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The Cowardice of the Financial Elite Could Doom Us All to Climate Hell
For a brief moment, lots of financial leaders said they were going to take steps to address climate change, but when Big Oil pushed back with the help the GOP, they turned tail and ran. It's time for them to turn and fight.
Jan 29, 2026
Any resistance needs to celebrate its victories, and the weekend’s retreat by the administration is a big one: Should the forces of decency ever regain the upper hand in DC, we need a monument to the people of Minneapolis on the National Mall, and busts of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in the Capitol.
And it’s not just the Trump administration that those brave people faced down, it’s the pundit class too, who insisted over and over that progressives should avoid talking about immigration because it wasn’t politically popular. The other subject we’ve been told to sideline is “climate change,” for fear of offending voters more interested in “affordability.” (Former Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told an industry audience Monday that “on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, climate does not rise as much as how much I'm paying for my electricity bill,” which is one of those things that sounds clever until you meet someone who lost their home to a wildfire.)
I actually have no problem with the advice to focus on electric bills—as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I think affordability, especially of electricity, is an issue that helps both elect Democrats and reduce carbon emissions, since anyone interested in the cost of power is going to be building sun and wind. But I also don’t think that talking about global warming is a mistake—most Americans, polls show, understand the nature of the crisis, and want action to stem it. It isn’t the single most salient issue because all of us live in this particular moment (and in this particular moment the fact that federal agents are executing citizens who dare to take cell phone pictures of them is definitely the most salient issue) but it is nonetheless a net plus for politicians, especially in blue states.
As we were reminded Tuesday morning, when Drew Warshaw, a candidate for New York state comptroller with a long record of building clean energy in the private sector, released a true bombshell report. In it he called for the state to divest its vast pension funds from fossil fuels—and provided the data to show that the failure of the incumbent to do that over the last two decades had cost taxpayers $15 billion in foregone returns. Billion with a b. That’s $750 for every woman, man, and child in the Empire State, all because the longstanding (as in, way too long) state treasurer, Thomas DiNapoli, has ignored the counsel of one expert after another and kept the state invested in Big Oil. (Oh, and since cowardice often consorts with incompetence, another report also finds that DiNapoli has cost the state more than $50 billion by underperforming index funds and giving huge contracts to various advisers.
Always remember, most of the nation’s economy is in places that voted against Trump. It’s a weapon that needs to be used.
A bit of backstory here. Fifteen years ago, some of us launched a fossil fuel divestment campaign. At the beginning the argument was mostly moral: It was wrong to try and make a profit off the end of the world, and if we could convince institutions to sell that stock it would tarnish Big Fossil’s social license.
But it didn’t take long for another argument to emerge. The pension funds, college endowments, and others who joined the movement reported that they were making money as a result, and for a very simple reason: Anything that they put the money into was generating better returns than coal, gas, and oil. And that in turn was for an even simpler reason: Fossil fuel is a faltering industry, because an alternative—the trinity of sun, wind, and batteries—now produces the same product, just cleaner and cheaper. That’s why 95% of new generating capacity around the world last year came from renewables; fossil fuel only has a good year any more if something goes very wrong (the invasion of Ukraine, say).
Anyway, this became the largest anti-corporate effort of its kind in history, with funds representing $41 trillion in investments joining in. Its had powerful effects—when Peabody Coal filed for bankruptcy, for instance, its legal documents listed divestment as a reason. But it also protected the fiscal integrity of the funds that did the right thing—they had more money to pay pensions, provide scholarships, or whatever else. That’s why pension funds in states and entire countries joined in.
Which brings us back to New York. Advocates have put in tens of thousands of person hours explaining to DiNapoli that he should join pension funds in dozens of other places in divesting from fossil fuels, and he has dragged his feet at every turn, with half-measures, occasional strongly-worded letters, and the rest: He is the Chuck Schumer of finance. As Warshaw’s report puts it:
When an investment, and in this case a whole sector of investments, fails to perform over a long period of time and show no realistic signs of turning around, investment managers need to act. Each market cycle over the last two decades has left in its wake less value for fossil fuel companies and less value for fossil fuel investors. This value erosion and strong headwind threats are at the heart of the divestment argument. Why continue to invest in an industry that is now only 2.8% of the market with no plausible strategy to turn things around and a corporate culture that simply that denies the problem even exists? Investment managers need to focus their time on maximizing risk-adjusted returns, not engaging in politically-driven wishful thinking for an industry in permanent decline.
