The Norwegian central bank has excluded four Canadian oil and gas companies from its US$1-trillion wealth fund, the world’s largest, for producing too much greenhouse gas emissions, its first use of carbon emissions as a criterion to blacklist firms.
Canadian Natural Resources, Cenovus Energy, Suncor Energy, and Imperial Oil were excluded from the fund due to “unacceptable greenhouse gas emissions”, Norges Bank said in a statement.
Reuters Newsagency reports the decision was based on recommendations from the Council on Ethics, the fund’s ethics watchdog, because of the companies’ carbon emissions from production of oil to oil sands, the central bank said.
Carbon emissions became a criterion for exclusion from the fund four years ago, and in 2017 the Council on Ethics recommended “a small handful” of firms be blacklisted for producing too much greenhouse gas emissions in either the oil, cement and steel sectors.
Norges Bank also excluded three other companies, Egypt’s ElSewedy Electric, Brazilian iron ore miner Vale SA, and Brazilian power company Eletrobras for causing severe environmental damage.
Reuters reports Vale declined to comment, while the four Canadian firms did not respond to requests for a comment after market hours.
Eletrobras and ElSewedy could not immediately be reached.
The central bank said for several of the companies of which exclusion was now being made public, the market situation, including liquidity in individual shares, had meant that it has taken a long time to sell the shares in a reasonable manner.
That explained why a long period of time had passed between some of the decisions and the bank’s publication.
The fund, formally called the Government Pension Fund Global and set up in 1996 to save petroleum revenues for future generations, has grown to almost three times Norway’s annual gross domestic product, far exceeding original projections.
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