A row broke out over demands for Bristol City Council’s pension scheme to sever ties with fossil fuel companies. Green councillors want Avon Pension Fund to sell all its investments in oil, gas and coal industries, insisting it is “fantasy” to believe net zero can be achieved by engaging with them and that the local authority’s 6,000 staff should be given a vote to decide.
But the city council’s representative on the local pension board, Labour group leader Cllr Steve Pearce, said it was “not a binary issue” because some of the biggest renewable energy firms were formerly traditional fossil fuel giants. And he said that most world-leading green power providers still earned a small proportion of their income from resources like coal, so divesting from these businesses would mean withdrawing funding for companies critical to low-carbon targets.
The authority’s human resources committee was told that the £5billion local government Avon Pension Fund, which thousands of employees at the West of England’s four councils pay into and rely on for retirement, has £4.1million of holdings across the top five most established oil and gas multinationals – Total, Chevron, BP, Shell and Exxon. But this equates to just 0.2 per cent of the fund’s listed equity portfolio and a mere 0.07 per cent of total assets, members heard.
