{"id":7524,"date":"2019-07-23T05:57:06","date_gmt":"2019-07-23T05:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7524"},"modified":"2019-07-23T05:57:06","modified_gmt":"2019-07-23T05:57:06","slug":"divestment-at-the-national-trust","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2019\/07\/23\/divestment-at-the-national-trust\/","title":{"rendered":"Divestment at the National Trust"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"section-body\">\n<p>I see that the National Trust has announced that it will be divesting away from fossil fuels within the next three years. \u00a0Peter Vermeulen, the charity\u2019s Chief Financial Officer, is reported as saying:<\/p>\n<p>\u201c<em>The Trust has just over a billion pounds invested on the stock market, the returns from which are an important source of income.\u00a0 Over the years we\u2019ve gradually evolved our investment strategy to reduce our carbon footprint. \u00a0Many organisations have been working hard to persuade fossil fuel companies to invest in green alternatives. \u00a0The charity will be establishing a long-term goal to continue the reduction of the carbon footprint of the investment portfolio. \u00a0They also aim to increase engagement with companies invested in, to encourage them to make material improvements in their environmental performance<\/em>\u00a0[but]\u00a0<em>these companies have made insufficient progress and now we have decided to divest from fossil fuel companies.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>This looks very much as if it might be virtue signalling. \u00a0However, assuming it is not, I am sure that all NT senior staff (as an act of solidarity) will be having nothing more to do with fossil fuels in their professional and personal lives: no travel in non-electric vehicles; no use of new plastics; no eating non-organic food; no use of electricity made from gas; no use of gas for heating; no use of metals smelted with coal or coke; etc. etc. \u00a0It will be a challenge, but these folk are quite smart so, ...<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, I hear that Norway's\u00a0sovereign wealth fund was given permission by the Norwegian government to ditch investments in fossil fuels. \u00a0This is beyond irony, given where all the money came from in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I see that the National Trust has announced that it will be divesting away from fossil fuels within the next three years. \u00a0Peter Vermeulen, the charity\u2019s Chief Financial Officer, is reported as saying: \u201cThe Trust has just over a billion...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7524\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}