Just a few years ago, ESG was all the rage in the banking and investing community as globalist governments in the western world focused on a failing attempt to subsidize an energy transition into reality. The strategy was to try to strangle fossil fuel industries by denying them funding for major projects, with major ESG-focused institutional investors like BlackRock and State Street, and big banks like J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs leveraging their control of trillions of dollars in capital to lead the cause.
But a funny thing happened on the way to a green Nirvana: It turned out that the chosen rent-seeking industries — wind, solar and electric vehicles — are not the nifty plug-and-play solutions they had been cracked up to be.
Even worse, the advancement of new technologies and increased mining of cryptocurrencies created enormous new demand for electricity, resulting in heavy new demand for finding new sources of fossil fuels to keep the grid running and people moving around in reliable cars.
In other words, reality butted into the green narrative, collapsing the foundations of the ESG movement. The laws of physics, thermodynamics and unanticipated consequences remain laws, not mere suggestions.
Making matters worse for the ESG giants, Texas and other states passed laws disallowing any of these firms who use ESG principles to discriminate against their important oil, gas and coal industries from investing in massive state-governed funds. BlackRock and others were hit with sanctions by Texas in 2023. More recently, Texas and 10 other states sued Blackrock and other big investment houses for allegedly violating anti-trust laws.
As the foundations of the ESG movement collapse, so are some of the institutions that sprang up around it. The United Nations created one such institution, the “Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative,” whose participants maintain pledges to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and adhere to detailed plans to reach that goal.
The problem with that is there is now a growing consensus that a) the forced march to a green energy transition isn’t working and worse, that it can’t work, and b) the chances of achieving the goal of net-zero by 2050 are basically net zero. There is also a rising consensus among energy companies of a pressing need to prioritize matters of energy security over nebulous emissions reduction goals that most often constitute poor deployments of capital. Even as the Biden administration has ramped up regulations and subsidies to try to force its transition, big players like ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP, and Shell have all redirected larger percentages of their capital budgets away from investments in carbon reduction projects back into their core oil-and-gas businesses.
The result of this confluence of factors and events has been a recent rush by big U.S. banks and investment houses away from this UN-run alliance. In just the last two weeks, the parade away from net zero was led by major banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and, most recently, JP Morgan. On Thursday, the New York Post reported that both BlackRock and State Street, a pair of investment firms who control trillions of investor dollars (BlackRock alone controls more than $10 trillion) are on the brink of joining the flood away from this increasingly toxic philosophy.
In June, 2023, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink made big news when told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colorado that he is “ashamed of being part of this [ESG] conversation.” He almost immediately backed away from that comment, restating his dedication to what he called “conscientious capitalism.” The takeaway for most observers was that Fink might stop using the term ESG in his internal and external communications but would keep right on engaging in his discriminatory practices while using a different narrative to talk about it.
But this week’s news about BlackRock and the other big firms feels different. Much has taken place in the energy space over the last 18 months, none of it positive for the energy transition or the net-zero fantasy. Perhaps all these big banks and investment funds are awakening to the reality that it will take far more than devising a new way of talking about the same old nonsense concepts to repair the damage that has already been done to the world’s energy system.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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