50 signatures reached
To: Ministry of Finance, the Council on Ethics
Divest Norway's "Petroleum fund"
We are asking the Ministry of Finance in Norway to support solutions to climate change by ending their investment in fossil fuels!
The fund should immediately freeze any new investments in fossil fuels, and divest from direct ownership and any commingled funds that include fossil fuel public equities and corporate bonds within 5 years.
Why is this important?
The world's largest souvereign wealth fund, http://www.swfinstitute.org/fund-rankings/, is holding shares worth $37bn dollars in 146 of the 200 biggest oil and coal companies, of which total reserves represent 679 gigatons CO2 if burned.
The fund's huge positions in fossil fuels also violate their own ethical guidelines (Sec. 3 c) :
The Ministry of Finance may, on the advice of the Council of Ethics, exclude companies from the investment universe of the Fund if there is an unacceptable risk that the company contributes to or is responsible for:
c) severe environmental damage;
(background material presented in Norwegian)
http://www.framtiden.no/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=621&Itemid=194
By the way, the whole fund ($130 bn) is fully derived from the petroleum industri (taxes, licence fees and dividends).