After years of effort by climate activists and Greens MLAs, the ACT Government no longer has any shares in any of the world’s 200 biggest fossil fuel companies – becoming the first jurisdiction to divest its shares in the industry.

“That means Canberra’s no longer putting our investor money into fossil fuels,” said Jo Clay MLA.

Divesting the ACT’s portfolio has been a tripartisan achievement spanning more than 20 years. Greens MLAs Kerrie Tucker (1999), Meredith Hunter (2010), and Caroline Le Couteur all advocated for ethical investment.

“Governments take a long time to do things,” Ms Le Couteur said. “It is exciting to actually find something you’re involved in actually comes to fruition.”

In 2014, 350 Australia, the branch of an environmental organisation that aims to end the use of fossil fuels and transition to renewable energy, identified fossil fuel divestment as a community campaign. It used the Carbon Underground 200, a list of the top coal, gas and oil companies listed by potential carbon emissions, as an indicator of the level of the ACT Government’s investment in fossil fuels, said Canberra co-ordinator Warwick Cathro.

After 350.org and the Conservation Council presented evidence to a 2015 estimates committee, its chair, then-Canberra Liberals MLA Brendan Smyth, recommended the ACT responsibly divest 85 per cent of its holdings in fossil fuels.

Ms Clay pursued the divestment of the remaining 15 per cent when she was elected in 2020.

As recently as September last year, the ACT Government still had holdings in fossil fuel and mining companies, including Rio Tinto and Woodside Petroleum. Only 1 per cent of the portfolio were fossil fuels, the government’s borrowings and investments manager told Ms Clay and fellow Green MLA Andrew Braddock.

By the end of that calendar year, a spokesperson said in November, the ACT Government would have no holdings in fuel companies, and could exclude investments with direct exposure to proven fossil fuel reserves (coal, oil, and gas – both conventional and unconventional: shale oil, tar sands, and shale gas).

The divestment is part of the ACT Government’s nation-leading climate change policy,  including 100 per cent renewable electricity, and starting to electrify their transport, Ms Clay said.

“But if we’re putting money into fossil fuel industries and still wrecking the climate, the rest of that good work is getting undermined.”

Severe weather events of the last two years have shown why stopping investment in fossil fuels is vital, the Greens believe. Tim Hollo, Greens candidate for Canberra, pointed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report last month that burning fossil fuels causes the atmosphere to overheat, leading to extreme weather events – such as more frequent and severe floods and fires, of the sort deluging northern NSW and Queensland.

“Climate change is here,” Ms Clay said. “We’ve got floods. We’ve had fires. We’ve had Smokopoalypse. We’ve had the hail. I think a lot of us feel like it has gotten very, very real, very, very fast. Climate change is here, and we need to act.”

According to Greens leader Shane Rattenbury, “the events up our eastern seaboard in the past of couple of weeks have highlighted the reality that climate change is not something for future generations; it is our reality”.

“Our task right now is to make the continued burning of fossil fuels simply untenable at any level – politically untenable, economically untenable, and socially shameful,” he said.

Ms Clay hopes other jurisdictions will follow the ACT’s example. She intends to write to her Federal and state and territory counterparts to suggest divestment is “another smart, easy step to get off fossil fuels”.

Ms Le Couteur hoped the ACT Government’s decision would send a signal to the corporate community – “because it’s the large corporations that dig up fossil fuels” – that governments were genuinely concerned about climate change, and would not invest in these industries.

But will the Federal Government pay any heed? This week, energy minister Angus Taylor stated that Australia was correct to continue expanding oil and gas development, and that activists were wrong to oppose oil and gas projects in the Beetaloo Basin, the Guardian reported.

“Governments increasing the use of fossil fuels in the middle of the climate crisis is an extraordinarily dangerous and destructive thing to do,” Mr Hollo said.

“It is completely unforgivable. They are responsible for the destruction that we are seeing at the moment across the country, and that destruction increasing in the years ahead. There is no responsible alternative but to stop increasing fossil fuels and to phase them out as soon as possible.”

Australia needed to stop burning fossil fuels by the end of the decade, Mr Hollo believes. To help the country do so, the Greens last week announced a $19 billion ‘just transition’ plan nationally ($50 million in the ACT) to help workers and towns that relied on fossil fuels move to cleaner industries, as Germany has done.

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