Matt Levine, as always, provides the most honest and direct commentary about this. Here's the start, but the whole piece is interesting, as pointed out by a reply.
> Will BlackRock’s decision to send a strongly worded letter about environmental sustainability reshape how corporate America does business? Well, I remember two years ago when Larry Fink sent a strongly worded letter about how companies needed to make society better, and that too was supposedly “likely to cause a firestorm in the corner offices of companies everywhere,” and now, uh, same society really.
> Now BlackRock will send a strongly worded letter to CEOs about the environment. It will arrive on the desk of the CEO of, I don’t know, giant state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco? A company where, according to Bloomberg data, BlackRock is the largest outside shareholder. A company that did a bond offering last year—after the Saudi government murdered and dismembered Jamal Khashoggi, after Fink sent that letter about making society better—in which BlackRock was also a big investor. “We wanted the Aramco bond to be much bigger,” Fink said, way back in April, when his public-relations goal was to butter up Saudi Arabia. Now it is January, and his public-relations goal is to butter up environmentalists, so BlackRock “will make investment decisions with environmental sustainability as a core goal.” Next time a big oil company is looking for money, presumably that will change again.
Disclaimer: I worked for BlackRock for about 3 years on an investment team (but its been a while and I don't have a dog in this fight)
BlackRock is a very simple business to understand. First, they only investment money on behalf of their clients and they take investment fees for making decisions on behalf of their clients (investing their money).
They break the business in to two parts:
Alpha: old school mutual funds, new school quant funds, real estate etc. Anything where managers get paid big bucks to make investment decisions on behalf of clients.
Beta: passive investment vehicles that blackrock tries to deliver for the lowest price with lowest tracking error (i.e. deliver as close to what the index returns as possible).
What BlackRock is doing here, is a VERY, VERY big deal. They are allowing clients to now pick passive investment strategies which exclude coal or other businesses that people find morally objectionable. What that means is that if you care about the environment you can move your money to these new passive investments. As more and more people do it, it will decrease demand for equity in those companies and increase their cost of capital.
On the active side, they already had that feature, and many of their clients already ask BlackRock to exclude investments from their active portfolios and were willing to accept less return. (BlackRock has offered that for a very long time).
I find very few things interesting that asset managers do, but I am going to look at all my passive investments and try to get them moved over. I bet passive funds without coal etc. will outperform while more and more people move money from vanilla S&P500 to S&P500 without coal.
Eventually those coal companies may fall out of indexes all together which will really increase their cost of capital.
Your post quotes the cynical piece of Levine’s editorial (literally his next three words are “but let’s not”, referring to “being cynical all day”), but it’s worth reading in full for the more nuanced perspective. I found the last two paragraphs surprisingly enlightening:
> The right model of BlackRock is probably that it is mostly an aggregator of preferences, but it is also, at the margin, a shaper of preferences. It passively reflects what investors want generally, but it has some ability to push those investors to want different things. There are other things that BlackRock does—it votes the shares of stock that it owns on behalf of investors, it meets with managers to talk about their sustainability plans, it writes strongly worded letters to CEOs—but I suspect that they’re mostly less important than the basic core function of taking $7 trillion from investors, channeling it where the investors want it to go, and slowly and subtly diverting those channels so that the money moves more in the direction that BlackRock wants it to go.
> This is an unavoidably uncomfortable role. If you want BlackRock to do more on climate change, you will be annoyed that it mostly offers broad passive products that buy all the stocks, including the ones you don’t like. If you want BlackRock to do less on climate change, you will be annoyed that it is pushing its clients into sustainability-focused funds rather than neutrally giving them all the stocks, including the ones BlackRock doesn’t like. Mostly it is an uncomfortably powerful role: BlackRock really is a general aggregator of preferences, so it speaks with the authority of its $7 trillion and its universal ownership, which means that its ability to shape those preferences matters.
Australia needs to exit the export coal business. We should go dig some other rocks up out of the ground, we have a lot of them...
