Agenda item

10.15

Currently council meetings are taking place in-person (not virtually) with social distancing operating in the venues.  However, members of the public who wish to speak at this meeting can attend the meeting ‘virtually’ through an online connection.  Places at the meeting are very limited due to the requirements of social distancing.  While you can ask to attend the meeting in person, you are strongly encouraged to attend ‘virtually’ to minimise the risk of Covid-19 infection.

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Normally requests to speak at this public meeting are required by 9 am on the day preceding the published date of the meeting. However, during the current situation and to facilitate these new arrangements we are asking that requests to speak are submitted by no later than 9am four working days before the meeting i.e. 9 am on Friday 3 September 2021.  Requests to speak should be sent to khalid.ahmed@oxfordshire.gov.uk. You will be contacted by the officer regarding the arrangements for speaking.

If you ask to attend in person, the officer will also advise you regarding Covid-19 safety at the meeting.  If you are speaking ‘virtually’, you may submit a written statement of your presentation to ensure that if the technology fails, then your views can still be taken into account. A written copy of your statement can be provided no later than 9 am 2 working days before the meeting. Written submissions should be no longer than 1 A4 sheet.

The Committee received a public address from Ms Al Chisholm from Fossil Free Oxfordshire.

Thank you for the opportunity to address you today on behalf of Fossil Free Oxfordshire on the subject of passive investment reallocation. And thank you, as ever, for all the important work you do to look after the fund and decarbonise it.

The backdrop for your discussion is the IPCC report, which the UN Secretary General said “must sound a death knell for coal and fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet”

Although passive fund allocation has come to seem complicated, it’s very simple. To choose the PAB fund is to choose to stop investing in fossil fuels and rapidly reduce emissions., It’s simple and risk-free. Given the escalating climate crisis and the urgent need to reduce fossil fuel extraction and emissions, it’s a no-brainer.

The alternative is to invest in a CTB fund. It means giving fossil fuel companies money to develop and explore for more fossil fuels, while at the same time asking other companies to burn less fossil fuel to decarbonise the whole economy. Its logic is entirely contradictory.

Known reserves contain more than enough to tide us through the transition to clean energy, and burning all known reserves would guarantee catastrophic temperature rises. Funding the sector to find more makes no sense.

Two main arguments for opting for the CTB have been made

1. A “Just Transition.”
2. Engaging with the fossil fuel industry.

I’d like to address each of these in the very brief time available

1. Using the concept of “Just Transition” to justify continued investment in the fossil fuel industry is an absolute travesty. Yes, there absolutely must be a rapid and just transition to clean energy that protects the livelihoods of those working in the fossil fuel industry, but maintaining investments in these companies under the guise of finding financial solutions to a political problem will simply delay political action, and will in the long run make the transition less just.

We only need to look at the experiences of the Ogoni people whose leaders were executed in the Niger Delta or the people who fished there until the catastrophic oil spills, to understand how companies like Shell can be relied upon to protect people’s livelihoods.

Anyway, it is the Government’s responsibility to ensure the just transition, not the Pension Fund Committee’s, but if the Committee is concerned with justice in this transition, it might do better to invest in clean energy technology so there are jobs for oil and gas workers to go to as this transition takes place. (Incidentally, both funds will exclude tobacco, but we see no arguments for the Pension Fund to ensure a just transition for workers in that sector.)

2. The second argument is about engagement with the fossil fuel industry. It has been going on for decades. If it was working, they would have stopped exploring for and developing new oil and gas reserves and put serious money into renewables. They would stop lobbying against climate policy and trying to derail COP. None of them - not even the more progressive ones - has a Paris-Compliant business plan. Besides, the Climate Policy states clearly that the fund will not remain invested in fossil fuels purely so it can pursue engagement.

For these reasons, Fossil Free Oxfordshire urges you to transfer 100% of the passive investments to the Paris-Aligned Benchmark fund to protect the value of Scheme members’ pensions from stranded assets, and to protect the planet they and their children will inhabit.

As Kimberly Nicholas, a climate scientist quoted in New Scientist says, 'There is no more important task than stabilising the climate...' and 'What we do really really, really matters.'

Thank you.