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It’s the kind of story that lights up headlines: one of Britain’s biggest fund managers started selling shares in Exxon Mobil Corp. because the global oil giant wasn’t doing enough to address climate change.
The investment fund manager, Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM), oversees $1.3 trillion, making it the 11th largest money manager in the world. Legal and General (as it is called) is also one of scores of investment management firms, activists and hand-wringing organizations that are part of the burgeoning global sustainable and environmental social finance and governance effort to promote collaborative engagement and foster responsible investment and divestment. The goal is to enhance disclosure target-setting within corporations so that they can become leaders and builders of business models that will help the planet achieve a prosperous and sustainable future and overcome the climate emergency/crisis/disaster now faced by humanity if fossil fuels are not reduced to near-zero in the not-too-distant future.
As part of this movement, LGIM is a member of an organization called Climate Action 100+: Global Investors Driving Business Decisions, a collection of meddling institutional investors around the world, mostly government-run pension plans — although Quebec’s state pension fund, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, is the only obvious Canadian member of Climate Action 100+.
Exxon was one of five companies LGIM said it had placed on the divestment list as it steps up pressure on companies to address climate change: ExxonMobil Corporation, Hormel Foods, Korean Electric Power Corporation, Kroger and Metlife. “These names,” said LGIM, “are in addition to China Construction Bank, Rosneft Oil, Japan Post Holdings, Subaru, Loblaw and Sysco Corporation, all of whom remain engaged but who have yet to take the substantive actions to warrant re-instatement.”
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