DiNapoli is not alone in his cowardice, of course. For a brief moment—when they were scared by the emergence of Greta’s worldwide movement before the pandemic—lots of financial leaders said they were going to take steps to address climate change. BlackRock, for instance, the biggest investor in the world, which has the power should it choose to use it, to make vast change fast. (BlackRock’s wealth is roughly twice the continent of Africa’s). Here’s what Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, said in 2020:
Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects. Last September, when millions of people took to the streets to demand action on climate change, many of them emphasized the significant and lasting impact that it will have on economic growth and prosperity–a risk that markets to date have been slower to reflect. But awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.
The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance. Research from a wide range of organizations–including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the BlackRock Investment Institute, and many others, including new studies from McKinsey on the socioeconomic implications of physical climate risk–is deepening our understanding of how climate risk will impact both our physical world and the global system that finances economic growth.
Will cities, for example, be able to afford their infrastructure needs as climate risk reshapes the market for municipal bonds? What will happen to the 30-year mortgage–a key building block of finance–if lenders can’t estimate the impact of climate risk over such a long timeline, and if there is no viable market for flood or fire insurance in impacted areas? What happens to inflation, and in turn interest rates, if the cost of food climbs from drought and flooding? How can we model economic growth if emerging markets see their productivity decline due to extreme heat and other climate impacts?
Investors are increasingly reckoning with these questions and recognizing that climate risk is investment risk.
But then what happened? Big Oil pushed back, in the form of red state treasurers promising to pull their money from BlackRock. Suddenly Fink turned tail and ran. By now he’s part of President Donald Trump’s inner circle. As Pilita Clark explained in that radical journal the Financial Times over the weekend, DiNapoli and Fink’s failure of courage is endemic across too much of the American elite landscape:
This failure is not due to a shortage of scientific understanding or technological breakthroughs. It is because we lack the political changes needed to put financial systems and economies on to paths that avoid burning fossil fuels. Achieving those changes is inordinately difficult.
Public support from large businesses is important. Ultimately, staying quiet at a time like this is self-defeating. It undermines the global institutions needed to address a growing global climate problem that poses serious financial threats.
David Gelles, in the Times, has another sad account of this collective failure of nerve on Wall Street, and it’s well worth reading. As he writes:
Republican legislatures around the country introduced more than 100 bills to penalize financial companies that supported ESG practices. Republican state treasurers around the country began pulling money out.
This is the company DiNapoli keeps, and the people he apparently listens to—again, he’s a lot more like Chuck Schumer than he should be. So it’s very good news that insurgent candidate Warshaw is talking about bringing New York State’s financial might to bear—in part because it amplifies the message being sent by Mark Levine, new comptroller of the city of New York. Levine’s predecessor Brad Lander, who already led the divestment from fossil fuel companies, late in his tenure called for the city to ditch BlackRock, and Levine seems to be interested in following through.
Together, the pension funds of New York City and New York state control far more resources than the funds of the various red states combined. If they manage to put effective pressure on the oil industry and the finance industry, it will have enormous impact—it will aid enormously in the climate fight and it will undercut Trump. And it will encourage other blue state leaders to do likewise: Always remember, most of the nation’s economy is in places that voted against Trump. It’s a weapon that needs to be used.
And New York can do so without putting anyone’s pension at risk—under the Empire State’s laws, the comptroller has to pay pensions in full no matter what happens to his investment portfolio, so there’s no danger Warshaw will do anything except save taxpayers large sums of money. (And Warshaw is not alone; the other Dem in the primary, Raj Goyle, has called for divestment too, though not with the same depth of analysis). This is a no-brainer, except if you’re stuck in your ways.
I helped found an organization devoted to elder action on behalf of climate and democracy; obviously I don’t think age disqualifies one from office. But DiNapoli is 71 and he represents the greatest danger of long tenure in office: a stultification of ideas, an inability to see new facts, a stubborn attachment to old ideas. It’s time for him, finally, to get out of the way, or to be voted out.
The climate fight, even in this country, is very far from over. The basic premise of that battle—that we must move swiftly away from the moral and financial sinkhole of Big Oil—is still clear and powerful.
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Facing the Climate Crisis, Can We Make Politics Move Faster Than Physics?
As Tehran runs low on water, New York City considers divesting from planet-wrecker Blackrock. We need more of the latter to prevent more of the former.
Nov 29, 2025
We are not getting out of the climate crisis without immense amounts of damage—the only question at this point is whether we can extricate ourselves with something like our civilizations intact. And the news from one cradle of civilization isn’t heartening: In Iran, where urban settlements date back to 4400 BC, the deepest drought in the country’s recorded history has now reached the havoc stage.
