LSE students reject corporate greenwashing

Students from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) have published a document criticising the university’s greenwashing of corporate capitalism at LSE Festival 2026.

The document, seen by the Canary, takes aim at how the university’s stated ethos diverges from its material investments and corporate practices. This alternative programme was compiled by LSE Students for Justice in Palestine.

It comes in response to LSE’s school-wide festival, beginning 15 June, which will gather economists, academics, policy ministers, journalists, and scientists to speak about the climate crisis, green finance, and ecological governance.

However, student and staff activist researchers in 2024 and 2025 revealed how LSE’s own investment practices contradict its charitable goals and ESG standards.

This year, students write:

…while the institution performs planetary concern on its stages, it holds more than £86 million in investments across the very industries responsible for the climate catastrophe.

As you attend this festival, remember that LSE does not put its money where its mouth is.

LSE’s money isn’t where its mouth is

In May 2024, LSESU’s Palestine Society published Assets in Apartheid, a forensic analysis of LSE’s multi-million pound endowment. In June 2025, it published Stakes in Settler Colonialism, a 228-page update.

The reports’ cumulative findings are clear. LSE holds more than £86 million in companies profiting from the extraction and/or distribution of fossil fuels, including BP (£2.05 million ), Enel (£1.98 million), and Shell (£1.11 million).

Its investment advisor, JP Morgan Chase, is the world’s most prolific financier of fossil fuels, according to the 2025 Banking on Climate Chaos: Fossil Fuel Finance Report. This is who LSE trusts with its money.

Beyond fossil fuels, LSE has investments worth over £71 million in companies profiting from the manufacture and/or proliferation of arms as well as the funding of nuclear weapons.

The university also has at least £72 million in companies profiting from the genocide in Gaza. Those companies are:

Supplying the Israeli military operating in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT)
Involved in illegal settlement activities
Funding the occupation of Palestine

The report explains that:

These are not abstract figures. Every barrel pumped, every missile shipped, and every settlement financed by a company in this portfolio is a decision that LSE’s Finance and Estates Committee has taken, and refuses to reverse.

The students at LSE allege that for the university, “money is more important than lives”.

The university is happily staging a festival about saving the planet while bankrolling its destruction. In doing so, it uses the spectacle of concern to obscure its own material role in ecological breakdown and genocide.

Polluters are the programme

LSE has organised various high-profile speakers, all with loft speech titles, but the students aren’t convinced.

Mon 15 June

The Politics of Climate Change

This is a panel on the “green backlash” and climate rollbacks in recent years. However, students say:

LSE is its own case study: students voted for divestment in 2024, and again in 2026. Management declined to act both times.

The panels are included, but not limited to, ‘Political Economy Analysis for Accelerating the Green Transition,’ ‘How the Right Laws Can Save the Planet,’ and ‘Can We Tackle Climate Change Without Deepening Inequality?’

And, the report authors promise to tackle the problem of opposition from management:

LSE’s administration and its own student body are divided by exactly this failure of cooperation. 89% of students voted for divestment. Management refused. Cooperation, apparently, means something different when the institution is on one side and its students on the other.

Gross institutional hypocrisy on BP

As the students state:

Oil and education don’t mix.

They’re keen to underscore the complicity of BP, to whom LSE directs many millions of pounds. BP is complicit in both ecocide and the Gaza genocide.

LSE has been here before. In 1988, following a two-week student occupation of Connaught House, LSE divested from all 26 of its holdings in companies complicit in South African apartheid, a stake worth £3 million that included investments in BP. It has been done, and can be done again.

However, two years later, in 1990, LSE accepted £1.25 million from BP to establish the BP Centennial Professorship Scheme, designed, in LSE’s own words, to “contribute to the internal education programme of BP and to develop contacts between the School and BP”.

Under this scheme, LSE lends BP the grammar of sustainability, development, and progress. This is the precise language BP uses to greenwash its complicity in climate breakdown whilst the planet burns.

The report authors explain that:

Greenwashing is the practice of deploying the language of environmental responsibility to obscure the reality of environmental harm. It does not require lying. It requires only that the performance of concern be loud enough, and public enough, to crowd out scrutiny of the underlying conduct.

In June 2024, the LSE Student Union held a referendum on divestment from fossil fuels and arms producers. With record turnout, 89% of students voted in favour. In February 2026, the referendum was renewed with similarly overwhelming support.

Both times, LSE management declined to listen to its student body, citing “fiduciary duties”. But, the students allege fiduciary duty is not the neutral, technical constraint that management presents it as. It is a choice about whose interests count and over what timescale.

How to actually save the planet

Students have listed a number of suggestions for LSE to take up:

Full divestment from all holdings in fossil fuel companies, and from the asset managers and advisors financing their expansion.
Immediate divestment from all companies identified in Assets in Apartheid and Stakes in Settler Colonialism as complicit in crimes against the Palestinian people.
Full transparency of LSE’s portfolio. Easy access to view how much money is invested and in which companies.
Democratic oversight of the endowment. Students and staff must have binding participation in investment decisions.
End the BP Centennial Professorship and all partnerships with BP and other fossil fuel giants.