Peter Dudgeon's activity
In group: Sustainable Healthcare
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Peter Dudgeon posted an update in the group Sustainable Healthcare 4 years, 5 months ago
Came across this great TED talk on fossil fuel disinvestment. I didn’t know that the BMA have disinvested in fossil fuels (2014)! Made me question pension investments – could we be fighting against ourselves by investing in fossil fuel companies through our pensions at the same time as trying to reduce our carbon footprints?
Mike Berners-Lee has carried out an evaluation of pension schemes and environmental sustainability. He has tweeted about the results in the last week or two. Worth a look.
Hi Olivia, thanks for much for flagging this, I’ll look up Mike Berners-Lee on Twitter. BTW, if you’re a Twitter person, I can be found at: @THTpartnership. All the best.
On watching this talk, I immediately transferred money into ethical investment funds and I intend to continue tomorrow with a small private pension I acquired when some old NHS pension related funds were moved. I do not believe the NHS pension however is ‘invested’ as such but this conclusion was only made following a fairly superficial google search. I do think divestment is a potentially powerful tool however. Cheers, Richard.
Hi Richard, thanks so much for taking the time to act and to provide feedback – I’ll do some further checking on state pensions. I can see how it wouldn’t be invested, as such, I guess it would come from the public purse (but I’m speaking naively here), I’ll do some digging.
From my personal investments perspective, I’ve asked the company who looks after my pension and ISA, to come back to me on this. Yesterday they sent me a questionnaire from Parmenion (who my ISA is with), asking for my ethical investment views. Interestingly, they call out Armaments, Animal Testing, Tobacco Production, Alcohol production etc, but ‘environmental damage’ is just one broad heading (fine, to an extent) but I think these investment firms might need to shift their thinking, to understand the urgency of specifically reducing emissions. Thanks again for your replying to my post. All the best.