Bad Advice From Govt Pension Scheme
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Wilson
NEST is is the government workplace pension scheme used by many employers. If their infantile advice on climate change is anything to go by, I would advise members to take their money out!
Climate change is the fight of our lives. We’re fast reaching the point of no return causing irreversible damage to nearly every aspect of our lives.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
From food shortages to property damage to higher prices and smaller pensions, every degree that global temperature rises will come at a cost to our lives, the economy and the environment. This isn’t something we can tackle on an individual level. Governments and businesses around the world must take action now if something is to change.
We’re doing our part to limit global warming with our new climate change policy and are proud to be among the first UK pension providers to commit to transitioning to a net zero carbon strategy.
What are we facing?
Climate models indicate that the world’s temperature is likely to increase above 4C by the end of this century if things don’t change. This doesn’t just threaten the quality of our day-to-day lives. It’s a risk to virtually every sector of business and the wider economy itself.
Scientists believe that our best hope is to drastically reduce carbon emissions now, limiting the rise in global temperature to 1.5C above the level it was at the start of the modern industrial era. This is what most countries in the world have committed to in the Paris Agreement.
How will it affect you?
The economy and the environment are so closely linked that if we don’t act, the UK could see huge changes by the end of the century:
As could the rest of the world:
All this could significantly impact whether companies can make profits in the future, shrinking your pension pot while raising your costs of living.
Climate change won’t just affect your financial health either. Pollutants linked to climate change are known to cause cancer, asthma, strokes and heart disease, and air pollution alone causes 40,000 premature deaths in the UK every year.
How can I help make a change?
You already are, along with over 9 million other Nest members. As a pension saver, you’re a stakeholder in global financial markets. Your Nest pension savings are held in everything from the world’s biggest companies to sectors like food or transport.
And it’s your pension that gives you power.
We manage over £12 billion on behalf of members like you. By changing how this money is invested, we stand a chance of changing how businesses and industries around the world operate. That’s why our new climate change policy matters.
You’re not alone in wanting to build a better world.
- 68% of UK savers want their investments to consider people and planet alongside profits
- three quarters of Nest members say responsible investment is important to them
- 71% of Brits would opt for a fully or partially sustainable pension if they had the choice
Providers that don’t take climate change into account risk more than your money. They risk your future.
That means we’ll:
- transition our portfolio to the 1.5C global warming limit
- put more money into renewables and green technology
- encourage businesses we invest in to act sustainably
- reduce how much money goes to the biggest greenhouse gas polluters
- stop investing in the most harmful fossil fuels
- work to reduce our portfolio’s impact on nature and biodiversity
- stop working with companies and fund managers that aren’t aligned with the Paris Agreement
- partner with non-profit campaigners like Climate Action 100+ to address environmental issues and encourage businesses to change
- lobby for the UK pensions sector to be more transparent about its contribution to climate change
We’re one of the first UK pension providers to commit to these standards but it shouldn’t stop with us. By the end of 2018, UK pension savers collectively invested £6.1 trillion in the global economy. If money talks, that amount of money shouts – and we want to encourage our fellow providers to make climate change a priority too.
For a start, climate change does not create pollution. As for the 4C by the end of the century, I know of no serious investor who would worry about what may or not happen years after he is dead!
But let’s take a closer look at some of the more immediate claims. For instance, puffin population declining by 42% because of climate change. In fact the opposite is true, puffins are thriving:
Puffin population on Skomer Island
https://skomerisland.blogspot.com/2018/07/2018-whole-island-count-totals.html
The highest number of puffins since the 1940s has been counted on Skokholm Island off Pembrokeshire.
A total of 11,245 were spotted on Monday, compared to 8,534 last year, the Wildlife Trust of South and West Wales said.
The sea birds have begun arriving almost a month early for their annual return to the area to mate.
A similar count is due on nearby Skomer, which recorded 34,796 puffins in 2020, a 44% rise on 2019 figures.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-56511105
If NEST cannot even get basic facts like this right, can anything they say be trusted?
Then we get London heatwaves of 48C. Even next to the runway at Heathrow, temperatures barely get to 37C in the hottest of heatwaves.
https://www.ecad.eu/utils/showindices.php?p59u9up2usckia4pktefnvirs0
There is no evidence either that cities like Leeds and York are flooding more.
Then there’s a threatened 15% fall in crop production:
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare
And 100 million pushed into poverty and 140 million climate migrants:
https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty
Just about every claim made is the reverse of what has actually been happening.
I’m no expert, but I am sure a pension provider or any other financial adviser has a legal duty to be open and honest.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
So where do we start. with our local MP ? With the governing body for pension advisers?
