zenfarm - 5/18/2022 16:16

kb ag - 5/18/2022 15:27

and it is going to hurt the poorest the worst. The same people that want to hand out freebies to harm the poor also don;t want them to have the basic necessities.

Moore yanked West Virginia’s state funds away from BlackRock and reinvested them with a different firm. A few months later, the state legislature passed a bill that enabled him to create a blacklist of banks that boycotted fossil fuels, and to pull state money away from them as well. Since then he has put together a coalition of 15 other states that are making similar moves — states that he says have funds worth more than $700 billion.

Moore is one of the leaders of a new backlash against environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing. The financial sector has only just begun to make tentative movements away from fossil fuels, but Moore and politicians like him want to stop this green-investing trend before it can get off the ground; they’ve been assisted in this effort by conservative organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as well as a conservative media that views Blackrock as a new deep-state bogeyman. There’s a clear economic rationale for these laws, which serve to protect the interests of oil and gas companies, but their proponents have clothed them in the language of the culture war, speaking out against “woke capital.”

The notion of green investing has been around for decades, including in prior guises like “corporate social responsibility” and “sustainable development,” but it’s only in the past few years that ESG has become a major trend. Between 2014 and 2021, the total amount of assets under management in ESG funds quadrupled from $10 trillion to $40 trillion, so that one in every three managed dollars in the world was in an ESG fund. Sustainable debt issuance doubled from $800 billion to $1.6 trillion in a single year between 2020 and 2021.

At the same time, financial leaders like Fink at BlackRock have talked up capitalism as a force for good: “We focus on sustainability not because we’re environmentalists, but because we are capitalists and fiduciaries to our clients,” Fink said in his annual letter to CEOs earlier this year. Banks, from JPMorgan Chase to Bank of America, meanwhile, have announced their intention to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 or sooner, and several have said they want to divest from coal in particular.

A number of conservative media personalities have picked up on this rhetoric as evidence that Fink and his peers are trying to bring about a “great reset” of capitalism. Foremost among these is Vivek Ramaswamy, author of the book Woke Inc., who has argued that the financial sector is trying to “dissolve the boundaries between government actors and private companies to advance a single progressive globalist agenda.” When Ramaswamy appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson summed up his position by saying that Fink “invests it in ways that are repugnant to you and your core values and your family’s future.” On a later episode, Carlson referred to ESG as “fraud.” There have even emerged so-called “anti-woke ETFs,” or exchange-traded funds, that seek to give conservative investors an alternative place to put their money. One such ETF has boycotted Apple, Disney, Nike, and more in favor of Fox and News Corp.

It’s difficult to gauge the exact scale of this ESG movement, or its authenticity. On the one hand, it’s true that fossil fuels make up a smaller share of the average investment portfolio than they once did, and coal in particular has gotten the cold shoulder from many major financiers. A number of banks and insurers have also refused to support controversial oil-drilling projects such as those in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Alberta tar sands. On the other hand, the largest banks and funds still have massive exposure to fossil fuels. BlackRock, for instance, still held $85 billion in coal assets as of earlier last year, and banks like JPMorgan and Bank of America remain some of the largest financiers of the oil and gas industry. Just this month, BlackRock said it would vote against shareholder proxy resolutions on climate change, claiming the resolutions had become too “prescriptive,” and financial titans like Warren Buffett have more or less ignored the trend.
 
Even so, the fossil-fuel industry depends on ample access to capital, and these movements have made producers nervous about the future: The S&P ratings agency projected that fossil-fuel companies that don’t meet environmental goals may see restricted access to financing. That’s the impetus behind a barrage of new bills that seek to either punish banks that divest from fossil fuels or ensure that state funds still flow toward them. The first such bill was drafted last year for the Texas legislature by the Koch-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation, and sought to create a list of “restricted financial institutions”: the state would no longer contract with any bank or corporation found to be “boycotting” oil and gas. The blueprint for this law was a similar bill that targeted state contractors that had withheld their services from Israel as part of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement; the fossil-fuel version required all large companies to pledge they wouldn’t divest from fossils or else risk losing Texas’s business.”