Fossil Fuel Free Pensions
Fossil Fuels are dragging your pension down! At the end of last year I finally managed to switch to a fossil fuel free pension. The journey wasn't completely straightforward, but it was worth it and hopefully this will become a lot easier in the near future. Why do this? There's a bunch of things you can do to reduce your carbon footprint including giving up flying and eating less meat, and I recommend all of them. But right at the top has to be to stop investing in fossil fuel companies. A typical pension pot in the UK is around £88,000 of which - typically - 4% is invested in oil, gas, and coal. That's three and half grand of your money going directly to the likes of ExxonMobil. If you simply spent this much on tax free petrol it would buy you about 8.8 tons of fuel which would create about 29 tons of CO2, or about 5x the annual emissions of an average Brit. But investing probably results in an order of magnitude more emissions $^\dagger$ ...