Statement: CPPIB Gambles Over $4 Billion on Climate Failure
For Immediate Release: September 23 2025
Toronto, ON | Traditional territories of the Wendat, Anishnaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Chippewas, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) today announced a new $4.1 billion investment in fossil gas, barely a day after its chief sustainability officer admitted in The Globe and Mail that investors are struggling to manage worsening climate-related financial risks, with physical risks "happening earlier than expected, with greater impact than was anticipated.”
CPPIB is entering into a deal to acquire a US$3 billion stake (CAD $4.1 billion) in Sempra Infrastructure, a company that develops, owns and operates fossil gas pipelines, power generation and fossil gas export facilities in the United States and Mexico.
The production, transportation and burning of gas and LNG are a leading cause of the climate crisis. While CPPIB attempts to spin this investment as somehow part of the “energy transition”, the opposite is true. The energy transition requires, by definition, the removal of fossil fuels from our energy systems as quickly as possible.
This transition is now already well underway, with the International Energy Agency reporting last year that the world now invests almost twice as much in clean energy as it does in fossil fuels of all types. As this trend continues, CPPIB keeps making explicit bets against this transition, and the stabilization of our shared climate, risking the retirement savings and liveable future of Canadians.
By investing in line with blowing the world past 1.5℃, CPPIB is once again demonstrating a failure to understand that its ability to fulfill its mandate depends on a safe climate. Each investment it makes in fossil fuel expansion is a bet against the best interests of its Canadian contributors, worsening this crisis and amplifying the very climate-related financial risks its executives are struggling to understand.
Canadians depend on the Canada Pension Plan to help ensure their safe and secure retirement. CPPIB is failing all of us by investing in climate failure.
Additional information:
Shift. CPPIB Watch: A Quarterly Update on CPPIB-owned Fossil Fuel Companies (July-September 2025).
Shift. Shift warns Canada's Chief Actuary is severely underestimating climate risks to public pension plans. (August, 28, 2025)
Shift’s detailed analysis of CPPIB’s approach to climate risk and investments in fossil fuels (as of December 31, 2024).
Shift. CPPIB’s fundamentally flawed decarbonization thesis for fossil fuels. (February 2025).
Ortec Finance. Climate change could erode Canadian pension fund returns by 44%. (January 2025).
University of Exeter and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries: Planetary Solvency finding our balance with nature - Global risk management for human prosperity. (January 2025)
Contact information for interview requests:
Adam Scott, Executive Director, Shift Action for Pension Wealth & Planet Health
adamscott@shiftaction.ca
416-347-3858
Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health is a charitable initiative that works to protect pensions and the climate by bringing together beneficiaries and their pension funds to engage on the climate crisis.
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