Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Hot on the heels of the Guardian divestment scandal, and 350.org and Rockefellers divestment “issues”, it now turns out that, as of 31st December 2014, the BBC is also heavily invested in oil and tobacco.
According to the BBC’s pension fund website, the second highest equity holding of the BBC pension fund is a £40.6 million investment in Royal Dutch Shell.
Despite some dalliance with green groups, such as Shell Oil’s hookup with CRU scientists back in 2000, according to Wikipedia, Shell remains very much a traditional oil and gas business.
Shell is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading. It has minor renewable energy activities in the form of biofuels and wind.
Top of the list of BBC pension investments is a stake in Baidu, the Chinese internet services company. According to Wikipedia, Baidu has attracted significant controversy over its alleged censorship of web search results.
According to the China Digital Times, Baidu has a long history of being the most proactive and restrictive online censor in the search arena. Documents leaked in April 2009 from an employee in Baidu’s internal monitoring and censorship department show a long list of blocked websites and censored topics on Baidu search.
In May 2011, pro-democracy activists sued Baidu for violating the U.S. constitution by the censorship it conducts in accord with the demand of the Chinese government. A U.S. judge has ruled that the Chinese search engine Baidu has the right to block pro-democracy works from its query results, dismissing a lawsuit that sought to punish the company for Internet censorship.
Big tobacco also features on the list. 6th on the list of top BBC pension investments is a £31 million investment in Imperial Tobacco, which according to Wikipedia is the fourth largest cigarette manufacturer in the world.
The rest of the list contains a rich assortment of resources companies, media companies (including Tencent, another major Chinese media company), big banks, high tech, and other businesses.
Note this is not the complete list – the BBC website claims that the list Does not include any assets held in pooled funds.. The £1.2 billion represented by entries on the list cannot be the entire BBC pension fund, unless they have suffered major losses since the days of their big green pension play.
Nevertheless this does, in my opinion, qualify the BBC as being yet another group of green hypocrites – something worth considering, next time you view BBC content which discusses fossil fuel divestment, or a BBC article which discusses tobacco.
“I do need to scotch one particularly bizarre bit of blogbabble, though. Some bloggers depict me as a puppet for the BBC’s pension fund trustees trying to boost their investments in green technology.” Lord Haw Haw-arrabin on WUWT in 2011
“My real motive is to try to do a decent job telling people about things that are important and they probably didn’t already know. ”
…didn’t know Roger, cos they mostly come from the fantasy universe of you and your other climate cult friends.
What better way to redistribute capital by making money from your enemies. If one buys a stock of a successful company it doesn’t affect the balance sheet, the company continues to do whatever it is they were doing regardless. The beauty of Capitalism.
The point is that they denigrate people as in the pay of big oil. It appears that they are not only in the pay of big oil but also taking the taxpayer pound while sneering at them. Let the BBC eat cake. Their day is nearly done.
If the left exemplified by the BBC could pass a law to prevent investing in oil companies they would, after of course exempting themselves from the law.
The fact that the BBC Pension fund invests in ‘green politically incorrect’ funds show good sense. A point that should be highly educational to the BBC news fakirs; lessons they appear desperate to avoid.
The question about BBC investments should be have they ever invested in ‘green’ technology, e.g. solar, wind, hamster generators, etc.? What is the current status of those investments? along with any BBC profit/loss positions should be the real worry to BBC employees that plan living on BBC retirement annuities.
Has anyone worked it out yet? Money trumps integrity every time. It’s no contest.
Perhaps this is not hypocrisy but a ploy to increase their retirement benefits. The BBC pushes this divestment ploy, buys up all of the cheap oil stock, then 20 years from now the stock is worth 20-40 time as much.
Heh, likely, but attributable to luck rather than deviousness. Re: Hydrocarbons. We ain’t makin’ anymore of ’em, well, none ta speak of, so yeah, how rare the future.
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They can’t lose – The less there is the more the oil stock is worth, and there is more than enough oil, coal and natural gas for at least 100 and likely more than 200 years. Quit reading the green stories of doom. They have been claiming there are only about 50 years of fossil fuels left every year for more than 100 years. Besides that, when Fusion finally is made viable (something else that has bee forecasted to be achieved in about 10 years every year since about 1960), the oil companies will just rebrand into that effort.
“Besides that, when Fusion finally is made viable (something else that has bee forecasted to be achieved in about 10 years every year since about 1960), the oil companies will just rebrand into that effort.”
That never works. Mostly because at any given moment, for an established industry titan, a new upstarting field is just child’s play revenue-wise and doesn’t get the attention it deserves. My favorite example is Xerox, they nearly died when their xerography patent ran out EVEN THOUGH they had prepared for it and developed fantastic computer tech at PARC. But failing to monetize it, they got overtaken by IBM PC’s/Microsoft and Apple (who even hired their top developer and re-implemented the windowing surfaces he had designed at PARC).
You’d think they would have vastly reduced their exposure during this period of plummeting oil prices.
As the BBC pretends to be convinced that fossil fuel use kills the planet, the principle of independence of their pension fund must clearly make way for higher considerations, namely saving the planet at all COSTS. In other words, if the BBC weasels were not slimy liars but actually honest, they WOULD override the indepence of their pension fund management and GLADLY take any resulting losses, ALL of the little BBC thugs would happily agree with that, after all, what good is a slightly higher pension payment in a world destroyed by Global Warming.
So yes, they are slimy liars as expected.
The BBC … also heavily invested in oil and tobacco? Sacrebleu!!!!!!!!