Kicking CALSTRS While It's Down

This is a nice follow-up to yesterday's post about wind energy investment...

CALSTRS, the California teachers pension fund is taking heat for causing "social injury" in England.

As if being a California pension fund isn't miserable enough these days (the Sacramento Bee reports that the CALSTRS lost $42 billion last year), now CALSTRS has to deal with this?

The deal is that some British NIMBY's in the county of Kent are ballistic over a 420 foot wind turbine that the the locals claim would be built on an apple and plumb farm and be close enough to houses to be a "noisly nuisance."

Bloody hell!

The best part of this is that CALSTRS isn't even directly involved. It has a $63 million investment (chump change) in Hg Renewable, a hedge fund that claims to be the biggest fund in the world focused solely on European renewable projects. Hg Renewable is the one that financed the wind turbine.

So if you're CALSTRS and you just lost $42 billion, and now you can't even invest in a green energy fund without getting excoriated in the press, it might be time to go to cash or start buying T Bills.

British Activists Angry Over CalSTRS Wind-Power Investment [Sacramento Bee]