KEY POINTS
- The New Jersey bill mandates total divestment from coal companies within two years
- New Jersey Treasury Department, which administers the pension fund, opposes the divestment bill
- The oil and gas sector now only accounts for about 2.5% of the market cap of the S&P 500 index
The State of New Jersey may soon order its state pension fund to divest from fossil fuels, following a long list of other state, municipal and national pension funds that have already done so.
In a recent op-ed published in the Newark Star-Ledger newspaper, Richard J. Codey (a former governor of New Jersey) and Tom Sanzillo (director of finance at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis) wrote that it is high time for the Garden State to pull out of fossil fuel investments — for both environmental and financial reasons.
New Jersey State Senators Bob Smith and Linda Greenstein, both
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