How sixty British local councils managed to plant their climate flags firmly in the ground… and then quietly drill underneath them
Being a “Brit” means you have a kind of British institutional confidence that deserves its own word. It’s not quite hypocrisy… it’s more refined than that. It’s the ability to declare, with full sincerity and a lovely printed brochure, that you are deeply committed to a cause, while simultaneously doing the exact opposite, through a sufficiently complicated financial mechanism that nobody can really pin it on you.
This week, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism published the sort of story that makes you put your tea down slowly and stare at the middle distance for a moment.
Sixty UK local government pension funds… sixty, not two, not a rogue handful… have collectively invested £8 billion into infrastructure funds that are, as we speak, building enormous liquefied natural gas terminals along the Gulf Coast of the United States. The same pension funds that look after the retirement savings of teachers, social workers, council staff, and civil servants. The very people, in many cases, who attended the climate marches, who signed the petitions, who nodded vigorously at council meetings when net-zero pledges were made.
Their pension money is, right now, helping to construct giant white orbs of compressed fossil fuel in Louisiana and Texas. The same councils that declared climate emergencies. The same funds that announced, with considerable fanfare, that they were divesting from oil, gas, and coal.
I’d call it ironic, but irony implies someone involved is in on the joke.
The Trick Is In The Fine Print
Here’s how the magic trick works, and it really is a kind of magic… the sort that makes your money disappear and reappear somewhere you’d really rather it didn’t.
When councils and campaign groups pushed for pension funds to go green, the pressure mostly focused on selling shares in companies like BP and Shell. Public companies. Listed. Visible. The kind of thing you can point at. And so, dutifully, some funds divested. Waltham Forest, to its considerable credit, became the first council in 2016 to commit to pulling pension investments out of all fossil fuel companies. A genuine milestone. They pulled £53.4 million of oil, gas and coal stocks. People were pleased.
But a growing portion of pension investments had quietly migrated somewhere harder to see: “private markets.” Infrastructure funds. Big, opaque, institutional vehicles managed by firms like BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners, JP Morgan, and Stonepeak. These funds invest in everything from airports to toll roads to… well… liquefied natural gas terminals on the Gulf Coast of America.
And here is the beautiful, infuriating detail: these private market investments are frequently excluded from the scope of council climate commitments entirely. Not because anyone decided they should be excluded… but because nobody thought to explicitly include them. Or perhaps because including them would have made the numbers look rather less impressive.
It’s a bit like going on a diet, announcing publicly that you’ve sworn off crisps, and then eating an entire bag of tortilla chips every evening on the basis that they weren’t specifically mentioned.
What Eight Billion Pounds Actually Looks Like
Let me paint you a picture of the Gulf Coast right now, because it’s genuinely staggering.
Scores of those enormous white orbs are popping up along a 1,200-kilometre stretch of Louisiana and Texas coastline. A full-blown building frenzy, turbo-charged by Trump’s second term and further accelerated by the price shocks from his war in Iran. Gas companies are, as they say, absolutely printing it.
If all the planned terminals are built, the LNG they process would generate the same volume of greenhouse gases every year as every EU country combined. Every single one. Combined. That’s not a typo and it’s not an exaggeration… it comes from Jeremy Symons, a former official at the US environmental regulator.
The Bureau found eight US-based LNG terminals backed by UK pension money. The Sierra Club calculates that together, they would produce more CO2 annually than the entire United Kingdom.
Let me say that again, differently, so it properly lands: the retirement savings of British public sector workers are helping to build infrastructure that will, every single year, pump out more carbon than every car, every factory, every power station, and every flight departing from British soil.
For our pension. So that we can retire. Into… a world shaped, in part, by our pension.
This is the kind of sentence that makes climate despair not just understandable but almost rational.
The People In The Middle Of It
What makes this story genuinely human, rather than merely outrageous in an abstract policy sense, is the communities sitting right next to these terminals.
These gas plants are not being built in wealthy neighbourhoods. They never are, are they? They’re built in poor communities, in areas with limited political leverage, where the residents’ health complaints are more easily managed than those of people with lawyers on speed dial. Residents near these terminals are already reporting health problems. The environmental justice dimension here is not a footnote… it’s the story within the story.
And then there’s Jane Thewlis, a retired social worker and member of the West Yorkshire Pension Fund. When she found out what her pension money was doing, she said something so plainly sensible that it should probably be written on the wall of every council pension committee in England: “The UK could be funding a safer, healthier future for all via renewable energy generated in the UK that is cheap, safe, clean and owned by us.”
She’s right, obviously. And later, with considerably more edge, she added that she expected her elected representatives to use her money “to fund a safe future, not to hasten the end of humanity.”
That’s a retired social worker. Not a climate activist with a media team. Just a woman who spent her working life in public service, now discovering that her pension is off building fossil fuel infrastructure in Texas while the planet heats up.
You couldn’t write it. Except, apparently, you can… and the Bureau did.
The Excuses, Assessed
Let’s be fair and run through the responses, because they do make an effort.
