One year on: BlackRock still addicted to fossil fuels
Cuvelier, Lara; Pinson, Lucie; Satow, Angus; Cooper, Ryan; Ganswindt, Katrin; Bingler, Jacey; Jeandon, Jordan
Reclaim Finance, 75 rue Manin, 75019 Paris (France); Urgewald--Geschaeftsstelle Sassenberg, Von-Galen-Strasse 4, 48336 Sassenberg (Germany)2021
Reclaim Finance, 75 rue Manin, 75019 Paris (France); Urgewald--Geschaeftsstelle Sassenberg, Von-Galen-Strasse 4, 48336 Sassenberg (Germany)2021
AbstractAbstract
[en] With the Covid-19 crisis and its health, social and economic consequences, 2020 has demonstrated the urgent need to act to support the development of more just, united and sustainable societies. Unfortunately, the long-awaited leap has yet to come. As the world will need to decrease fossil fuel production by roughly 6% per year between 2020 and 2030 to follow a 1.5 deg. C consistent pathway, it is crucial that financial players put an end to their support to fossil fuel companies. They should both stop any support to coal and act with zero tolerance towards the companies expanding the most climate-damaging sectors, such as shale oil and gas. One year ago, on January 14, Larry Fink announced BlackRock was finally on its way to investing sustainably. The largest investor in the world, with $7.8 tn in assets under management, also published a coal policy, aiming at 'exiting thermal coal producers' but only excluding mining companies with more than 25% of revenues from coal production. To this day, BlackRock still has no policy regarding its investments in other fossil fuels. Reclaim Finance has conducted research on BlackRock's holdings (as of October 2020) to verify the real-world consequences of these announcements and assess the investor's exposure to the coal sector. Unfortunately, results show that even with this new policy, BlackRock remains a massive investor in coal companies and even in companies planning new coal projects, despite research showing that such projects are incompatible with any serious climate commitment. BlackRock has a major problem with its passively managed investments, which make it widely exposed to coal assets likely to become stranded. They also massively expose it to other fossil fuels, as even the most polluting companies are not excluded from BlackRock's investments. BlackRock's half-hearted steps in 2020 to invest more sustainably have proven to be superficial. Our analysis shows that the action taken is utterly insufficient to truly curb investments in the sector most problematic when it comes to climate change: fossil fuels. 2021 is a critical year for climate action, with new commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions expected by private and state actors ahead of COP 26 in Glasgow. As a first step towards the necessary phase-out of fossil fuels investments, BlackRock must immediately step up the ambition of its global coal exclusion policy, by extending its scope to the entire coal value chain and to all its assets.
Original Title
Un an apres: BlackRock, toujours accro aux energies fossiles
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Jan 2021; 23 p; 43 refs.; Available from the INIS Liaison Officer for France, see the INIS website for current contact and E-mail addresses
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Miscellaneous
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