A weekly reckoning with life in a warming world—and the fight to save it |
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BlackRock Chair and CEO Laurence D. Fink Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty |
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Two days ago, Apocalypse Soon published an important piece by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò about an often overlooked part of climate policy: asset management firms. Asset management firms are companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, and UBS who manage investments for billionaires, pension funds, endowments, and more. These “Big Three” firms alone control about $21 trillion, as well as a huge number of shareholder votes in companies across America. But that’s not all, as Olúfẹ́mi wrote: |
A new report by Friends of the Earth U.S. reveals that the Big Three asset managers collectively own more than 27 percent of shares in fossil fuel giants Chevron, ExxonMobil, and ConocoPhillips and over 30 percent of major agribusiness companies like Archer-Daniels-Midland, making them among the largest shareholders in the two industries most responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions driving the climate crisis. |
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{{#if }} Our writers and editors are bringing you vital reporting, explanation, and analysis to understand the current climate crisis—but they need your help. Here’s a special offer to subscribe to The New Republic. |
—Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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{{/if}} Asset management firms, Olúfẹ́mi wrote, are also blocking attempts to address climate change, by voting against “shareholder resolutions that would support establishing serious climate targets.” And they’re doing this, he added, while claiming to be environmentally friendly, by talking up their “green investment funds.” BlackRock is probably the best known of all these firms for its climate-friendly image—its CEO Larry Fink has gotten a lot of positive press for allegedly prioritizing sustainability in investment decisions and using his pulpit to press companies to tackle climate change. Today, there was a remarkable update in this story: Even BlackRock doesn’t believe its own climate rhetoric. Examining emails obtained via Freedom of Information Requests, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Josephine Moulds reports this morning that BlackRock executives told Texas oil regulator Wayne Christian not to take the CEO’s climate rhetoric too seriously. “It was nice to hear that BlackRock didn’t mean—or no longer believes—many of the disagreeable things the company and its CEO Mr Fink have said about the oil and gas industry,” Christian wrote in an email last month. Josephine Moulds also pulled a telling quote from an email by BlackRock head of external affairs Dalia Blass: “We are perhaps the world’s largest investor in fossil fuel companies,” she wrote. “We want to see these companies succeed and prosper.” Both of these pieces on climate change and asset management are worth your time. Other things going on at TNR this week include coverage of the crisis in Ukraine, Kate Aronoff reporting from the oil and gas industry’s annual corporate hoedown on the latest oil ban news, and frequent contributor Melody Schreiber writing about what we need to do to prevent the next pandemic. This last piece is part of a series we’re running this week on the second anniversary of the World Health Organization officially declaring Covid-19 a pandemic. Check it all out on Apocalypse Soon. —Heather Souvaine Horn, deputy editor |
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Three-quarters of Americans support U.S. participation in international efforts to address climate change, according to a recent Pew survey. |
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The Amazon rain forest is losing the ability to recover from logging, according to a new study. This increases the danger that we may soon reach a tipping point, triggering mass dieback in the remaining forest land. (Read about one way to stop contributing to Amazon deforestation.) |
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Elsewhere in the Ecosystem |
The Washington Post published a devastating piece today on the lingering environmental effects of racist housing discrimination: |
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The practice known as redlining was outlawed more than a half-century ago, but it continues to impact people who live in neighborhoods that government mortgage officers shunned for 30 years because people of color and immigrants lived in them. The analysis, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, found that, compared with White people, Black and Latino Americans live with more smog and fine particulate matter from cars, trucks, buses, coal plants and other nearby industrial sources in areas that were redlined. Those pollutants inflame human airways, reduce lung function, trigger asthma attacks and can damage the heart and cause strokes. |
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What Subscribers Are Reading |
Bulk-buying beans, potassium iodide, and guns won’t save you from Vladimir Putin being crazy. They’re just a way to shore up Americans’ individualist delusions. |
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Americans haven’t thought seriously about the threat of nuclear war in a long time. Now, as climate change accelerates, the peril and promise of nuclear technology feels more fraught than ever. |
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