Investment giant Blackrock has come under fire by conservatives for using Environmental Social Governance (ESG) standards when making investment decisions.
The company is used by states across the country to manage pension funds and other government holdings.
To date, eleven states have divested from Blackrock in an attempt to pressure the company to abandon its use of ESG standards and other woke initiatives.
The effort has resulted in almost $4.5 billion in losses for the company, with other Republican states looking to follow suit in the near future.
The biggest divestment effort has come from Florida, where CFO Jimmy Patronis divested $2 billion in state funds from the company, totaling almost half of the total funds divested.
Other states, such as West Virginia, have banned banks from doing business with the company, resulting in even steeper losses.
The Daily Caller Reports–
Florida announces that it plans to divest $2 billion worth of its assets managed by BlackRock, “the biggest such divestment by a state opposed to the asset manager's [ESG] policies.”
This is a good step by Florida.https://t.co/xMMD0qsTrW
— Pedro L. Gonzalez (@emeriticus) December 1, 2022
Republican states removed almost $4.5 billion in state funds from investing giant BlackRock due to the asset manager’s commitment to environmentally and socially conscious investing policies.
Several Republican states, including Florida, Louisiana, Arizona, Utah, South Carolina, Missouri and Arkansas, divested their state funds from BlackRock, which manages $8 trillion in assets, after alleging that the firm’s efforts toward meeting its climate targets have compromised its financial responsibility to its clients. BlackRock views climate change as a significant financial risk and wants businesses to significantly reduce their carbon emissions in order to reach “net zero” targets by 2050, in accordance with the United Nations Paris Climate Agreement.
“What we’re trying to do is ensure that we’re being good stewards of taxpayer dollars and that we don’t have a conflict of interest … so we’re not going to do business with anymore that’s trying to diminish the funds that they are managing,” West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
