Marion Coutts, winner of the Wellcome book prize, has given her full support to the Guardian’s climate change campaign asking the Wellcome Trust health charity to sell off its large investments in fossil fuels.
“I support your campaign in every way,” she told the Guardian, after Wednesday evening’s prize ceremony. “We need to think very carefully about how we live and about how we manage our resources. We are clearly not doing things very well at the moment.”
More than a dozen other writers and judges honoured by the Wellcome Book prize since 2009 have also backed the campaign, including the chair of the 2014 judges, Sir Andrew Motion. “The Wellcome Trust does magnificent work in all sorts of ways, but its investment in fossil fuels contradicts many of its own policies. By divesting from fossil fuels it would show leadership in keeping with its reputation and ideals,” said Motion.
The Wellcome prize, worth £30,000, is for fiction or non-fiction books with a medical or health theme and was awarded to a “delighted” Coutts for her memoir on art, work, death and language, The Iceberg. The book is “wise, moving and beautifully constructed,” said Bill Bryson, the chair of the 2015 judges.
At the ceremony in London, Bryson referred to the fossil fuel divestment campaign with a joke, asking just before announcing the winner: “I know there is just one thing you want to hear from me: ‘Am I heavily invested in fossil fuels?’”
A series of analyses have shown that existing fossil fuel reserves are several times greater than can be burned if the world’s governments are to fulfil their pledge to keep global warming below the danger limit of 2C. But coal, oil and gas companies continue to spend billions on finding new reserves.
A fast-growing divestment movement, supported by the UN and Nobel prize winners, argues that fossil fuel investments are a threat to both the climate and health and also to investors, as action to combat climate change could render the fuel reserves worthless.
In 2009, University College London and the Lancet published a report concluding that global warming is the biggest threat to global health in the 21st century.
The Wellcome Trust, which considers “climate change to be one of the greatest contemporary challenges to global health”, is the world’s second largest non-governmental funder of medical research, dispensing £727m in grants in 2014. It was a co-founder of the Human Genome Project; it has funded pioneering work on cancer and malaria; and it has been at the forefront of the fight against Ebola.
The Guardian campaign calls on Wellcome and the world’s biggest health charity, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to join over 180 institutions that have already divested from fossil fuels. The Guardian Media Group announced earlier in April that it will divest its £800m fund, the largest to date to sell off all fossil fuels.
A Wellcome Trust spokesperson said: “Reducing carbon emissions is of crucial importance, but there are differing views as to how this is best achieved. The network of people with whom the Wellcome Trust enjoys relationships is broad and it would be surprising if this community did not contain a diversity of opinion about fossil fuel investments. We believe engagement rather than divestment gives us the best opportunity for change.”
Coutts said: “It has always been a thing that people say – ‘it is better to be inside the camp than outside it’ – but that is not necessarily effective. People can put their money into projects which reflect the current [climate] crisis: humans are eternally inventive.”
In 2014, the Wellcome Trust’s £18bn endowment included over £450m invested in the fossil fuel majors Shell, BP, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton alone.
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