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Julian Poulter, CEO of the Asset Owners Disclosure Project, is not a happy man right now, telling anyone who’ll listen, major investors or investment funds are not taking climate change seriously. Indeed, despite increasing pressure from anti-fossil fuel climate activist groups, the number of the top 500 investors (or investor groups) tracking, disclosing, and running programs to reduce the risk climate change may pose to their portfolios fell in 2015. Of the top 500 investors, 246 scored zero concerning their response to climate change according to the Asset Owners Disclosure Project (AODP), which surveys global companies on their climate change risk and management. This is up from 236 investors scoring zero in 2014. Just 20 percent of investors are actually taking steps to mitigate or hedge the risk of climate change to their investments.
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Japan Post Insurance Co Ltd., Kuwait Investment Authority, and China’s SAFE Investment Company are the four biggest funds that scored zero in the survey.
The 246 investors identified as “laggards” for doing nothing to address climate risks account for $14 trillion in assets, the report said. “It is shocking that nearly half the world’s biggest investors are doing nothing at all to mitigate climate risk,” complained Poulter, warning pension funds, insurers, and other investors ignoring climate change “are gambling with the savings and financial security of hundreds of millions of people around the world and risking another financial crisis.”
Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Congress is pushing another effort to rein in President Obama’s climate ambitions, or at least his continued funding of climate boondoggles. Twenty-seven Senate Republicans are citing a 1994 law prohibiting the United States from providing funds to any United Nations (UN) agency that recognizes as a member country any country not recognized as a sovereign state, to demand the Obama administration cut off hundreds of millions of dollars from the UN’s Green Climate Fund and the $10 million in annual funding given to the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
The law targeted the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Palestinian territories that are not recognized as a country by the United States or other major world powers and are not UN members. Palestine recently joined the UNFCCC, which Republicans say should result in an end to U.S. funding for that group.
In a letter written to Secretary of State John Kerry, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), who led the lawmakers writing the letter, noted, “The administration needs to obey the law, and we’re going to do everything we can to enforce it.”
In the past, President Barack Obama cut off funding to United Nations entities over the Palestine issue. For example, in 2011, Obama cited the 1994 law to cut off funding to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization after it admitted Palestine as a member.
Eugene Kontorovich, a professor of international law at Northwestern University School of Law, said the argument made in the letter puts the Obama administration in a tough spot. “The president is committed to climate change, and the president is also opposed to Palestinian unilateral statehood efforts at the UN, and the U.S. clearly does not regard Palestine as a state, ….” At the same time, Kontorovich noted while it’s well established that the executive branch has the sole authority to recognize a nation, laws like the 1994 one use the funding and appropriations power specifically delegated to Congress to enforce policies. “It would be a step beyond anything that’s been done before for the administration to ignore this provision, because it’s the power of the purse,” Kontorovich said.
Here’s hoping more investors abandon the sinking ship that is climate hysteria and that the President decides to follow the law as opposed to continuing to pursue his costly climate obsession. Should either or both of these come to pass, the economy and peoples retirements funds and their freedom of choice will be better off.
