Pressure group Make My Money Matter has been slammed for 'misleading' and 'slacktivist' messaging by a long-time sustainability advocate.
Make My Money Matter is an initiative co-founded by film director Richard Curtis (pictured), which encourages individuals to engage with their pension provider to decarbonise their investments.
The central claim of MMMM is that such portfolio shifts can create 21 times less emissions than a combination of a person stopping flying, moving energy supplier and switching to a vegetarian diet.
Of these claims, London Business School Professor of Finance Alex Edmans called them “misleading and irresponsible.”
“If your pension provider sells brown companies, that doesn't make the emissions magically disappear; the shares are simply held by other investors that may be less responsible," the academic said today.
An accompanying report complains that pensions are "invested in companies at high risk of driving deforestation", but investing in such companies and engaging with them may reduce deforestation.
"Worse, this claim may give the impression that it's OK to consume as much as you want, as long as you send the slacktivist email on the webpage asking your pension fund CEO to cut deforestation from the portfolio and take other actions," Edmans said.
"This is like a tobacco company donating to a cancer charity," he added.
Others went yet further in criticism of the MMMM approach. Jerry Bowyer, an economic adviser at US wealth managers the Ronald Blue Trust, compared MMMM to “indulgences”, a religious term for simply paying the church in exchange for committing sins.
Edmans was a speaker at Net Zero Investor’s Annual Conference, where he argued that ESG investing should not be driven solely by “a financial result”, but actually because it will make a difference in terms of issues such as diversity.
Make My Money Matter has been contacted for comment.
