scheme fund to sign – our council taxes pay employers contributions to the fund and the wages of pension scheme members. You can find a printable PDF version of the petition here.
- Write to the pension committee if you are in the pension fund asking them to stop investing your money in fossil fuel companies and to invest in local solutions to climate change and fuel poverty instead. Here are their email addresses.
- Write to your councillors and council leader if you are a council tax payer asking them to stop the council pension scheme to stop investing in fossil fuels and instead to invest in local solutions to fuel poverty and climate change.
- Pledge to respond to the pension fund’s Net Zero Strategy consultation when it opens at the end of this year. We need as many pension scheme members to respond as possible and will produce a briefing and run online meetings to help you respond. If you sign the pledge we’ll email them to you once the consultation opens.
- Help us to run a short online meeting about this campaign for a group you are in, your union branch or your work colleagues. Email us at leicsdivest[@]gmail.com.
- Join our working group. We would love your active support on this campaign, for example gathering petition signatures, doing social media, researching, writing letters, and getting our heads around the complexities of pensions and fossil fuel investment – so please get in touch via leicsdivest[@]gmail.com if you are interested.
- We are asking groups (community, religious, educational, environmental, union branches etc) to sign a statement to the pension committee (and ideally send it with a covering letter). If you are part of a group in Leicester, Leicestershire or Rutland who would be willing to sign this you can find it here.
- We are also starting to gather support from councillors across the County by asking them to sign a similar petition to the groups one. If you would be willing to ask your councillors to sign the statement, please get in touch via leicsdivest[@]gmail.com.
For more information:
- You can our response Pension Scheme’s Sep 2022 Draft Net Zero consultation here, a submission we made to the pension committee here and the short talk we gave to the committee on 26/11/21 here.
- We held a vigil outside County Hall just before the pension fund’s AGM last year. You can see the flyer we gave out here.
- This clear article written in everyday English about how pension funds can use their shareholdings to help move the world towards net zero
- Platform and Friends of the Earth’s 2021 divestment report. It finds that Leicestershire’s pension scheme (which Leicester and Rutland are part of) has about £154 million currently invested in fossil fuels.
- This new academic research showing that divestment reduces fossil fuel companies carbon emissions (and that divestment outperforms engagement with regards to effectiveness). You can also watch this short explainer video about this research or this 25min webinar with the researchers.
- A 75min webinar about Securing Climate Friendly Investments from May2022, including 2 speakers who are on pension committees and Mark Campanale from Carbon Tracker.
- This excellent one and a half hour webinar from Platform: Local Government Pension Schemes, Climate Change and Building Community Wealth. It includes a presentation from the expert Mark Campanale of Carbon Tracker about why fossil fuels are a risky investment.
- This very well researched and straight forward briefing for Councillors from Divest UK: Divest briefing. It includes case studies on Shell and BP who the Leicestershire LGPS are invested in.
We are deeply aware that while fossil fuel companies are mostly owned and funded by the Western world – for example the UK – the impacts of both fossil fuel extraction and climate change are currently experienced, by the Global South. For example, much of the money Leicestershire pension fund has invested in fossil fuels is with Shell who are destroying and polluting communities, and driving conflict and oppression in Nigeria. Watch this short 2 minute animation about how fossil fuel companies are at the root of climate injustice.
According to Platform and Friends of the Earth’s new divestment report, Leicestershire’s pension scheme (which Leicester is part of) has about £154 million currently invested in fossil fuels. Even without the urgent nature of the climate crisis, given that this is only 3.7% of their fund, and that fossil fuels are becoming a financially risky investment, now is the time to switch these investments to green ethical option which will leave us all with a better future. The Council response to the Platform divestment response can be seen here. We’ve checked with Platform and we feel that yes it is based on estimates, but that these are conservative and that it is probably about right. The point is not exactly how much the fund has invested in fossil fuels. It’s if the fund will continue to invest in them at all – thereby giving them social licence to continue causing climate change – or if the fund will use it’s voice to divest and call for regulation of the fossil fuel industry instead so we can prevent catastrophic climate change. Click here for our Oct 2021 submission to the Pension Committee on why they should stop investing in fossil fuels and make a public statement to this effect.
The pension committee’s position of engagement assumes that they are influencing the behaviour of the fossil fuel companies they are invested in, and that this is a reasonable position in the light of the Climate Emergency which they have declared. However it is now widely agreed among climate scientists, financial experts and policy makers alike, that to achieve the steep emissions reductions required to address climate change, the vast majority of fossil fuel reserves can’t be burned[1]. Indeed, research from September 2021 found that nearly 60% of oil and fossil methane gas, and 90% of coal must remain unextracted to keep within a 1.5 °C carbon budget.[2] To further underscore the incompatibility of fossil fuels in a zero carbon future, a recent landmark report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) stated unequivocally[3] that – beyond 2021 – “there is no need for investment in new fossil fuel supply in our net zero pathway.”
The UN’s Production Gap report[4] states that for a 1.5°C-consistent pathway, the world will need to decrease fossil fuel production by roughly 6% per year between 2020 and 2030. Indeed, to align with the seismic implications of the IEA report, oil and gas companies must prepare for major production declines, with half of the world’s largest listed oil and gas companies facing cuts of 50% or more by the 2030’s[5]. However, fossil fuel companies continue to invest billions of their capital expenditure into expansion of existing, or exploration of new, fossil fuel reserves.
Please share our petition and join our campaign. There are many areas in which our councils do not have the power to act to tackle climate change. This is an area where they do have the power to act and could make a real difference.
[1] Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (2018) What are stranded assets?, available at: https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/explainers/what-are-stranded-assets/
[2] Welsby, D., Price, J., Pye, S. et al. Unextractable fossil fuels in a 1.5 °C world. Nature 597, 230–234 (2021), available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03821-8#citeas
[3] IEA (2021) Net Zero by 2050: A Roadmap for the Global Energy Sector, available at: https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050
[4] UN Environment Program (2020) The Production Gap, available at: https://productiongap.org/2020report/#R1
[5] Carbon Tracker, Adapt to Survive: Why oil companies must plan for net zero and avoid stranded assets, available at: https://carbontracker.org/reports/adapt-to-survive/