We are responsible for 37% of global coal exports. That's massive. If we halt coal exports it would put a squeeze on the coal supply and that raise prices; probably significantly. Coal power plants are already on thin margins. If cost of coal increased for a sustained period (a few years) coal would be considered unviable as a fuel source. We should see a lot of the plants close down.
Australia always talks about its self as being insignificant and anything we could do to help prevent climate change would have no measurable impact. This incorrect relatively and absolutely, we are one of the largest per capita emitters. But we are also the third largest exporter of fossil fuels.
This is Australia's opportunity to actually do something significant to help address climate change.
"In 2014–15 mineral extraction in Australia was valued at 212 billion Australian dollars. Of this, Coal represented 45,869 million, oil and natural gas 40,369 million, Iron ore 69,486 million, Gold ore 13,685 million, and other metals 7,903 million." [1]
45B is still a lot of money to remove from the economy. It's less than I would have predicted (mining is only 5.8% of economy), but it's still a non-trivial amount. And 45B gets you a lot of lobbyists.
Australia produces ~6% of the worlds coal [0]. That is the only thing nature could care about; figures like % exports and per capita numbers are meaningless. 6% is a big enough slice of the pie for everyone to argue about. The 34% figure specifically is a bit meaningless because it is by value and there is big price (about x4?) difference between met coal (Queensland) vs. thermal coal (NSW). It doesn't make sense to try and compare Australian met coal exports to, say, Indonesian thermal.
Also as a counter argument, attempting to pressure China economically by choking their imports would probably end badly for us.
It is important to keep in mind the two categories of coal in terms of their final use. Most people think coal is only thermal coal, which is predominantly used in power plants to generate energy. A non-negligible 20% of Australian coal is the other sort, metallurgical. This type is used predominantly in steel production (think carbon in steel) and is, at the present, very unlikely to be replaced for a long time. Roughly half of coal produced in Canada is metallurgical, for instance, and that production is unlikely to end unless steel production does.
I've been wondering lately how and whether Australia could use its position as the biggest exporter to deliberately wreck the global thermal coal market, and consequently, coal usage.
I'm definitely not an economist, but would it be feasible, if coal production could be co-ordinated nationally, to manipulate the market through (I'm guessing) either or alternately dumping coal on it or suddenly cutting it off, possibly in an unpredictable manner? Does Australia have enough weight to make a difference? And would this have any effect greater than cutting off production entirely?
Sure but it has a huge financial impact. Its the second largest source of export earnings and the main source of electric power. The Australian economy has been hugely successful thanks due to coal, there is no way voters will take a big cut to their standard of living, especially with most of them overleveraged into property.
Imagine what we could do with just a 1% export tariff and funneling that money into renewable energy sources. At 10% we could invest in renewable energy projects in other parts of the world.
Australia needs to take a more enlightened attitude to the environment at home first. Just as Norway still exports a lot of oil but has the largest density of electric vehicles.
I personally agree with you 100%, but of course the economy is more important that addressing climate change.
It's so blatantly obvious the current political leadership in Australia is in bed with the coal industry, but like all the other democracies that have been bought by mega corps - what are you going to do?
At this point, this is one of those policies which is both environmentally friendly and makes piles of economic sense. Even without clean energy subsidies, coal is rapidly becoming a bad investment. The cost of running existing coal plants has exceeded the cost of building new solar & wind power plants. Over the next few years, demand for coal is likely to implode.
As bankers and insurers start to internalize this idea, the number of people willing to continue investing, insuring, or financing coal operation is going to vanish and the industry will collapse completely.
Next they should do the same with natural gas. The data on the investments of nat gas fracking make it doubtful that it will pay back even the last round of capital investment.
Remember that price paid for an asset is the primary driver of returns for the investor. Even as coal implodes, one can make money as the near term cash flow on invested dollars is high enough to offset declines.
Smoking has been in decline for decades yet cigarette companies have been phenomenal investments.
