One of Britain’s largest private health research charity groups has, over the last year, rebuked fossil fuel divestment campaigners by increasing its investments in coal, oil, and gas — despite the group considering “climate change to be one of the greatest contemporary challenges to global health.”
Campaigners at 350.org, a fossil fuel divestment outfit, are calling Wellcome Trust’s decision to move forward with its fossil fuel investments disappointing, ultimately placing them “on the wrong side of history.” Bill McKibben, the head of the divestment group, added that he thinks the research group’s move is akin to an investment in “tropical disease and natural disaster.”
“It’s hugely disappointing that a mission-driven organisation like the Wellcome Trust should be choosing, after everything that’s just happened in Paris, to plant themselves on the wrong side of history by continuing to back fossil fuels,” Danielle Paffard, a U.K. divestment campaigner with McKibben’s 350.org, told reporters.
She added: “I hope those at the trust reflect on the implications of their actions, and the type of world they play a role in shaping.”
The research group, according to an analysis of its financial assets by The Guardian, has “increased the number of shares held in the oil and gas multinational BG, which is subject to a takeover bid by Shell, by at least 300% since Sept 2014.” It also increased its shares in BP by 12% in 2015, a number showing an uptick, rather than a decline, in Wellcome Trust’s fossil fuel assets.
The Guardian orchestrated a Keep it in the Ground campaign earlier this year, which, the paper states, calls on the Wellcome Trust to divest.
Previous divestment campaigns have been successful, managing to convince Stanford University in 2014 to divest and then, one of their biggest prizes in April, when Syracuse University became one of the largest colleges to shake off fossil fuels.
Still, some energy insiders see the recent misfortunes of the divestment campaign as a sea change.
It started to unravel, they say, when divestment group 350.org — according to Divestment.org, a website devoted to fleshing out the facts surrounding divestment campaigns — inflated the number of fossil fuel assets divested this year.
“By now it should be perfectly clear that the divestment effort stumbled terribly in 2015. The most notable rejection was that of the Guardian’s campaign,” Matt Dempsey, speaking on behalf of Independent Petroleum Association of America, told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an email.
He added: “But several college campus rejections too show just how flimsy the divestment effort has become.”
Indeed, Wellcome Trust’s decision to forgo divesting its fossil fuel interests came after news earlier this month that the University of Michigan struck the cord and refused to divest its fossil fuels.
The McKibben divestment group Divest and Invest pushed the University to divest — but to no avail. The UM’s president, Mark Schlissel, was not persuaded by the group’s pleas, but did note in a statement on the UM website that, like Wellcome Trust, the school will continue to do all it can to curb global warming.
“I do not believe that a persuasive argument has been made that divestment by the U-M will speed up the necessary transition from coal to renewable or less polluting sources of energy,” Schlissel, wrote in a statement announcing the school’s decision.
Members of the medical profession are still pushing the issue, arguing that fossil fuels negatively effect public health; in fact, according to Dr David McCoy, the director of the medical campaign group Medact, fossil fuels are the “greatest health threat of the 21st century.”
“To hear that the Wellcome Trust is investing heavily in the industries that are driving the problem is deeply disturbing,” McCoy said about the negative effects carbon emissions have on public health.
He added: “It sends a message that the foundation does not believe this conflicts with their aim to improve health for everyone, or their duty as a charity to act in the public interest.”
In the end, McCoy said, Wellcome Trust’s decision “sends a message that the foundation does not believe this conflicts with their aim to improve health for everyone, or their duty as a charity to act in the public interest.”
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