Tehran, shrouded in truly toxic smoke because the country’s power plants have run short of natural gas and begun burning “mazut, a dark residue of petroleum high in sulphur and other impurities,” is now facing a possible evacuation because it has run out of water. As Yeaganeh Torbati points out in an excellent essay, Iran’s water woes are deeply rooted in agricultural policy that prioritized irrigation above all (see also California); its international isolation has not helped it cope (including with the tragic fires that broke out last week in the Hyrcanian Forest, one of the oldest woodlands on Earth and a biodiversity hotspot). But the savage drought has been the final domino here, in a country where, as the head of one water utility points out, “Higher than normal heat has intensified the evaporation of water resources.” As the Australia Broadcasting Corporation summarized it:
Faced with a perfect storm of weather woes and decades of mismanagement, President Masoud Pezeshkian issued a warning to his country earlier this month that the situation could deteriorate even further.
“We’ve run short of water. If it doesn’t rain, we in Tehran… must start rationing,” he said.
“Even if we do ration and it still does not rain, then we will have no water at all."
“They [citizens] must evacuate Tehran.”
While it may seem like an exaggeration, it is the shocking reality facing the Iranian population—particularly in its capital, which has in excess of 15 million people across the broader metropolitan area.
This particular kind of disaster is becoming more common on a rapidly warming world. We’ve already had severe Day Zero scares in big cities in Brazil and South Africa; a new study earlier this month warns that:
Moments when water levels in reservoirs fall so low that water may no longer reach homes—could become common as early as this decade and the 2030s.
To find out where and when DZDs are most likely to occur, scientists at the Center for Climate Physics in Busan, South Korea ran a series of large-scale climate simulations. They considered the imbalance between decreasing natural supply (such as years of below-average rainfall and depleted river flows).
By some estimates, 2 billion humans are at risk.
The residents of New York are not at present among them. The city’s water supply system is one of the miracles of the modern world, and after six decades the “third tunnel” that will make that water system more secure is almost complete. (As a cub reporter in the early 1980s I spent several happy days underground, watching "sandhogs" from Local 147 blowing up rock walls to extend the shaft).
But that doesn’t mean New York is immune from climate danger, as anyone who lived there during Hurricane Sandy will recall. (As the financial journal Business Week printed in block letters on its cover the week after that catastrophe, “IT’S GLOBAL WARMING STUPID”).
And it certainly doesn’t mean that New York isn’t part of the cause of the global climate collapse. Not from its emissions—subway-riding New Yorkers are fairly green—but from the churn of capital through its financial markets that underwrites the ongoing expansion of the fossil fuel enterprise, in ways that scientists have said for years now simply has to stop.
A huge step in the right direction came Wednesday morning, when the city’s comptroller, Brad Lander, announced that he was recommending the city stop investing its money with Blackrock, the largest single representative of irresponsible capitalism on planet Earth.
Lander is urging three of the city’s pension funds to drop BlackRock Inc. because of “inadequate” climate plans, the latest move to penalize investment firms for failing to tackle global warming.
The guidance to reject BlackRock, the city’s largest money manager overseeing $42.3 billion of index funds for the pensions, follows a review of the firm’s efforts to press companies to decarbonize. Lander said Wednesday he’s also asking plan trustees to terminate much smaller mandates with Fidelity Investments and PanAgora Asset Management.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of this decision. To call Blackrock a “giant” is to pitifully underestimate its size—it has $13.46 trillion under management as of this fall. It owns 10% of the world’s stock market. If it wanted to stop the expansion of the fossil fuel industry, it could, more easily than any other single entity on planet Earth.
Instead it has dithered endlessly, making occasional noises of climate concern and then backtracking when red state treasurers (with far smaller portfolios than Lander’s to wave around) squawked at them. In August, Democratic officials from a dozen states sent warning letters to asset managers, calling on them to “reject pressure from the Trump administration and GOP lawmakers, and instead commit to thorough evaluations of risks tied to global warming, supply chains, and corporate governance.” Lander’s recommendation is the first concrete outcome.
Or, fairly concrete. Lander’s term ends on December 31. The advocates who have pressed for this policy—especially New York Communities for Change—are pushing him to get one of the city’s three pension plans—the New York City Employees Retirement System or NYCERS—to actually commit to the plan at its December 17 meeting. They think that with some prodding by Lander the votes are there to make the change.
If anyone has the political credibility to get it done before Christmas, that would be Brad Lander. Though he finished third in the primary, he emerged from this year’s mayoral contest with more love than any player in the city, maybe even including Zohran Mamdani. Partly that was because stood up for immigrants early, getting arrested by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement thug. Mostly it was because he figured out he was going to lose to Mamdani, took it with exceptionally good grace, and ended up playing the important role of his being his verifier—assuring people with both his insider and his Jewish credentials that the young socialist was up to the job. He comes out of 2025 both a macher and a mensch, and now he’s rumored to be planning a run for Congress; assuming he ties up some of the loose ends here, he will take on any future race with the fervent support of the environmental community, for whom he has delivered big-time. (And with the fervent opposition of Wall Street, which is proving to be a useful credential in itself).