> this is one of those policies which is both environmentally friendly and makes piles of economic sense
To a broader point, this is how real change is enacted: make it matter to enough folks, usually by means of economic pressures. I.e., make bad things cost more than good things. Although obviously ham-fisted tariffs, etc. aren't very effective for a host of reasons. You gotta be more subtle than that.
> The cost of running existing coal plants has exceeded the cost of building new solar & wind power plants. Over the next few years, demand for coal is likely to implode.
That article cites a report written by climate change activists who want coal to be banned as fast as possible. If their fantasy were a reality, market forces would achieve their goals without intervention. Naturally, they're going to argue that government intervention is necessary to speed things along.
Federal reports suggest coal will decline slightly over the next several years, but won't disappear. Some forms of renewables are competitive with coal (onshore wind, hydro, geothermal), but they cannot be used everywhere. Solar and offshore wind are still not competitive with coal, nuclear, or natural gas.
That was my thought too. I wonder if they're just dressing up their findings in environmental speak for points. What other industries do they plan to drop in the name of the environment?
The decision whether or not to buy shares in the secondary market will make little difference to existing coal companies (who are largely cash flow positive and trade at near 25% earnings yields). Regulations are what matter. All that secondary investors can do is increase WACC via lowered demand for marginal primary debt/equity issuances. If you want to phase out coal, focus on government regulation instead of secondary investments.
It can (and often does) make sense to invest in industries in terminal decline as price paid for an asset’s cash flow is the primary determinant if returns for the investor. You can buy coal stocks for 25%+ earnings yields. Even if those plants are phased out in 6 or 7 years, one can make solid returns.
Indeed I have invested in cigarette shares in the past while wishing the government would do more to stop smokers. The fact that I hold the equity doesn’t change demand for cigarettes, and only in aggregate does the investor appetite effect WACC. Someone must always hold existing shares. For every buyer there is a seller and vice versa.
Lastly I should mention that metallurgical coal as opposed to thermal coal is a necessary “evil” to smelt steel.
I’ve used this recent hate for coal investments(and weakness in NG) to take positions at high earnings yields in ARCH and HCC.
That's not strictly right. If the pool of potential buyers for these coal stock shares dries up, the price of the shares will be much lower than it otherwise would be. This makes in increasingly less attractive for these companies to raise capital for new mines or mine expansions. It even makes merging less attractive. It also makes recruiting and retaining skilled executives harder. All of this surely impacts these companies in the longer term (say 5-10 years from now)-- they are likely to be a lot smaller and to employ fewer people.
> It can (and often does) make sense to invest in industries in terminal decline as price paid for an asset’s cash flow is the primary determinant if returns for the investor. You can buy coal stocks for 25%+ earnings yields. Even if those plants are phased out in 6 or 7 years, one can make solid returns.
For Blackrock, those 25% yields you talk about don't exist. If Blackrock were to retain a significant investment in those companies, share prices would be higher and yield lower.
What makes sense for a small investor often doesn't make sense for large corporate investors.
That said, investments like what you describe have their own risks. At this point it largely depends on contracts and how quickly alternative power sources can ramp up.
You are the second person to mention tobacco, and I think it's a poor comparison. People are literally addicted to tobacco which guarantees long term demand. Even if that demand is decreasing over time, it's predictable and not severe. Coal does not share those characteristics.
BlackRock is dumping coal because coal is a dying business. The climate change point is just a convenient PR booster. If coal was still generating lots of free cash flow we wouldn't see this.
With that being said, it's nice to see that the coal industry is losing its economic strength. Hopefully other environmentally unfriendly industries follow suit soon.
A great article posted in May 2019 by Saul Griffith from Otherlab/Makani/Instructables on decarbonisation[1] and another posted yesterday suggesting the idea of a "climate loan"[2]:
"The future can’t be built on lay-away; we need a loan. America’s strength for much of the 20th century was inventing new financing models and exporting those banking skills to the world. We need to put that to work once again, this time for climate change. The key insight here is to extend infrastructure financing closer to the home where the infrastructure of the 21st century will sit."
