My TL;DR:
The Environment Agency has, in the past, issued warnings against PFAS (“forever chemicals”), a family of carcinogenic chemicals which can cause “almost indefinite environmental contamination”.
According to the Environment Agency, their “extreme persistence… could lead to long-term exposure of both people and wildlife”, and some of the chemicals “have also been shown to cause harmful effects in humans”.
Despite this, the Environment Agency’s pension fund has invested nearly £15m of taxpayers’ money directly into chemical firms that produce PFAS.
A spokesperson for the Environment Agency said its pension fund was “legally separated from the operational and regulatory functions carried out by the Environment Agency” and said that its third party managers controlled what made up its portfolio.
The chair of the EA’s Pensions Committee, Robert Gould, was the former Conservative leader of Dorset County Council until 2017. He has claimed that the pension fund’s approach is influenced by “the desire to act in the wider public interest”.
Recent testing found that all but one water company in England already had potentially toxic levels of PFAS in their water supplies.
florge@feddit.uk 5 months ago
Feel like this it probably more on the pension fund managers than anything else. I remember reading that Saudi ARAMCO is wholly owned by two investment vehicles which are called something obvious like Big Oil Investing Co, but because these two companies are only an investment companies and fund managers do so little due diligence, a lot of ESG oriented investments end up indirectly investing in Saudi oil.
Jho@feddit.uk 5 months ago
I’m not really sure how much I blame EA in all this. Honestly, I don’t really understand how pension funds work.
Does EA have a lot of choice on what pension fund to use? Does any pension fund invest wholly ethically?
It’s certainly an issue that £15m that is given to the EA is ultimately used for purposes which go directly against what the EA does. There’s something going wrong which needs to be fixed, but I wouldn’t know what the answer would be.