Right now, the way that the system works means our pensions are using our hard-earned wages to fuel the climate crisis – but they could instead turbocharge the solutions. Studies show that each pension saver has an average of £3,000 invested in fossil fuels.1 Climate breakdown means that the decades to come are set to become increasingly difficult and dangerous. Pension funds invest billions of pounds from our salaries in things like fossil fuels which pollute our air and water, wreck the climate and harm our hopes of a better future. Fossil fuel investment is a risk to our pensions too, with these investments increasingly losing value during the transition to cleaner technologies.
The majority of pension savers don’t want our money to fund fossil fuels, we want our wages to be invested in safe and green industries, like renewable energy.
So if our pensions savings are invested in more expenmsive and less profitable renewables then our pension incomes will be higher.
Be interesting to see that trick pulled off but how?
He does know you can pick which funds you invest your pension in? Has he even got a pension? Probably spent all the money in Costa conversing with imaginary people.
Before I fisk the whole thing – in what sense are any of his wages (and I thought he was retired) ‘hard earned’ – grifting is ‘hard graft’ now??
Tim put me into* Shell when shares were 10 quid. They’re 24 now. However, I’m OK because I think it’s not fossil fuels, it’s abiotic and therefore as green as could be.
*Not a share recommendation, just a comparison of dividend yield vs interest rates at that time.
“Fossil fuel investment is a risk to our pensions too, with these investments increasingly losing value during the transition to cleaner technologies.”
The problem with this thinking is that hmmm… might happen… but it ain’t going to be overnight.
Technological transitions take a long time. The failed experiments along the way, the improvements that have to happen, the environment that has to change. Buying into internet stocks might have got you Sun Microsystems, Netscape, uBid, Yahoo and Verio.
“The majority of pension savers don’t want our money to fund fossil fuels” – I don’t suppose there’s any evidence to back up this claim, is there? Seems a bit odd that the lefties & greens have to put on so much external pressure if everybody agreed with them, very odd.
“Fossil fuel investment is a risk to our pensions too, with these investments increasingly losing value during the transition to cleaner technologies.”
Those Tesla shares are a case in point..
I may have said this before, but when I was a baby Marxist I remember my comrades constantly insisting that capitalism would inevitably collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. I then noticed that they would wail and gnash their teeth over every tiny setback.
Why? I wondered, when the collapse was inevitable? Surely all we had to do was wait? But no. Thus were the empirical seeds of heresy sown, but you have to have a grain of scepticism and independent thought to do that. There’s not a lot of that in a bag of potatoes.
The basic mistake is to confuse the ownership of a fossil fuel company with any harm done by the use of its products.
Students at an Oxford college were not happy when the Bursar offered to switch off the central heating in response to demands to diversify.
The trick is pulled off in the Ed Millionaireband manner – by subsidising “Green” energy providers and providing them with guaranteed high profits via a levy on energy consumers and/or the taxpayer (usually “and” not just “or”).
Orsted has just decided to cancel its next North Sea windfarm – despite having signed a contract – because its building cost has gone up. Let’s see whether Ed will bail them out or Murphy’s latest claim will be proved wrong.
Does Sir Keir Staermorrhoid pay any attention to the vaporings of the pearl-clutcher of Ely?
Thought not.
Maybe he lost money on the horses yesterday or something – he’s in a pig of a mood.
But then, what happens now is not a celebration. It is an enactment put on for current political purposes. It is all part of the ‘bread and circuses’ routine now beloved of all politicians who want to distract us from the fact that most people in this country are being exploited. The trouble for them is that growing numbers of people are now aware of that fact, which is why support for fascism is again increasing, including in significant numbers here in the UK this time.
There is, then, nothing to celebrate today.
Instead, we should note that we have not learned the lessons of history.
And we should note that the Tories and Labour are now marching to the far-right’s drumbeat as they offer ever more extreme policies of hate in their stupid desire to emulate its racist and oppressive agendas.
Eighty years ago, we won a victory in Europe. Today, we are losing the fight against fascism at home, and those leading the celebrations are responsible for that. I find nothing that makes me want to wave a flag in that fact.