> contradiction between the company’s new activist stance and
I don't think I agree with calling BlackRock activists. An activist investor uses investment choices as leverage to apply pressure to achieve some other goal.
But BlackRock's statement seems to say that they are doing this for financial reasons. It says they're doing it because regulation (existing or potential) is making those investments riskier. From BlackRock's letter (as quoted in the article):
> Thermal coal production is significantly carbon intensive, becoming less and less economically viable, and highly exposed to regulation because of its environmental impacts. ... we do not believe that the long-term economic or investment rationale justifies continued investment in this sector
So in other words, BlackRock isn't using pressure to change the world. It's responding to pressure and uncertainty. This is just market forces causing BlackRock to keep its distance purely for financial reasons.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a Levine article and not been impressed. The man’s a national treasure! Also, you can get his articles sent to your inbox to bypass the paywalls.
There are tons of economic analyses that show that these kinds of boycotts or divestment efforts (usually driven by naive university students) rarely cause any noticeable change in policies or operations at the targeted companies.
What is usually happening is that other technological or consumer behavior is already leading to the decrease in business of some industry, and the divestment push happens simultaneously (because of people's awareness) and is merely a symptom of their final decline.
Take South Africa in the 80s, or the ridiculous grape boycott of the 90s, etc. None of those symbolic acts led to actual changes happening -- those were all consumer or political changes already in flight.
People create much more effect by voting with their dollars than by symbolically calling for divestment. It usually turns out that there is someone willing to take your place as a buyer when you choose to divest. It's only through fundamental change in demand or supply that a business is affected. Stop believing in the effectiveness of the feel-good boycotts. Even Blackrock won't make a difference.
This isn't simply a divestment campaign. This is one of the largest shareholder telling the companies to change their practices. There was a business group that played a major role in negotiating the end of apartheid in South Africa (see https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/center/private...).
Wouldn't neglect from passive index investors simply mean that active investors pick up such undervalued assets themselves instead? I don't see this sort of divestment as fundamentally altering the price discovery aspects of the market. All that changes are which individuals (or institutions) benefit.
I'm curious who will take the other side(s) of this trade. If you can invest capital in large chuncks (aka. PE/HF) why not just go long? If you can provide enough capital to manage down the business better than where it's priced now... that's an opportunity.
Whether one likes it or not, for a lot of people this will mean a good investment opportunity.
I would also hesitate to label it a decision made out of moral reasoning. Neither BlackRock nor (the majority of) their clients want to reduce coal exposure because of that. They rather want to reduce their exposure because they expect more regulatory hurting to come for those companies.
It's starting to look like "alternative" energies might be more efficient in near future anyway, despite climate change. It seems intuitive (but don't know) that burning organic matter is not the most efficient way to extract energy from nature.
Mass extraction and consumption of oil and coal will happen until these resources are too sparse to warrant building new plants or maintaining existing ones.
I don't really see any future where this doesn't happen. If you remove coal subsidies, or tax them, then some of the energy production currently handled by coal will change to oil, but once the oil becomes expensive enough to extract, coal mines will open back up again.
This just seems inevitable to me. Is there an angle I'm missing?
[+] [-] nostromo|6 years ago|reply
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-14/blackr...
> Will BlackRock’s decision to send a strongly worded letter about environmental sustainability reshape how corporate America does business? Well, I remember two years ago when Larry Fink sent a strongly worded letter about how companies needed to make society better, and that too was supposedly “likely to cause a firestorm in the corner offices of companies everywhere,” and now, uh, same society really.
> Now BlackRock will send a strongly worded letter to CEOs about the environment. It will arrive on the desk of the CEO of, I don’t know, giant state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco? A company where, according to Bloomberg data, BlackRock is the largest outside shareholder. A company that did a bond offering last year—after the Saudi government murdered and dismembered Jamal Khashoggi, after Fink sent that letter about making society better—in which BlackRock was also a big investor. “We wanted the Aramco bond to be much bigger,” Fink said, way back in April, when his public-relations goal was to butter up Saudi Arabia. Now it is January, and his public-relations goal is to butter up environmentalists, so BlackRock “will make investment decisions with environmental sustainability as a core goal.” Next time a big oil company is looking for money, presumably that will change again.