In a larger sense, I’ve been reading accounts for months now of how climate is dead as a political issue. I think this move makes clear that isn’t true; in fact, I’d wager that as energy affordability takes center stage in next year’s midterms, the transition off fossil fuels will be a key issue for progressives to seize.
They will need to do so quickly. As events in Tehran make clear, time is now moving fast. The physics of global warming are implacable: Run out of water and you have to move your city. We’ll have to make politicians move fast to have any hope of getting ahead of the curve.
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Why Save for Retirement If You'll Be Living in a Climate Hellscape?
Only by making investments in climate resilience and clean energy can asset managers like BlackRock truly protect the retirement savings of everyday Americans.
Jun 03, 2025
Every spring, Larry Fink, CEO of the world's largest asset manager BlackRock, publishes his annual letter to investors, often heralded as an indicator of where the financial industry is headed. This year, Fink focused on the need to "democratize" investing by giving regular people more access to invest in private markets, meaning businesses outside of stock exchanges.
Fink argued this move would not only help more people save more money for retirement, but that these investments are necessary to help meet the growing need for financing for the infrastructure and energy needs of the future. Unfortunately, his take on the energy needs of the future is concerning, emphasizing fossil fuel pipelines and infrastructure and AI data centers, while casting doubt on renewables.
Democratizing investing is a noble goal, but Fink's annual letter misses a key point: A secure retirement isn't just about the money you save, it's about retiring into a world you want to live in, with healthy communities and a livable climate. By failing to encourage investments that help facilitate the transition to a clean energy economy and create green jobs, BlackRock's efforts will undermine the long-term success of our financial markets and threaten the ability of everyday Americans to retire with dignity. If asset managers like BlackRock truly want to help people retire, they must uplift investments that increase returns for individuals AND help build a future where everyone thrives.
America's Investment Landscape
In pushing forward BlackRock's agenda on private markets, Fink's annual letter conveniently ignores two critical realities.
The first is the growing problem of economic inequality in the United States. The difficulty so many Americans face in reaching their saving and investing goals has less to do with limited access to private markets, and more to do with our egregious income divide. Right now, the top 1% holds nearly as much wealth as the bottom 90%. Helping more people be financially secure in retirement begins with investing in our communities and climate solutions to help create green jobs so that more people have the resources they need to save.
The second is the growing need for financing for, and opportunities to invest in, climate resilience and the clean energy transition. This includes everything from renewable energy infrastructure to disaster-proof buildings and climate-resilient farming.
True retirement security comes not only from individual savings, but from living in a world where our investments foster a safe and thriving future for all.
Estimates show global investments in clean energy must reach $4 trillion annually by 2030 to hit global climate goals. Although this goal may seem huge, reaching it is necessary to prevent much larger losses to our economy. By 2050, without further action, climate damages could permanently shrink economic output by 20%, cost $38 trillion annually, and slash global stocks by 50%. This translates to trillions of dollars lost annually due to extreme weather, damaged infrastructure, and lower productivity. Alongside these widespread economic losses, retirement savings would take a major hit. In other words, failing to invest in the transition to a clean energy economy will make our communities—and our savings—much worse off.
Instead of focusing his annual letter on private markets, Fink should have focused on the investments necessary to support the long-term financial security and peace of mind for the millions of people he claims he wants to help save for retirement. Only by making investments in climate resilience and clean energy can asset managers like BlackRock truly protect the retirement savings of everyday Americans.
Financial Security Goes Beyond the Numbers
Retiring with dignity is not merely about having the financial security to live comfortably. It's also about the broader environment in which people live and age, which is something Fink apparently forgets. It's not only about having investment portfolios that can weather climate-related risks, but about having thriving communities and flourishing economies to retire in: cities with liveable temperatures, modern buildings, and plentiful clean energy, and people with access to good jobs, quality education, and affordable housing.
Financial security isn't just about having a diversified portfolio and a comfortable nest egg—it's intricately linked to the health of the environment. Ignoring climate risks jeopardizes the well-being of future retirees and the communities they call home. True retirement security comes not only from individual savings, but from living in a world where our investments foster a safe and thriving future for all.
To truly democratize investing, asset managers like BlackRock must direct their investment strategies to support climate resilience and the clean energy transition and provide prosperity for all Americans, within individual portfolios and beyond.
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