If civilization still exists a century from now, Earth ought to throw a parade for pension funds. For all their fiscally conservative stodginess, the people tasked with safeguarding your nest egg are forcing the financial world to pay attention to climate change.

Last week, some retirement funds and church endowments, along with BlackRock, the world’s largest investment bank, approved a proposal that Occidental Petroleum begin researching and reporting its climate-related vulnerabilities. Shareholders of other petroleum companies have petitioned for climate risk disclosure before, but no one’s ever pushed through a vote. These aren’t save-the-planet activist shareholders, either. They’re investment companies whose business is ensuring they have enough money to pay out future financial obligations.

Occidental Petroleum is one of the nation’s largest oil companies. Not surprisingly, it opposed the proposal. But the vote needn’t have happened. BlackRock1, and other investors, had been asking the company for more than a year to voluntarily disclose its risk. Occidental demurred, saying it already considered the long term risks climate change poses to its business. The rigor of those reports dissatisfied many investors. So they passed a measure calling on the company to, among other things, issue annual reports (starting in 2018) on how things like the Paris agreement—which seeks to limit global warming to 2˚C—will impact its its business.

Full Content: Wired

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