Embarrassingly for Blanc, who by most accounts is a highly talented chief executive, she also happens to be a non-executive director of BP, which will presumably be bidding for some of the licences that become available.
No doubt the Aviva chief executive keeps her various positions well siloed, but how’s she going to square that one? That she took on the BP role specifically to enhance the company’s own green transition never sat happily with those investors who own BP shares solely for the cash cow characteristics of the company’s legacy oil and gas business.
To be fair, insurers such as Aviva have more reason than most to be worried about climate change, which arguably represents an existential threat to the entire industry. Already there is a mass exodus of insurers from Florida, in part because mounting storm damage is judged to have rendered much of the state uninsurable.
There is also some sort of a case that can be made for taking an uncompromised net zero position on the savings side of Aviva’s business, even if a fairly tenuous one. If there is no sustainable future for hydrocarbons, it significantly raises the risk of investing in them, with stranded assets a real possibility.
Some of the same observations can be made about the pressure central banks are under to apply much higher capital requirements to lending on oil and gas development. If this lending is rendered worthless by transition to renewable and nuclear forms of energy supply, then the losses would plainly have implications for financial stability. Even so, such judgments are ultimately best left to markets, where the risk is already in the price.
In a further outburst of ethical posturing, Aviva recently wrote to investors in some of its savings products saying it would be selling out of “certain companies that do not meet “our Aviva Baseline Exclusion Policy”.
These would include companies that “might be involved in coal production, weapons/arms, and tobacco production”.
There appears to have been no consultation with policyholders on any of this. What’s more, investors are to be unilaterally charged 0.04 percent of their funds for the privilege. The amounts might seem trivial, but it’s investors’ money nonetheless, and it seems an entirely unnecessary price to pay to assuage the conscience of Aviva’s no doubt burgeoning diversity, equality and inclusion department.
Furthermore, Aviva had to be pushed hard to clarify that the exclusions would not apply to main league defence contractors such as BAE Systems.
This is just as well, for if even providing the means to defend your own citizens is judged to be offensive, then we really have walked straight into the realms of delusion.
Not everyone can hide, like Switzerland and Ireland, behind the protective shield of Nato’s major defence spenders.
Ethical posturing is destroying corporate Britain
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Embarrassingly for Blanc, who by most accounts is a highly talented chief executive, she also happens to be a non-executive director of BP, which will presumably be bidding for some of the licences that become available.
No doubt the Aviva chief executive keeps her various positions well siloed, but how’s she going to square that one? That she took on the BP role specifically to enhance the company’s own green transition never sat happily with those investors who own BP shares solely for the cash cow characteristics of the company’s legacy oil and gas business.
To be fair, insurers such as Aviva have more reason than most to be worried about climate change, which arguably represents an existential threat to the entire industry. Already there is a mass exodus of insurers from Florida, in part because mounting storm damage is judged to have rendered much of the state uninsurable.
There is also some sort of a case that can be made for taking an uncompromised net zero position on the savings side of Aviva’s business, even if a fairly tenuous one. If there is no sustainable future for hydrocarbons, it significantly raises the risk of investing in them, with stranded assets a real possibility.
Some of the same observations can be made about the pressure central banks are under to apply much higher capital requirements to lending on oil and gas development. If this lending is rendered worthless by transition to renewable and nuclear forms of energy supply, then the losses would plainly have implications for financial stability. Even so, such judgments are ultimately best left to markets, where the risk is already in the price.
In a further outburst of ethical posturing, Aviva recently wrote to investors in some of its savings products saying it would be selling out of “certain companies that do not meet “our Aviva Baseline Exclusion Policy”.
These would include companies that “might be involved in coal production, weapons/arms, and tobacco production”.
There appears to have been no consultation with policyholders on any of this. What’s more, investors are to be unilaterally charged 0.04 percent of their funds for the privilege. The amounts might seem trivial, but it’s investors’ money nonetheless, and it seems an entirely unnecessary price to pay to assuage the conscience of Aviva’s no doubt burgeoning diversity, equality and inclusion department.
Furthermore, Aviva had to be pushed hard to clarify that the exclusions would not apply to main league defence contractors such as BAE Systems.
This is just as well, for if even providing the means to defend your own citizens is judged to be offensive, then we really have walked straight into the realms of delusion.
Not everyone can hide, like Switzerland and Ireland, behind the protective shield of Nato’s major defence spenders.
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