Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Divests Entire BP Holdings

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has fully divested itself from its $187 million stake in BP, one of the world’s seven supermajor oil and gas companies.

The Guardian first reported the news by comparing filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission made by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust between September of 2015 and February 2016.

Specifically, the Trust’s Form 13F, filed on the 13th of November, 2015, shows $187 million worth of holdings in BP PLC. However, in the company’s next Form 13F, filed on the 12th of February, 2016, all mention of BP is gone, indicating that Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust had divested itself of its BP holdings.

In reporting on the story, The Guardian made note of Bill Gates’ earlier claims that fossil fuel divestment was a “false solution,” as well as the unsurprising counterpoint to that argument, which shows that his Foundation has divested from 85% of its fossil fuel divestments since 2014.

In an interview with The Atlantic back in November of 2015, Bill Gates dismissed divestment as a “false solution”, continuing:

If you think divestment alone is a solution, I worry you’re taking whatever desire people have to solve this problem and kind of using up their idealism and energy on something that won’t emit less carbon—because only a few people in society are the owners of the equity of coal or oil companies.

Gates’ thrust was the need to also focus on research and development into clean energy and energy efficiency solutions, and hoped that some of the money being divested “would come into this pool that is funding these high-risk innovations.”

The need for a widespread attack on climate change and the entrenched fossil fuel industry is not to be dismissed, however, nor is the worldwide divestment movement. To coincide with the COP21 climate change talks in Paris back in December, worldwide divestment campaign 350.org announced that, according to its figures, more than 500 institutions from around the world had divested a total of $3.4 trillion in fossil fuel assets.


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Joshua S Hill

I'm a Christian, a nerd, a geek, and I believe that we're pretty quickly directing planet-Earth into hell in a handbasket! I also write for Fantasy Book Review (.co.uk), and can be found writing articles for a variety of other sites. Check me out at about.me for more.

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