The Maine Public Employee Retirement System is using your tax dollars to make climate change worse.
Our taxes pay the salaries of state workers, and part of those salaries goes into their pension fund, Maine PERS. In 2021, our state Legislature passed a law telling Maine PERS to stop investing in the expansion of fossil fuels infrastructure. Maine PERS decided to ignore that law.
This is puzzling because there are strategies that safeguard both pension fund profitability and our families’ safety from climate disruption. Research shows that the Maine PERS pension fund would be larger today if they had pursued these divestment strategies 20 years ago.
Further, the best science today shows that we remain on track to make the world uninhabitable within our own or our children’s lifetimes.
Why would Maine PERS endanger us this way?
First point: Maine PERS staff and trustees are worried that fossil divestment will lead to a never-ending list of divestment requests, such as PFAS contamination. What makes fossil fuel divestment different from all others is that Maine has already passed a law telling Maine PERS to divest from fossil fuels as long as this can be done without harming the pension’s financial returns, which we know is possible.
Second point: Maine PERS staff minimize the risk that climate change poses for all of us, including their beneficiaries. This is due to many “shortcuts” in how we all think; ways of oversimplifying complex issues and relying on emotion instead of facts and logic. Here are a few of them.
One: This staff works within a corporate culture that trains its workers to believe that making money is the only thing that matters. Our survivability is not their concern.
Two: Nobody likes to be told what to do. The staff at Maine PERS resent climate change advocates and the divestiture law.
Three: We all make the false assumption that life will just go on as it always has during our lives.
Four: We all have a dependent tendency that makes us want a strong leader who will tell us what to believe. Unfortunately, the fossil fuel industry pays billions to conservative leaders and media to repeat endlessly that climate change is a hoax or at least, not a serious problem. This corporate money buys our beliefs and our loyalty.
Five: Our brains are designed to pay attention to immediate risk, not long-term risk. By the time chaotic weather alarms us all, climate change will have too much momentum to be stopped. Minimizing our awareness of climate risk is an unconscious emotional defense, which means that it controls our attitudes, and we are not aware of it happening.
The five thinking shortcuts noted above all add to how we minimize our awareness of this risk. We need this emotional defense. Without it, we’d be overwhelmed by worry, grief and guilt all day. Unfortunately, we overdo this minimization, and so we don’t take the steps that are possible; the steps that are necessary to safeguard our children’s lives.
Maine PERS staff don’t find divestment strategies that yield good returns because they don’t see the need to look for them. For the last year and a half, they have consistently resisted considering such strategies. Maine PERS will not divest unless it is pressured to.
It is time for Maine PERS beneficiaries to write to the staff, and for our elected leaders to take action. Maine’s children deserve no less.
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Publish date : 2024-08-27 21:00:00
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