Hannah, Zack and the Positive Money team wrote this in their most recent newsletter:
Andrew Bailey, the next governor of the Bank of England, has declared that excluding fossil fuels from the Bank’s assets will be a “priority” when he takes over next week.
Getting rid of investments in companies like Shell and BP is an encouraging sign that Andrew Bailey plans to take the climate crisis just as seriously, or even more-so, than his predecessor Mark Carney. [1]
It’s also a vital step towards greening our whole economy, because it signals to private banks and investors that high-carbon bonds are no longer a safe bet.
We’d sent him an open letter a few days beforehand, signed by 100 civil society organisations, prominent scientists and economists, making three key demands. [2]
It was covered by The Guardian, City AM, and Yahoo Finance to name just a few but most importantly, it caught the attention of one of the MPs on the Treasury Select Committee – Julie Marsden. [3]
She picked up on our call for the Bank to exclude fossil fuels from its quantitative easing programme and Bailey responded by saying that reaching carbon neutrality would be a “priority” because of the public’s interest in combating climate change.
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Footnotes
1] Major breakthroughs on central banks and climate change:
https://positivemoney.org/2019/04/major-breakthroughs-on-central-banks-and-climate-change/
[2] “The Bank of England must lead the way on climate change” Open Letter to Andrew Bailey:
http://positivemoney.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/Open-letter-to-Andrew-Bailey.pdf
[3] Huge win on greening the Bank of England: