Natasha White, reporting for Bloomberg:
Money managers who say BP still belongs in an ESG portfolio include Legal & General Investment Management, which added BP to its Climate Action Global Equity fund in September and has held on to the stake despite the company’s pivot away from its climate commitments.
“We’ve seen some backpedalling,” said Nick Stansbury, manager of the fund and head of climate solutions at Legal & General. “But that is in the context of an awful lot of backpedalling everywhere else.”
Stansbury said that “what matters isn’t only the absolute sustainability performance of a company, but its performance relative to other companies.”
A best-in-class approach can let fossil fuel “climate leaders” into a ESG fund. LGIM has a very ESG-sounding “Climate Action strategy”, and a very legal justification for being a SFDR Article 8 fund. But if you keep your stake in an oil major after it abandoned its energy transition plans, calling yourself a “climate action fund” is just a boldface lie.
An Inconvenient Thought 