Do they? Renewable arenāt necessarily ethical or particularly environmentally friendly, probably the opposite if anything. I donāt think shell and BP are trying to look like theyāre doing the right thing since thatās just subjective. Thereās a market they want to tap and thatās what theyāre doing. Renewables are worth investing in because itās a future component of our future energy production. But thereās nothing particularly ethical about them though and in 20 years weāll be taking about the devastation caused by wind turbines to the environment.
Protecting 99.9% of their earnings means tapping into new markets whichever company does it better is the sign of a good company. It doesnāt matter if they produce fossil fuels or not.
Itās not like thatās news? Nothings immune to environmental impact and nothing is all that ethical. Wind turbines for example have huge impacts on environment, land use, habitation destruction, and issues with bird and bat impacts.
Long term viability requires battery storage which has its own considerations as well. Power generation is just power generation, the renewables are better in many aspects but they arenāt completely clean of environmental issues.
Right, I donāt think anyone is saying they are harmless, but without giving up energy entirely they are orders of magnitude better than the alternative. I donāt see how something is not ethical if it removes 95% of a problem just because it doesnāt solve for the last 5%.
The environment impacts of a wind, solar or nuclear are negligible when compared to the alternatives.
Oh yeah I agree. I donāt see us leaving oil for a long time though, perhaps for general power generation, but not for many other needs. Shell and BP arenāt moving to renewables just for the reduced impact though, as i say, these things are good, thereās nothing wrong with them saying theyāre good, but theyāre not hiding the fact that they donāt just do renewables.
As you say, there are other companies for that if youāre looking for a renewable only focused company.
In this respect Total and Shell are light years ahead of BP. BP were forced to make such a song and dance about it because they know how far behind they are. Chevron and Exxon are worse though.
So it seems despite making a lot of noise about the environmental conscience they have suddenly discovered BP and Shell still lobby against environment measures in order to protect their fossil fuel interests :surprised pikachu:
Cambridge University plans to rid its endowment of all direct and indirect fossil fuel investments by 2030, the school announced Wednesday.
The U.K. school has one of the largest endowments in Europe at Ā£3.5 billion ($4.45 billion), and arguably becomes the most prominent university to aim for divestment.
The Church of England Pensions Board has sold all its holdings of Exxon Mobil Corp. because the oil giant failed to set goals to reduce emissions produced by its customers.
Something to bear in mind, perhaps who owns our shares may be as important as what they own.
We are giving immense voting power to the big ETF holders (Blackrock, Vanguard) and perhaps we shouldnāt just be considering their costs and tracking error but their voting record. Maybe in future we will look at our custodians voting record when deciding whether we buy an iShares or Vanguard ETF in the same way we look at an MPās for voting.
That is a very optimistic view of voters in this country. Iām sure you already know of this great site for seeing how your local MP is voting/has voted on issues in parliament but Iāll leave the link here for anyone else - TheyWorkForYou
This thread has now got me wondering if Freetrade has an environmental policy or if they do any carbon offsetting.