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Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo Vote to Keep Financing Fossil Fuels [1]

['Kate Aronoff', 'Andrew Bergman', 'Holly Buck', 'Olúfẹ Mi O. Táíwò', 'Toly Rinberg', 'Jan Dutkiewicz', 'Liza Featherstone']

Date: 2022-04-26

Asset managers aren’t legally required to disclose how they vote in shareholder meetings until they submit mandated filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission later in the year. State Street did not respond to a request for comment on how it voted this morning in time for publication. Spokespeople for Blackrock and Vanguard each said via email that they don’t comment on specific votes as a matter of policy. On occasion they will choose to disclose their votes on specific resolutions close to a vote, though they declined to on those taken this morning. Given the low vote share for each resolution in the initial tally, Cushing thought it was unlikely any of the big asset managers had voted for the resolutions.

All three of these asset management companies belong to the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net-Zero, or GFANZ, an effort to align banks, insurers, and asset managers behind the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. This alliance was announced with much fanfare at the climate talks in Scotland last December. But financial institutions’ promises to start moving toward net-zero have so far been pretty flimsy: The U.K.-based watchdog group ShareAction recently found that 25 European-based banks signed onto GFANZ provided $38 billion in financing to the world’s 50 most expansionary fossil fuel companies in 2021. Blackrock has almost $260 billion invested in fossil fuels worldwide.

These financiers, however, do not like having their sincerity questioned. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, GFANZ convener and former Bank of England head Mark Carney lashed out at those who have criticized alliance members’ continued investments in fossil fuels: “What’s implied for somebody who isn’t an expert in it, which is most people,” he said, “is that anything above zero is too much. Well, that’s not realistic.”

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[1] Url: https://newrepublic.com/article/166208/bank-america-citigroup-wells-fargo-fossil-fuels

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