To: Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System
OTPP and OMERS - Go Fossil Free!
As public pressure to confront climate change builds, as educators and citizens we call on the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System to immediately freeze any new investment in fossil-fuel companies, and to divest within five years from direct ownership and from any commingled funds that include fossil-fuel public equities and corporate bonds. We believe such action on behalf of the OTPP and OMERS will not only be a sound decision for its financial portfolio, but also for the well-being of its current and future members as well as all Ontarians and beyond. We all deserve the opportunity to live with a future not defined by climate chaos. We need to take action in the spirit of the Haudenosaunee concept of thinking seven generations in advance, and take climate action now for ourselves and future generations.
Please read our brief and resolution calling on the OTPP and OMERS to divest:
And please visit the website of the Educators Climate Alliance to stay up to date on this campaign. We can do this!
Why is this important?
Climate change is accelerating, and we are witnessing the increasing impacts of a warming planet more and more consistently. In addition to increasingly pointed warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the past few years have seen an urgent report from 11000+ scientists warning of the urgent need to change course for climate action in the next twelve years:
https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biz088/5610806
We continue to witness the impacts of climate change unfolding in real time, across the world, as we witness more record-breaking heat, droughts, and hurricanes, which impact hundreds of thousands of people and cost economies hundreds of billions of dollars. Hurricane Sandy alone caused $50 billion in damages. Experts agree that global warming caused by humans burning fossil fuels will continue to accelerate and intensify these tragic climate disasters. The scientific consensus is clear and overwhelming; we cannot safely burn even one fifth of global fossil-fuel reserves without dangerously warming the planet for several thousand years.