TIAA’s ‘sportswashing’ its contribution to climate change
If you’re a Penn State basketball fan, you’ll have heard a lot last week about the pension giant TIAA, which sponsored the Big Ten basketball tournament. The company manages retirement benefits for a wide variety of academic, research, and medical institutions, including the whole Penn State system and the University of Pittsburgh.
TIAA hopes that its basketball advertisements will inspire warm feelings about the company, associating it with pride, enthusiasm, and victory. What TIAA’s ads won’t tell you is that the company is also helping to cause the world’s climate crisis and contributing to environmental devastation across our state.
Not a leader
TIAA promotes itself as a leader in socially responsible investing with wall-towall advertising and social media. But it manages at least $78 billion of investments in oil, coal, and gas, and adds to climate change, pollution, and human misery around the globe.
Here in Pennsylvania, where burning coal and natural gas contributes to high asthma rates in our cities, TIAA invests in Coterra Energy (formerly Cabot Oil & Gas), which had to pay millions of dollars to build a new public water system in Dimock, after it poisoned the water supply there with toxic levels of barium and arsenic.
TIAA also invests in Shell, which agreed last year to pay a $10 million fine for exceeding emissions limits at its plastics plant in Beaver County. “It’s not normal to look up in the sky and see flames,” local resident Hilary Flint, told NBC News. “The sky has been a completely different color since they’ve become operational.”
TIAA pours money into hydraulic fracturing by investing in companies like Halliburton and Exxon. It also directly invests in several fracked gas power plants in New York and Ohio. The process of fracking pollutes groundwater with “forever chemicals” known as PFAS compounds, which are linked to high cholesterol, kidney cancer, liver disease, and low birth weight. The children of pregnant women who live near fracking wells have an elevated risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
Close to home
This issue hits close to home: For instance, none of Washington County’s 200,000 residents live farther than ten miles from a fracking well or other fracking facility. Most, in fact, live much closer to fracking operations — fracking that is associated with numerous health problems, including complicated pregnancies, heart problems, respiratory diseases, and rare cancers.
But TIAA is also causing problems abroad. In Brazil, TIAA owns over a million acres of plantations that have been razed to plant soybeans and other crops that are sold to companies around the world. Leaked documents show that the company regularly purchased land from people accused of acquiring it with threats and violence.
Globally, TIAA holds investments in Big Oil, including Exxon, Chevron, and Shell, and in fracked gas giants Halliburton and ConocoPhillips. And it’s the fourth largest holder of coal bonds in the world—at exactly the moment when research has shown that coal is the fossil fuel that contributes most to climate change.
Turn off the spigot
Certainly, we need stronger government regulation of the fossil fuel industry in Pennsylvania. But we also need to turn off the spigot of money that fuels this industry. And a lot of it comes from TIAA.
TIAA needs to stop talking about socially responsible investing, and start investing responsibly. Over 1600 companies worldwide have already divested from fossil fuels. It’s time for TIAA to do the same. After all, it’s our retirement money they’re investing with.