Ironically as someone babbling on about ‘Genocide in Gaza’ he is one of the leading examples of ‘real fascism’ which he conveniently ignores
I’d imagine the moment someone builds an SMR that produces competitively priced electricity the value of shares in anything ‘renewable’ will plummet to zero
And this is the ‘team’ behind the petition – what a Diverse bunch!
https://350.org/team/
I’ll stick with Fossil Fuels, thanks.
“The majority of pension savers don’t want our money to fund fossil fuels, we want our wages to be invested in safe and green industries, like renewable energy.”
Hah. Also here (scroll down a bit).
I don’t doubt that the people who have nothing else to worry about think it’s terribly important, but they’re comically short of being the majority.
“Climate breakdown means that the decades to come are set to become increasingly difficult and dangerous.”
We were being told that decades ago. The difficult and dangerous stuff caused by the radically changing climate never arrived. The people saying this stuff were 100% wrong. Why would I believe anything they are saying now?
It shouldn’t be too much to ask. We all want to know that, as we get older, we’re going to have enough money and a thriving planet to live on.
It shouldn’t be – but the state continues to cost over £1.2 trillion per year for increasingly no return. Where is the money going?
Our pensions system is broken for all but the highest earners, investment managers and fossil fuel CEOs, with millions of ordinary people facing poverty in retirement.
Most of the pensioners without financial troubles are in the public sector – it’s here we need to make changes. CEOs are not numerous enough to make any material difference and they are dwarfed by the number of Politicians and bureaucrats all of whom have their noses in the trough of taxpayers money.
The UK’s pension system is enormous – it’s worth almost £3 trillion, and private pensions make up the single largest component of total household wealth. Yet as it stands, many of us are going to retire without enough money coming in to cover the costs of essentials like food and bills.
Inflation is rampant – largely driven again by the cost of feeding a city the size of Birmingham coming in every year, as well as the cost of the state. It’s a very real issue
Women, people of colour and people with disabilities are all much more likely to face financial hardship. With the right policies in place, we can make sure that everyone is able to save enough to guarantee a decent standard of living in retirement. Nobody should have to choose between heating or eating in their old age.
The first point is complete nonsense, women, PoC and even disabled people receive specific consideration and prioritization in hiring and in other workplace aspects across almost every sector in the country, even extending to professional sports. White men, arguably the people that did most to create the UK that was able to prevail during the Second World War face systematic racism and ongoing discrimination across a whole raft of areas. Your beliefs are out of touch with reality and are like some kind of vaguely demented religious dogma.
Right now, the way that the system works means our pensions are using our hard-earned wages to fuel the climate crisis – but they could instead turbocharge the solutions. Studies show that each pension saver has an average of £3,000 invested in fossil fuels.1 Climate breakdown means that the decades to come are set to become increasingly difficult and dangerous.
It’s largely a scam manufactured by groups like yourself with a desperate desire to control people’s lives without troubling yourself to get elected to do so. Almost all the advocates of ‘net Zero’ are peddlers of monstrous evil and unrestricted totalitarianism. You pose a clear and present danger to the people of the country and must be opposed at every turn
Pension funds invest billions of pounds from our salaries in things like fossil fuels which pollute our air and water, wreck the climate and harm our hopes of a better future. Fossil fuel investment is a risk to our pensions too, with these investments increasingly losing value during the transition to cleaner technologies.
I think the bulk of people who have invested in Fossil Fuel companies rely on their dividends, especially with the depradations of this government, now universally agreed by anyone without a vested interest to be among the very worst in human history, to live.
The majority of pension savers don’t want our money to fund fossil fuels, we want our wages to be invested in safe and green industries, like renewable energy. If our pensions were invested differently, they could play a vital role in supporting a rapid transition to clean energy, and in creating jobs and growth in the technologies and industries of the future.
Here’s a novel idea – why don’t you allow people to invest in what they want and piss off on the horse you
rode in on?
The good news is that this could all change. The government is undertaking the biggest review of the pensions system in a generation. This is a huge opportunity to push the Government to fix it so we all have more money in our pockets when we stop working, as well as cleaner air and a healthier environment now and in the future. Now’s the time for the government to change the pensions system to stop gambling with our retirements and safeguard our hard-earned savings for the long term.
