The climate emergency continues, with the need for immediate action ever more pressing as conditions worsen, extreme events multiply and tipping points are threatening. Yet the latest data on their public equity investments (30th June 2024) show that USS continues with a failed policy of “engaging” with the very companies and banks responsible for this emergency, in order to “help them transition” to reduced emissions. There is widespread evidence that this policy has utterly failed. Read the latest on USS’s fossil fuel supporting investments.
I’m retired so don’t have a work email. Can I still sign the petition? Regards Chris
Yes, please do 🙂
Would be good to know what evidence we can cite about engagement having failed?
Such a scandal. Thank you Divest USS for all your sterling work! With regard to evidence, the following is from an earlier report by Divest USS:
USS maintains investments in numerous companies with no credible plan to decarbonise in the coming years at the rate required to meet the Paris goals. Examples are
Even USS’s pro-climate decisions do not hold up to scrutiny – their recent £500m investment cited electrified aviation and carbon capture. The UK Climate Change Committee has not included the former as a factor in significant carbon reductions from mass aviation[xii]. The latter is heavily promoted by fossil fuel companies and consistently used to justify continued emissions. Current and planned facilities are scheduled to capture just 1% of global annual emissions by 2030[xiii].
Our understanding is that USS have in the past held meetings (‘engaged’) with fossil fuel companies that they held shares in (for example Shell, BP) to encourage them to transition away from fossil fuels however none of these companies have come up with realistic transition plans and indeed many of them are now discarding any plans they had and concentrating again on fossil fuels. USS have also voted against the directors of banks such as Barclays and Bank of America as they considered the banks not taking the Climate/Biodiversity Emergency seriously enough but other shareholders voted in favour of the directors so the view of USS was defeated. One might expect in these circumstances that USS would divest but this appears not to be the case. USS also invests our pensions in companies like Halliburton – one of the biggest fracking companies – and it will be interesting to observe if USS divests if/when these companies are given licence to exploit new fossil fuel reserves by the incoming American administration.
Many thanks. Just wondered if there’s any published sources to cite on any of this, or that reviews and evaluates the effectiveness (or otherwise) of engagement in general?
The only species in the world which failed to save itself because it wasn’t cost effective to do so, and USS is part of that. The board continues to act against the wishes of the majority of its members and against all the well established and accepted evidence on the climate catastrophe unfolding before our eyes. Shame on the USS Board.