My Climate Crisis Diary (Log 2)

Being the hypocritical climate activist that I am, I haven’t entirely divested my own investments from fossil fuels yet – despite the fact that I’ve been to more than one protest outside of Blackrock demanding that they divest from fossil fuels. But this week, I did empty my Invesco account, which I’ve been wanting to do for a while, since I knew they still had investments in fossil fuel companies. 

I wanted to give them a chance to change their ways, so I called up on Wednesday saying I was concerned about the investments in the fossil fuel industry and that because of that I might redeem the entire amount in my account within the next couple of days. The person I spoke to didn’t seem too concerned about my taking my money out of Invesco. 

On Thursday, I called Invesco again and confirmed that they had, indeed, not divested their billions of dollars in fossil fuel stocks overnight, even given my warning to the customer service agent the previous day. In fact, I asked about the details of my own account, and found out that in percentage of total assets for the fund (I was told my account was in the Invesco Main Street Fund), Exxon Mobil ranked third (after Microsoft and Apple). 

Invesco does have fossil free funds available, and I could have asked more about the possibility of transferring my account to one of those. But I’d rather not have my money in a company that invests so much in companies like Exxon, even if my money were not directly invested there. 

I searched Invesco Main Street Fund online later, and saw that the percentage was 3.57% in Exxon Mobil – not as much as I feared third place might mean, but still too much, and an indication of how bad the other investments might be.

Having concluded that I profited at least somewhat off of Exxon stock over the time that I neglected to take my money out of the Main Street Fund, I decided I should send at least some of those profits to those working to fight the effects of Exxon’s decades-long history of lies and exploitation.  So I sent some money to a couple of the organizations Rupert Read lists in his post on ecologically effective altruism: https://rupertread.net/ecologically-effective-altruism/

The issue of scale is a persistent question when someone wants to do something about the climate crisis. It’s the big institutions that have most of the power to actually change anything, but it’s the smaller ones that an individual has more hope of reaching out to in any meaningful way. Invesco didn’t seem to care about me draining my entire account. But earlier in the week I sent a brief letter to the editor at the local Jewish Link asking them to include climate news in the World Newsbriefs – and I saw that they actually printed the letter, which was encouraging. Though still no mention of the climate crisis in their World Newsbriefs.