Jason Miyares, the Virginia attorney general, is, like several other Republican AGs, concerned that asset management giant BlackRock has gone “woke.”
Miyares has joined a coalition of 15 Republican AGs raising issue with BlackRock’s embrace of environmental social and governance investing practices – the dreaded ESG that the folks with shows on Fox News at night drone on about.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has signed onto the Climate Action 100+ and the Net Zero Asset Managers initiatives to force fossil fuel use to be cut from 61 percent in 2020 to 25 percent by 2030 and to 2 percent by 2050.
It’s a pretty boss move, all things considered, for BlackRock to use the shareholder voting power of its members to influence how utilities operate by reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
Given what we’re seeing these days on the climate-change front, with high temperatures at the Arctic Circle reaching 99 degrees last week, to cite just one outrageous bit of climate news, this ESG thing that BlackRock is helping push doesn’t seem like that bad an idea.
Don’t try to tell that to our friend Jason Miyares.
“The overlapping web of personal and business relationships between major mutual fund directors and BlackRock raise red flags about potential conflicts of interest, and call even further into question the misguided investment strategies done in the name of ESG,” Miyares said.
Miyares and the other Republican AGs have fired off a letter to BlackRock’s directors to raise their concerns, which almost certainly will do nothing of any consequence, other than to get stories about how they’re doing something about it, like the one you’re reading right now, in the press.
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Chris Graham
