The carbon divestment campaign - known also as the "Fossil Free" or "Keep it in the ground" movement - scored a victory this week. Norway's sovereign wealth fund is going to sell off holdings in companies that get at least 30 percent of their revenue from coal. The fund had previously divested from pure coal companies.
From The Guardian
Norway’s $900bn sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, should cut its exposure to the global coal industry and sell stakes in firms that focus on the sector, a key parliamentary committee said on Wednesday.
According to the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette the motivation for this move is both ethical and financial:
Svein Flaatten of the governing Conservative party said “investments in coal companies can have both a climate risk and a future financial risk.”
The "governing Conservative party"? Maybe something got lost in translation there. :-)
This is a positive development, but it raises some head-scratching questions. Please follow me below the fold for a bit of further discussion and a poll.
There are a host of interesting things here, starting with: that is a big old fund. $900 billion dollars for a country of 5,000,000 people is $180,000 each. Wow.
The fund, formerly known as the Government Petroleum Fund, is essentially a rainy-day fund where Norway stashes its oil income. As per Wikipedia:
The purpose of the petroleum fund is to invest parts of the large surplus generated by the Norwegian petroleum sector, generated mainly from taxes of companies, but also payment for license to explore as well as the State's Direct Financial Interest and dividends from partly state-owned Statoil. Current revenue from the petroleum sector is estimated to be at its peak period and to decline over the next decades. The Petroleum Fund was established in 1990 after a decision by the country's legislature to counter the effects of the forthcoming decline in income and to smooth out the disruptive effects of highly fluctuating oil prices.
While I can get behind coal divestment, it is a bit ironic that an "oil fund" is divesting from coal - don't you think?
For those of us of a certain age, Alanis Morrissette is permanently linked to anything ironic. The poll below contains some lines from the classic song that I find particularly appropriate for this situation. Can you help me decide which one is best?