OPINION: While you’re doing your best to help avoid a global sauna for your kids by installing solar, your pension fund could be busily unwinding all your good work.
If I look in my own backyard, I can count among my company’s clients Get-Up and Greenpeace. But the list also includes just about every company that has ever owned an Australian coal-fired power station and a few with some pretty big oil and gas operations.Now maybe that means I’m a person with no ethical backbone, who’ll take money from anyone. But I’d prefer to point out it illustrates that one of the problems with fossil fuels is they remain a big part of the economy.
Spanish power utility Iberdrola also makes the climate wreckers list because of its involvement in gas power plants. Yet this is a small, legacy part of a company that is one of the largest developers of renewable energy projects in the world. Of course, excluding such companies will reduce the diversity of your portfolio. But it’s worth noting that even with coal, oil and gas prices at some their highest ever levels, the share price of many major fossil fuel companies has shown little improvement, if any, over the past 10 to 15 years. Woodside’s share price is still to recover to where it was in 2006. Meanwhile, Santos shares are more than 20 per cent down on where they were 10 years ago.
This allowed me to see that while UniSuper’s Balanced Option isn’t great, its Sustainable High Growth option excludes major fossil fuel producers. Importantly, it has delivered a better return over the past seven years than the Balanced Option. As a starting point, Market Forces provides a list of other superannuation options that also enable you to give fossil fuel producers the flick.
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