You've just found out that your 'ethical' pension invests in mining companies. Does that undermine its ethical credentials?
On the surface, the extractive industry's basic qualities make "ethical mining" as much of an oxymoron as "feminist pole dancing". At the turn of the century humankind used 20 naturally occurring elements from the periodic table. Now we draw all 92, and removing them from the earth's crust is a job fraught with danger, waste, toxicity and social injustice. It involves not just the removal of the mineral but the rock and dirt that surround the ore ? the "overburden". To produce one tonne of copper, 125 tonnes of overburden are excavated. Each year, mining strips away more of the earth's surface area than natural erosion. This creates vast material flows, only a tiny percentage of which is reused and recycled. Our frontier mindset still tells us that the earth's ability to do this is limitless.
But you have to go deeper to see why ethical funds find it conscionable to invest in the mining industry. The big extraction companies, after decades of pressure, have reformed some of their methods; many are signatories of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and run natural resource management programmes to clean up the process and aftermath of resource extraction (mining is a short-term activity, but its impact is felt in the long term). Therefore many ethical funds consider them to be a positive work in progress. And as consumers we are all complicit to some degree. From mobile phones to eye make-up, the ephemera of life contains materials extracted by mining.
Many activists suggest the Dodd-Frank legislation in the US is having a positive impact on mining. It requires companies to publish what they pay for resources and governments to publish what they earn from industries. (Here, a "Publish What You Pay" campaign aims to make the EU to do the same.) It is hoped this transparency will stop the leakage of funds from mining going into the pockets of war lords ? so-called conflict minerals. Some commentators suggest the idea of conflict minerals is a media and/or NGO construct, and that a moratorium on mining hits poverty-stricken communities reliant on informal (illegal) mining. These artisanal miners fall through the net of regulation.
So do you follow Norway ? which in 2008 excluded UK mining giant Rio Tinto from its government pension fund due to the firm's "grossly unethical conduct" in Indonesia ? and strop off to a mining-free fund? Or do you take the view that we all rely on these materials and support those extractive industries that invest to some degree in environmental reporting and innovation? The answer depends on the extent of the moral hole you have already dug.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/11/lucy-siegle-ethical-pension
Energy industry US politics North Korea Kevin Pietersen Cheltenham festival Neal Ardley
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