Two of Britain’s leading professional associations — the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine — announced last week to mark the first-ever London Climate Action Week that they will completely divest from fossil fuel investments.
French banking giant BNP Paribas has cut ties with electricity producers in Poland, citing their continued dependence on the coal industry and no signs of a change in strategy towards renewable forms of energy.
The investment arm of the world’s seventh-largest bank, BNP Paribas, announced plans this week to implement an enhanced coal-exclusion policy which will tighten the company’s exclusion policy on companies engaged in mining thermal coal and generating electricity from coal.
British banking giant Barclays has revised its stance on investing in fossil fuels which includes halting investment in coal mining and coal-fired power stations, but the bank has come under fire for not going far enough, with environmental organization Greenpeace comparing its lack of action with the bank’s previous stance on apartheid, saying the bank is “once again on the wrong side of history.”
The global divestment movement has celebrated an important milestone this week as it now boasts more than 1,000 institutions around the world worth almost $8 trillion which have committed to divesting from fossil fuels.
BP CEO Bob Dudley, in his keynote speech given as the “Petroleum Executive of the Year” on Wednesday, raised his concerns with the global divestment and disclosure movements that have risen up around the fossil fuel industry, saying that they “could lead to bad outcomes.”
The fossil fuel divestment movement which has so influenced the global economic and energy sectors over the past five years has hit a new milestone, surpassing $6.24 trillion in assets committed to fossil fuel divestment, up from only $52 billion only four years ago.
One of Europe’s largest banks, Lloyds Banking Group, has announced this week new policies which moves to solidify its support for the transition to a low-carbon economy by ceasing new funding for coal-fired power stations or thermal coal mines.
The General Synod of the Church of England earlier this week voted near-unanimously in favor of divesting from companies that fail to align themselves with the Paris Climate Agreement.
One of the world’s leading reinsurers, Swiss Re, has this week announced it will not provide re/insurance to businesses with more than 30% exposure to thermal coal across all lines of business, the latest company to tighten the screws on the future of the thermal coal industry.
