Divestment from Fossil Fuels

Two major players have joined the divesters this fortnight:

Climate progress reports

At a business and climate change conference held this week in Paris, AXA — France’s largest insurer — announced that it would sell €500 million ($US559 million) in coal assets by the end of 2015, while increasing its “green investments” in things like renewable energy, green infrastructure, and green bonds to €3 billion ($US3.3 billion) by 2020.

During the announcement on Friday, AXA’s chief executive Henri de Castries spoke about the threat that climate change poses to the environment, and the responsibility of insurance companies to deal with those threats. Last year, AXA paid over €1 billion ($US1.1 billion) globally in weather-related insurance claims, citing climate change as a “core business issue” already driving an increase in weather-related risks.

From a report in the Business Spectator

The Climate Spectator notes

Norway’s giant Government Pension Fund Global is set to divest from companies that derive more than 30% of their revenue or operations from coal, with activists calling it the biggest step yet in the global fossil fuels divestment campaign.

However

Bloomberg said Australian coal mine operators BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Glencore were set to fall safely under the 30% threshold.

Details at “Norway’s giant fund to divest coal-reliant companies” by John Conroy at the Climate Spectator