She responded:
Yes, because editing the internal magazine of BP for one year over 20 years ago instills a lifetime's worth of bias. And the fact i would take a pay cut to from BP so as to become a Reuters graduate trainee is also indicative of strong bias. As for being a natural gas reporter at platts, clearly writing about the sector also instills bias rather than knowledge about how the industry works. At BP i actually covered their renewable efforts, which is how i came to understand many of the challenges with areas like solar. I also had the opportunity to visit solar manufacturing sites, which gave me a good insight into the production process.I on the other hand am not so nice. For example, I laughed out loud when I saw this story in the London Times, January 31:
Two students at St John’s College wrote to Andrew Parker, the principal bursar, this week requesting a meeting to discuss the protesters’ demands, which are that the college “declares a climate emergency and immediately divests from fossil fuels.” They say that the college, the richest in Oxford, has £8 million of its £551 million endowment fund invested in BP and Shell.
Professor Parker responded with a provocative offer. “I am not able to arrange any divestment at short notice,” he wrote. “But I can arrange for the gas central heating in college to be switched off with immediate effect. Please let me know if you support this proposal.”...Of course this led 14 of Harvard's finest to write an open letter expressing their solidarność with the oppressed Oxford students:
Harvard Faculty Call on Oxford Faculty to Support Student Demands for Divestment
At that I only giggled.
But enough about me, here's Izabella Kaminska at FT Alphaville:
This week climate activists targeted the front lawn of Trinity College Cambridge to draw attention to the university’s fossil fuel investments, which in their minds should be divested immediately. They also targeted the offices of oil trading companies in Geneva on the basis that they “contribute to climate disruption.”
The logic behind both protests is flawed.
Take the issue of divestment. Even the most environmentally-committed financiers tend to agree divestment is not a sound strategy to achieve global climate change objectives. Selling an asset doesn’t eradicate the problem at hand. In many cases it just makes the asset more affordable to a new group of opportunistically-minded investors, who may be less concerned about the environment than the old lot.
Back in 2015, FT Alphaville moderated a panel at the Paris Climate Finance Day precisely about this matter. It was entitled “How can institutional investors bring their portfolios into line with 2 degrees C?”
That was five years ago. Even then, panelists agreed divestment wasn’t necessarily the solution. They preferred to back shareholder activism focused on using votes to influence corporate leadership to transform their business models in line with climate policy targets.....MUCH MORE
The logic at hand is comparable to the Remainer argument in the Brexit debate: you don’t change the European Union for the better by leaving it. To make real progress, you have to use your voting power and membership to influence the body from the inside.
Except in reality divesting is even worse than leaving.
As Brexiteers might argue, there comes a point in a fixed membership system which boasts an unelected executive arm where the power of your voice becomes limited. In corporate finance, however, there is no limit to the amount of votes you can accumulate.
Putting your money where your mouth is is sometimes what really counts. Buying more fossil fuel investments rather than fewer can ironically be more effective. After all, only then can you buy the companies out and put them under new management inclined to favour clean energy over the fossil sort....
Come for the journalism, stay for the comments. The January 15 post garnered 182 of them, most civil, the majority on-topic.
At the end of this "better off buying BP" post Ms. Kaminska makes her BP full-disclosure but I got a kick out of the first time when she did it on the fly, in the comments section.
Gotta run, I feel another post coming on.