In order to do this we need:
– An end to immigration on an unsustainable scale
– Massive cuts to an over bloated state
– An end to Diversity, identity politics and all the panoply of ‘hate crimes’
All of which am guessing you oppose
By signing this petition you are joining people across the UK, charities, consumer groups, trade unions, economists and many more to demand better, fairer and greener pensions. With enough of us working together, we can persuade the government to change the pensions system to:
1. Deliver decent pensions for all.
2. Fund a just transition to a thriving low-carbon economy.
3. Phase out investment in fossil fuels, deforestation and other harmful industries.
It’s like a roll call of every responsible party for the state we are in. The prescription proposed would be the equivalent of making Harold Shipman minister of health.
There’s a lot of money in pension funds and retirement accounts, and great big pots of money attract the attention of hyenas who are convinced that in a just world that pot would be theirs. Ya’ gotta’ be vigilant because it will be taken from you if given half a chance.
I will sell my oil and gas investments when all the tech needed to replace the use of oil and gas are in place and available in the market. Until then, oil and gas is needed.
And no, do not send me a link to a scientist who has done a few lab experiments and claims that they have invented a carbon nanotube thingie that can store twice as much energy as a litre of jet fuel. It is a long and expensive road from lab experiment to an actual product that is mass produced and available to buy at a reasonable price.
all politicians who want to distract us from the fact that most people in this country are being exploited.
Why would they want to do that? Politicians are always telling us of the jobs they create. And another word for employing labour is exploiting labour. Since one employs labour to increase value (only theoretically in the public sector of course)
Yet again he shows words don’t mean what he thinks they mean.
It is clear that Van Patten was not paying attention when “Woy” abolished the death penalty in the face of overwhelming evidence that it saved lives (my five-figure statistical tables were inadequate to find a level of probability that it did not: i.e. less than 0.0005%) or when Wilson introduced hyperinflation to the UK with inflation reaching 25% in one year and the value of the £ note in our pockets worse than halving in less than five years.
However some of his comments on the current state of affairs are correct. We need a cut to the bloated state and fair pay for all would involve cuts in public sector wages to match those for equivalent jobs in the private sector [adjusting for differences in working conditions and pensions would require cutting them below private sector wage rates but it would be preferable to demand that they work harder instead of a drastic pay cut].
It is true that women and those with disabilities are more likely to suffer financial hardship because they earn less *despite* the legally-imposed priorities given to them (and, in the case of women that they have to survive longer on their savings/pension after retirement because men die younger, mostly due to the harsher working conditions during their working lives). VP should have asked Murphy whether he wanted everyone to be paid for not working or for just “working” while sitting in a centrally-heated office drinking tea?
I do NOT believe that any pension fund invests in fossil fuels – quite a few invest in BP and/or Shell but I have never heard of any investing in barrels of oil or tons of coal. There is a good reason why Pension Funds invest in Shell – it produces stuff that is essential (and will remain essential until someone invents a solar cell that runs off moonlight in midwinter) to maintaining UK domestic economy at a price below the maximum that people are willing to pay and so generates a profit that will provide enough income to keep the pensioner above the breadline (and, hopefully, in comfort) for the rest of his/her life. *That*, unlike Murphy, meets the definition of a suitable investment for a pension fund.
I’ve gone on too long but I must mention that BP (and most other oil majors) has tried investing in renewables and found that they really, really are not a good investment.
“Woy” abolished the death penalty in the face of overwhelming evidence that it saved lives (my five-figure statistical tables were inadequate to find a level of probability that it did not: i.e. less than 0.0005%)
Sounds like the sort of bollox statistics a politician would come out with, John. The sample size of murderers who commit a second murder after a previous conviction for same is too small to mean anything & in reality, the deterrent effect is zero. Nobody commits a crime expecting to be caught & convicted unless they don’t care if they are.
Further to BiS’s closing line…
When I were a law student in times antediluvian, some chaps produced a study by interviewing incarcerated ‘lags’ and other ‘bad lots’ that strongly indicated that they were not dissuaded from committing crimes because of the potential severity of the sentence anything near as much as they were dissuaded by the likelihood of getting caught.
On the basis that ‘clear-up’ rates are so dismal I’d suggest that increasing the severity of sentences would make very little difference to the levels of criminality.
Real life experience would seem to indicate the same, Nobel Baron. Guy I know served an 8 stretch for a serious offense. It was the sort of thing where it was a repeated offense he made a living out of where he eventually got captured. As he so succinctly put it “I thought I could walk on water until I got a bath.”
And that’s the reality. The more people get away with things the more they think they can get away with them. And their success is instructive for others.
