Your Pension Is Funding Its Own Destruction | Bonus Content

Sue, Lisa, thanks so much for joining us today.

You've both been working with a group called Divest Derbyshire, which is trying to green the county pension scheme.

So I'd like to talk a little bit about how you first felt compelled to get involved with this.

So Sue, as we heard on the podcast, you're a retired childcare worker.

You're not a climate scientist or a professional economist.

So what made you feel like you had to get involved in this effort?

So I suppose it was just something that I was aware of for quite a number of years.

And then about eight, nine years ago, I realised how serious it was and how things were already starting to get much worse.

And it was having grandchildren and thinking more about future generations and what they would have to deal with that made me think more about climate change.

So I was part of a group called Derbyshire Pensions Action Group and we then became part of Divest Derbyshire and joined the pension campaign around trying to get rid of fossil fuels in the pension.

I've been concerned about climate change for many years and I went along to a talk in Sheffield many years ago, I think it was like 2015, and heard a talk about the amount of money that our pension funds, our local authority pension funds have got invested in fossil fuels And I was quite shocked and thought, well, I wonder what Darvish has got invested in.

And I went away and had a look at it and realized they got hundreds of millions of pounds invested in fossil fuel companies.

And it wasn't just the ethical issues of investing in climate change when they had a climate change policy to try and take action on climate change.

It was also the risk to pensions.

And although I'm not a Darvish pension holder myself, I am a council taxpayer.

And any risk to the pension will ultimately be borne by taxpayers.

So I started sort of investigating, looking at it and campaigning to try and get them to divest their investments from fossil fuel on the basis of risk to the pension.