The Green MP for Brighton Pavilion Caroline Lucas has asked the Conservative Chancellor George Osborne to end the investment of parliamentary pension fund in fossil fuels.
She made the request at Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons. The Chancellor was standing in for Prime Minister David Cameron.
Caroline Lucas said: “Today sees a mass lobby here in Westminster of people who are demanding urgent action on climate change.
“Since coal is the most damaging of the fossil fuels, does the Chancellor agree that as well as phasing out coal, we in this House have a responsibility to divest our parliamentary pension fund from fossil fuels, as has been done in Norway very recently?”
Mr Osborne said: “It is way above my pay grade to interfere with the parliamentary trustees of the pension fund here and I leave the decisions on investments to them.
“I agree with the honourable lady that the lobby of Parliament today is important and the Paris talks at the end of the year are a real opportunity to get a global commitment to binding standards and carbon targets.
“Britain will play its full part.
“What we want to achieve is dealing with those greenhouse gas emissions and meeting our international obligations on climate change but doing so in the cheapest way possible for the consumers of electricity here in Britain.”
UK policies to comabt climate change are now in a desperate state, the Conservatives being criminally negligent in this regard. The New Scientist last week reported that we have already built in 5m of sea level rise over the next few hundred years and the fossil fuel industry is lobbying as hard as possible for business as usual.
That said, there is such a vast quantity of known fossil fuel reserves that cannot be burnt without meeting our admittedly week international commitments. The reserves that cannot be burnt are known as stranded assets as they cannot be realised. Worse, fossil fuel companies count these stranded assets on the balance sheets. Problem is when the bubble burst.
I was in Swansea last Saturday visiting friends for the weekend; there was a large anti-austerity demo taking place, and who should be there but the incapable and incompetent Bennet woman, the ridiculous petrol-guzzling, Jaguar car-driver Welsh Green leader Pippa Bartolotti woman, and ‘5 Homes’ Lucas herself. As one might imagine, none of these vile, ghastly Green harridans looked as if they were suffering from the effects of ‘austerity’, but were no-doubt there to entice more gullible students into voting Green.
Bit rich the Greens claiming that they are the party of anti-austerity; this is the Green council that tried to close-down two homeless shelters in Brighton, tried to get rid of a mobile library, slashed spending on mental health provision in Brighton and tried to raise Council Tax by 5%. There was, of course, enough money to send Green Councillor Alex Phillips on a ‘fact finding’ trip to Palestine, of course…
You have friends?
You forgot to mention the “vile Greens” that opened up two new Libraries and kept children’s centres open while LibLabCon councils closed their’s with abandon. Inconvenient, but true.
But really, who cares what Caroline Lucas and her left-wing cronies think. I am SO pleased that George Osborne basically told her to ‘go forth and multiply’.
The greens are a very useful group for providing ideas, but they have no place in REAL politics of running countries or councils.