Funnily enough, BiS, Thomas Sowell produces numbers that prove exactly the opposite: that convicted murders frequently go on to murder again, and that the total number of murders far exceeds the number of murderers. If you want to maximise lives saved, execute murderers.
Of course, this may apply more strongly in the US than the UK but the point stands and the stats are there to interrogate.
If people who have shown the propensity to and capability of murder once, and have been jailed and then released after a 14 stretch, are (under the BiS reading) not dissuaded from having another crack by the thought of execution then they surely can’t be dissuaded by the thought of another 14 years.
That suggests that there is no such thing as deterrence of any kind for murder, which I doubt, but so what?
Offer them jail forever, on South Georgia, or a swift hanging, and wash your hands of them. The important thing is that not a single murderer should ever be able to murder again, given that nothing much deters them except the prospect of apprehension (about the only thing the British police being any good at being nicking murderers).
It is all part of the ‘bread and circuses’ routine now beloved of all politicians who want to distract us from the fact that most people in this country are being exploited.
Half the country is on benefits, which is an odd way to be exploited.
‘Climate breakdown means that the decades to come are set to become increasingly difficult and dangerous.’
Any economist, especially a “professor,” knows you don’t spend money now on something decades out. Seriously, it is one of the mostly profoundly stupid things you could do.
‘Pension funds invest billions of pounds from our salaries in things like fossil fuels which pollute our air and water, wreck the climate and harm our hopes of a better future.’
Wut? Fossil fuels raised 80% of the world’s population out of extreme poverty, and enabled major population increases. His idea of ‘a better future’ is killing half the world and putting 2/3s of the rest in extreme poverty. Murphy proposes crimes against humanity.
‘Fossil fuel investment is a risk to our pensions too, with these investments increasingly losing value during the transition to cleaner technologies.’
There is double-ought zero evidence that there will be any such transition. It is an elitist fantasy assumption, ignoring the world.
‘The majority of pension savers don’t want our money to fund fossil fuels, we want our wages to be invested in safe and green industries, like renewable energy.’
Actually, few ‘pension savers’ care where their money is invested. Few even know. They are interested in return, not some bullshit social causes. No rational saver wants their money in ‘safe and green industries, like renewable energy.’
Murphy is lying. Why is unknown, however, Hanlon’s razor.
@ Sean O’Connor
Don’t discount the strange logic that exists around renewables. I have heard arguments that cost effective SMR’s could be used as backups to renewables so we get electricity when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. Telling them that the renewables would then be pointless just confuses them as they insist that when they were working the power from renewables would be cheaper.
I wold think that’s the last thing you’d want to do with a SMR. With any heat engine bringing it rapidly up to working temperature then letting it cool is a recipe for a very short life heat engine. Thermal stress.
Tough conditions to be an unreliables enthusiast right now.
Demand 30GW, Wind producing 3GW, Solar producing 0GW.
Thank you France and biomass (ugh)
I do wish the gridwatch graphic would show what batteries are delivering but I guess the pixels don’t go small enough.
@ bis
There was data on the number of “capital murders” over the periods before and after the trial period of suspending the death penalty. There were very few “capital murders” in the years prior to “Woy” abolishing the death sentence for capital murders because, for instance, many professional criminals refused to accompany anyone carrying a gun when carrying out a robbery.
I do NOT do bollox statistics (I have, on occasion, made myself unpopular by refusing).
“Woy” quoted a decline in the number of non-capital murders, which did not merit a death penalty, as a reason for abolishing the death penalty for “capital” murders. *That* is an example of bollox statistics.
Gamecock
May 8, 2025 at 7:46 pm
Thank you. My ego is boosted when people agree with me!!!
If the crims are locked up then they can’t be out there criminaling, so that should give a reduction in criminality.
I’m surprised the politicians don’t object to the criminals muscling in on their patch. After all, robbing us blind is their racket.
Prior employment scheme – sponsor is well known public supporter of climate narrative- forced wholesale switch into sustainability funds, net zero etc. as the trustees believe he long term risks of climate change meant it was their duty to FORCE people to switch.
I therefore over invested my SIPP in oil and gas. Oil and gas did very well. Equity investors in the energy transition less well.
And they’ve made moving the money out as painful as possible.