“LNG is a bridge fuel.” This is the industry’s favourite formulation, and several pension funds have leaned on it heavily. West Yorkshire’s environment, social and governance policy apparently describes LNG as “a bridge between today’s fossil-fuel-dominated energy system and a future low or zero-carbon one.” A spokesperson for IFM Investors went further, describing natural gas as something that is “increasingly utilised as a transition fuel for decarbonisation globally.”
Right. A bridge. The kind of bridge that, if all the planned terminals are built, will produce more annual emissions than the entire European Union. That’s quite a long bridge. Where exactly does it end? Because from here it looks less like a bridge and more like a very expensive runway extension for fossil fuels.
“We recognise climate risk.” Essex County Council’s response was a masterclass in this genre. The council said it “recognises its responsibility for managing a range of risks,” highlighted its investment strategy, confirmed these would be reviewed with stakeholder consultation in 2026, and did not directly address the specific investments identified. Not one word about the actual gas terminals. Magnificent.
“Private markets are different.” This is the structural defence, and it’s at least honest. The argument, such as it is, goes that private market funds are complex, opaque vehicles that sit outside the scope of climate commitments made about listed equities. Which is true, technically. It is also, from any reasonable human perspective, completely beside the point. The carbon doesn’t know it came from a private market fund. The communities in Louisiana don’t feel better because the investment vehicle was opaque.
The Pooling Problem, Coming Down the Track
There’s a further twist arriving shortly, which will be of particular interest if you enjoy your institutional irony with a side of structural reform.
The government is currently in the process of combining local council pension funds into larger “pension fund pools.” The intent is efficiency and improved governance. The effect, campaigners warn, will be to limit councillors’ power over investment decisions even further… distancing the people who made the climate pledges even further from the people actually deciding where the money goes.
At the same time, Parliament is debating pension reforms where campaigners are pushing for greater recognition of climate risk. Baroness Hayman, speaking in the Lords, observed that with £3 trillion held in UK pensions, there is “a clear opportunity to better protect savers from rising financial and environmental risks.”
Three trillion pounds. Just sitting there, rolling around the global financial system, much of it notionally committed to responsible investment… some of it currently helping to build gas terminals that will outlast most of the people whose savings funded them.
What This Is Really About
There’s a temptation, when you read a story like this, to reach for outrage as your primary register. And I understand that impulse… I felt it myself. But I think what’s actually more interesting, and more troubling, is the structural banality of it.
Nobody sat in a room and said: “Right, let’s take the teachers’ pension money and use it to fund climate destruction in poor American communities whilst simultaneously telling everyone we’re green.” That’s not what happened. What happened is that decisions were made in layers: investment committees delegated to fund managers who invested in infrastructure vehicles that financed terminal construction, and at each layer there was a plausible justification, a technical reason why this specific link in the chain was outside the scope of the commitment made three links back.
This is how a great deal of institutional damage gets done in the modern world. Not through malice, but through a kind of distributed, deniable dissonance… where everyone is technically following their mandate and the outcome is nonetheless a collective failure.
The teachers whose pensions are partly parked in Texan gas infrastructure didn’t vote for it. The councillors who declared climate emergencies didn’t intend it. The fund managers who invested in BlackRock’s infrastructure vehicles were doing their fiduciary duty.
And yet. Eight terminals. More CO2 than the UK produces in a year. Communities on the Gulf Coast breathing it in. Right now.
What Happens Next
The honest answer is: probably not enough, not fast enough.
Some funds will review their positions, pushed by the investigation and by newly embarrassed councillors. There will be strongly worded letters. There will be policy consultations. The pooling reforms will proceed, and oversight will become murkier rather than clearer. Parliament will debate, and some amendment around climate risk may or may not make it through.
The LNG terminals will, for the most part, continue to be built. The companies behind them are enjoying a significant financial tailwind from Trump’s foreign policy adventures. The returns look healthy in the short term, which is exactly what pension fund trustees are legally obligated to care about.
What might actually change things, if anything does, is the combination of: continued investigative journalism making this specific and visible and local (Lancashire! Essex! Waltham Forest!), genuine grassroots anger from scheme members, and the slowly increasing recognition that “stranded asset risk” is not just a campaigner’s talking point but an actual financial concern for a fund that will still be paying out benefits in sixty years.
Councillor Andrew Scopes of West Yorkshire put it simply: “We need to be looking beyond the possible short-term gains, at the long-term risk.”
Yes. Quite. That’s the whole game, really.
There’s a metaphor lurking in those giant white orbs on the Gulf Coast… those alien spheres of compressed gas gleaming in the Louisiana sun, built in part with the retirement savings of British public sector workers who spent their careers trying to make things better.
It’s not a comfortable metaphor. But it might be a useful one.
The next time your council publishes a climate action plan, and you feel that little flicker of cautious optimism… it’s worth asking where the pension money actually goes. Not in principle. Not in the listed equity portfolio. In the infrastructure funds. In the private markets. In the places that the brochure doesn’t mention.
Because right now, in America, sixty sets of British pension savers are finding out the answer.
And it’s not what anyone was told.
Sources: Bureau of Investigative Journalism, April 2026. Additional reporting from the Blackpool Gazette, East Anglia Bylines, Waltham Forest Echo, Bedford Independent, and the Isle of Wight Council response via onthewight.com.
Until Next Time
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