Damning evidence of incompetence at least. Wicked, anyway.
All “coulds” and “mights” and all based on the nonsensical mathematical models of the climate that are at best crude estimates with no sound scientific basis. If they treat investment in the same way people should get their pensions and run.
The financial industry has much in common with the climate alarmists. In both cases they rely on either investment value or temperatures to be going up. In reality both cases are essentially chaotic and highly random which then relies on ‘seers’ to discern the patterns. I think computer models are even used more widely in financial services however in the small print they at least say past performance is no predictor of the future.
It’s not all bad for investors NEST, you just have to pick the right companies. According to Nilushi Karunaratne of Investors Chronicle – in an article recommending buying shares in Rentokil Initial plc – we are informed that a key growth driver for the company will be “climate change creating favourable conditions for unwanted critters to thrive”. Wonderful analysis. There is clearly little that the magic molecule cannot do.
As long as the massive subsidies continue, investing in renewable energy would seem like a good idea.
‘Climate change is the fight of our lives. We’re fast reaching the point of no return causing irreversible damage to nearly every aspect of our lives.’
Uhhh . . . they said this 30 years ago.
I guess this time, they really, really mean it.
‘Climate models indicate that the world’s temperature is likely to increase above 4C by the end of this century if things don’t change. This doesn’t just threaten the quality of our day-to-day lives. It’s a risk to virtually every sector of business and the wider economy itself.’
Find me a man, woman, or child who wouldn’t want to see the UK 4C warmer.
“If their infantile advice on climate change is anything to go by, I would advise members to take their money out!”
This information ‘may’ 🙂 well be part of the mandatory requirement to inform investors of where their money is being invested.
As to whether ‘invested’ is the correct terminology, I couldn’t possibly comment.
Who writes this sort of bollocks?
They should be exposed as imbeciles
The Chairman of Nest is one Otto Thoresen, who also happens to be the Chairman of the board of Avva, the insurers who got both barrels in your previous post. It’s an incestuous world this climate doomster business. He also seems to be the Chairman of the BT pension fund and Aberdeen Asset Management, so one can only imagine the amount of money these outfits are ploughing into virtue signalling projects based on the kind of dodgy research referred to in the above article.
My once upon a time Yorkshire Life with Profits Whole Life policy was gobbled up by Aviva. The usual blurb that it would benefit by being in such a large entity accompanied the notification. The policy is now 54 years old and the bonuses are lamentable, far lower than were the case with YL and then commercial Union. Aviva – another bunch of corporate thieves. Sadly I’d cut my nose off to spite my face if I surrendered now.
Nest did get one forecast right – smaller pensions. Certain to follow from following their half-baked climate change investment strategy.
Notice the word “could” in each of the statement designed to provoke fear. Could means also “could not” except in the fantasy world of the abusers of climate modelling where the most likely outcome of their junk models (P50) is ignored and something akin to P1 is all they talk about. It is clear they are not sure so what are we doing here?
“Could” is not good enough to be the basis of this radical marxist agenda forced on us by the “compassionate” leftie bullyboys and girls. Could is an opinion nothing more and why is the government promoting such opinions which are a million miles away from both science and conservativism?
Every day we are assaulted by a barrage of thinly veiled extreme left wing propaganda, here outrageously being pushed under the “watchful eye” of a conservative government.
What is worse is that these people are pretending they are in the know where as in reality they just copy and paste chapter and verse handed to them by their preferred 2K a day climate enforcer.
Where are the links to the sources of these “coulds”? It is a very interesting exercise to follow claims made by one or another climate alarmist. The currency of Climate Alarmism suffers from rampant inflation as should be expected when the claims are baseless. They pass from activist to activist mouthpiece, each sexing up the language. The language is deliberately vague with definitions rarely if ever being offered. Being baseless it is down to all of the Humanities graduates who enthusiastically quote each other’s fatuous grandstanding. There claims can be followed round and round and round. They have no credible origin, they just “appear” and when rebutted by the unfunded tireless small army of “denier scientists, disappear for a while only to re emerge in exactly the same form.
I will end with two quotes from the incredible Chernobyl Series.
1.“What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.”
2.“To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not.”
How they used to do real science, a picture of attendess from 1927 Qantum Physics conference where the ‘paradigm’ supported by Einstein and others was replaced by what we largely understand now.
https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-golden-age-of-quantum-physics-9a3ddac68413
So many famous names on that photo Druker. When I was taking my Chemistry degree in the sixties I must have spent a million hours trying to understand their theories.