Ganecock
I take your point on Hanlon’s Razor but when you look at Murphy’s spats with Tim, Christie Malry, his falling out with even John McDonnell for F£&ks sake, there’s definitely a high degree of malice and I remain adamant he is the closest thing there is to pure evil in the blogosphere
Stonyground,
“We were being told that decades ago. The difficult and dangerous stuff caused by the radically changing climate never arrived. The people saying this stuff were 100% wrong. Why would I believe anything they are saying now?”
Even if you go with the IPCC reports, it’s a couple of degrees in a century. It will have a marginal effect, something that can be easily adjusted for in that period.
What is actually observable to you, in terms of looking out of the window, the price of certain products?
Even the thing of producing wine in England is more to do with it being the new rich man’s toy and a tourist attraction rather than being a sustainable business (most of Denbies wine is sold at the visitor’s centre, Nyetimber still hasn’t made a profit).
@John
I think there’s too many other factors in play to assign a rise in murders to the abolishment of capital punishment. For a start, most murders are committed on people the murderer knows for various reasons. Of the remainder, the time of abolition was also the time of a considerable societal watershed. On could even connect the two.
many professional criminals refused to accompany anyone carrying a gun when carrying out a robbery.
It’s the time when the UK started to get a different sort of professional criminal. Professional criminals generally didn’t used to own guns. They were rented from an “armourer” according to need. Because nobody wanted “the tools of the trade” hanging around to be found. But then the numbers of foreigners increased & brought with them a gun culture. Like the Jamaicans, to who guns are fashion accessories. And there’s a lot of technical changes made use of firearms in furtherance of crime redundant. Heightened security measures in banks etc put the “over the pavement artist”, the armed bank robber virtually out of business. The only ready money available in a bank is a few thousand in the cash drawers & vehicles that transport cash have all sorts of defensive measures. So guns now tend to be to protect the criminal from other criminals.
Gamecock doesn’t care if capital punishment increases or decreases murder. The debate is esoterica. Some crimes are heinous enough to demand it.
@ bis
Your first paragraph suggests that you may have fallen for Woy’s bait-and-switch. In the 1950s and early 1960s there was a decline in the number of murders (and, since the population was growing, a steeper decline in the murder rate). Nearly all murders of family members etc were not “capital murders” because the criterion was designed, inter alia but largely, to catch those likely to repeat the offence – kill someone else – if allowed to live. Hence murder in the pursuit of a crime, murder by shooting, (murder of a police was included to provide a deterrent). The decline in non-capital murders was irrelevant except to highlight the rise in formerly “capital” murders during the trial period.
You cite the rise in Jamaican gang killings with guns following the abolition of hanging for shooring people dead … It is not obvious that, Lucy Letby excepted, there has been a rise in “non-capital” murders alongside the rise in “capital” murders.
John, I’ve never paid the slightest attention to Woy & any of his mates. Why would I? As far as I’m concerned they were speaking from another planet. But I have been living in a major city & been aware of the changes around me. And the sixties are the period when it really started to change.The idea that the people that London was starting to acquire would have taken the death penalty as a deterrent to capital crimes is little short of hilarious. They were coming from places had it (still have it) & it didn’t deter them there.
Statistics may work if you’re comparing apples with apples but it’s not going to work if you’re comparing apples with mangos. You ever had any personal experience of these people apart from pissing around with numbers? The Kurds who opened up with automatic weapons one evening in Green Lanes, Harringay. Or ten minutes walk away, the spade who demanded “respect” by shooting a teenage girl through the head at the Wood Green Afro-Caribbean Centre?
@ Bis
I tend not to talk when I don’t know what I’m talking about.
I lived and worked in London in the 70s and 80s. There was a secular decrease in the number of murders throughout the UK in the 1950s and early 1960s; the West Indian immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s were more likely to be nurses and bus conductors (or, if they were lucky, tube drivers) than drug dealers or gang members. Even the Kray twins only killed one man each.
Today’s report of a low-life murdering an old woman while robbing her gave a name for the culprit that sounded English (or, perhaps, French) not Jamaican.
Woy Jenkins altered the risk/reward balance for gangsters carrying guns: whether or not you think a, relatively small, racial sub-group didn’t care about the risk of execution, the large majority of UK/London criminals clearly did.
It’s possible capital punishment isn’t that much of a deterrent, but recidivism rates are extremely low.