Wonderful photo, thanks for posting that.
Actionable, I would have thought. A misleading prospectus. Sell.
The Great Reset- WHO, UN WEF etc now used to reduce pensions for insurance, investment greed .says it all about global warming agenda and reason for pandemic etc
O/T. BBC Australian turtle mania!
This report claims higher sand temperatures are leading to 99% female baby turtles! They don’t say by how much sand temperatures have actually increased, which activated my BSometer!
Any chance of fact checking Aussie temp’ increases v historical records? It all seems somewhat contrived, and not surprisingly there wasn’t a single hard statistic in this article.
Plenty of claims, but no actual data at all.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-56690950
BBC reporter again knows nothing about science. Old news.
“In most species, gender is determined during fertilization. However, the sex of most turtles, alligators, and crocodiles is determined after fertilization. The temperature of the developing eggs is what decides whether the offspring will be male or female. This is called temperature-dependent sex determination, or TSD.
Surely this is not legal is it?
I was wondering if it is legal because there is a smell of miss – selling on two counts: 1. The pension fund and 2.Climate Change.
NEST is a government organisation established as a Trust; it must follow the Trustee Act 2000 and Trust law generally as it applies to Pension Schemes. There are other requirements which are very onerous. They have to take advice and act; climate change is at the very very least dubious – lets see what happens when members complain about investment returns if they do not turn out to be acceptably “adequate”…
“air pollution alone causes 40,000 premature deaths in the UK every year.” Codswallop!
This zombie statistic will not lie down, it is a gross misrepresentation of mortality statistics and is not true, has no factual basis, and is believed by every green zealot. This statistic comes from a PHE study, which having no data to base their study on, decided to ask several experts what % of a persons mortality burden could be due to air pollution. They replied in a range from zero to quite a lot, which got averaged out at 5% mortality burden, then some group of idiots in Parliament misunderstood this as 5% dying every year from air pollution.
I complained to the Parliamentary committee that this actually meant 95% of us were dying of something else, and perhaps they should concentrate on poverty, diet, alcholol as being the major causes of premature death.
Steve Milloy, over at Junk Science, has spent years authoritatively debunking ‘fossil fuelled’ air pollution mortality claims and has ample evidence that the attribution ‘studies’ relied upon to make such claims are, indeed, junk. Well worth a look.
Seconded.
‘air pollution alone causes 40,000 premature deaths in the UK every year’
Habeas corpus.
Give us a list of their names.
Yes, its all an appalling bit of fantasy and lies. Certainly advise anyone investing to avoid this NEST scheme as they are away in fairy land and guaranteed to badly underperform.
As to all the lies spouted, Paul nails a couple but every paragraph is fiction. The one that annoys me now is:
‘air pollution alone causes 40,000 premature deaths in the UK every year.’
This made up number has been oft repeated and thus repetition is taken as confirmation. Its a total fiction and has no basis in data or evidence of any kind. Its an extrapolation of a computer model based on a guesstimate of a theory from a wet dream. Challenge it whenever you hear it; ask for the evidence to back it up.
There is none, so they just say wibble. It has less veracity than Fergusons half million Brits dead from wuFlu by summer 2020.
Not a single doctor has recorded air pollution as cause of death on any death certificate in the UK – not one. A woke coroner (lawyer) recorded it as a cause against one death of a severely asthmatic child last year – but the doctors didnt record it!
Thunderstorms cause more deaths of asthmatics. In Melbourne in 2017 a severe event overwhelmed the ambulance system and hospitals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderstorm_asthma
I raised my concerns over these matters with the Pension Regulator. They suggested I take them up with Nest, Aviva and La& G. Isn’t it the job of the Pensions Regulator to do so?
A further question arises over Nest – employers are forbidden by law from discouraging their staff from entering auto-enrolment, but what is the ethical position if an employer feels his staff would be taking out a bad investment? Our solution is to point out the facts about Nest as we see them – I don’t think that is illegal.
The reason why Yellen is in Biden’s cabinet and Carney will run for office in Canada is to kneecap carbon producers and emitters at the banks. Denial of funding will depend on carbon behaviour. This is intended to tie in with these new “Ecofunds” and environmental investing.
They purposely want to limit access to cheap energy, because the Malthusians claim it is global suicide.
Not for the elites of course. Just us.
Whoa Paul, isn’t the nest page from July 2020 ?
That’s when they first tweeted about it
(The page is missing a date)
Then in August 2020 a Richard Curtis promo tweet
That’s why the page doesn’t include the update on Puffin numbers
.. Back on 3 Aug 2020 you wrote an article about the NEST plan