> I could keep being cynical about this all day.
[+] [-] wtvanhest|6 years ago|reply
BlackRock is a very simple business to understand. First, they only investment money on behalf of their clients and they take investment fees for making decisions on behalf of their clients (investing their money).
They break the business in to two parts:
Alpha: old school mutual funds, new school quant funds, real estate etc. Anything where managers get paid big bucks to make investment decisions on behalf of clients.
Beta: passive investment vehicles that blackrock tries to deliver for the lowest price with lowest tracking error (i.e. deliver as close to what the index returns as possible).
What BlackRock is doing here, is a VERY, VERY big deal. They are allowing clients to now pick passive investment strategies which exclude coal or other businesses that people find morally objectionable. What that means is that if you care about the environment you can move your money to these new passive investments. As more and more people do it, it will decrease demand for equity in those companies and increase their cost of capital.
On the active side, they already had that feature, and many of their clients already ask BlackRock to exclude investments from their active portfolios and were willing to accept less return. (BlackRock has offered that for a very long time).
I find very few things interesting that asset managers do, but I am going to look at all my passive investments and try to get them moved over. I bet passive funds without coal etc. will outperform while more and more people move money from vanilla S&P500 to S&P500 without coal.
Eventually those coal companies may fall out of indexes all together which will really increase their cost of capital.
Brilliant move by Fink, and I applaud it.
[+] [-] zamfi|6 years ago|reply
> The right model of BlackRock is probably that it is mostly an aggregator of preferences, but it is also, at the margin, a shaper of preferences. It passively reflects what investors want generally, but it has some ability to push those investors to want different things. There are other things that BlackRock does—it votes the shares of stock that it owns on behalf of investors, it meets with managers to talk about their sustainability plans, it writes strongly worded letters to CEOs—but I suspect that they’re mostly less important than the basic core function of taking $7 trillion from investors, channeling it where the investors want it to go, and slowly and subtly diverting those channels so that the money moves more in the direction that BlackRock wants it to go.
> This is an unavoidably uncomfortable role. If you want BlackRock to do more on climate change, you will be annoyed that it mostly offers broad passive products that buy all the stocks, including the ones you don’t like. If you want BlackRock to do less on climate change, you will be annoyed that it is pushing its clients into sustainability-focused funds rather than neutrally giving them all the stocks, including the ones BlackRock doesn’t like. Mostly it is an uncomfortably powerful role: BlackRock really is a general aggregator of preferences, so it speaks with the authority of its $7 trillion and its universal ownership, which means that its ability to shape those preferences matters.
[+] [-] woodandsteel|6 years ago|reply
And if you are wondering if the BlackRock head is right, do a google search on "fossil fuels stranded assets"
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wallace_f|6 years ago|reply
On the topic of executives needing to improve society, Fink here was important in the creation of the MBS market.
[+] [-] coenhyde|6 years ago|reply
We are responsible for 37% of global coal exports. That's massive. If we halt coal exports it would put a squeeze on the coal supply and that raise prices; probably significantly. Coal power plants are already on thin margins. If cost of coal increased for a sustained period (a few years) coal would be considered unviable as a fuel source. We should see a lot of the plants close down.
Australia always talks about its self as being insignificant and anything we could do to help prevent climate change would have no measurable impact. This incorrect relatively and absolutely, we are one of the largest per capita emitters. But we are also the third largest exporter of fossil fuels.
This is Australia's opportunity to actually do something significant to help address climate change.
[1] http://www.worldstopexports.com/coal-exports-country/
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-08-19/australia-co2...
[+] [-] azinman2|6 years ago|reply
45B is still a lot of money to remove from the economy. It's less than I would have predicted (mining is only 5.8% of economy), but it's still a non-trivial amount. And 45B gets you a lot of lobbyists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Australia
[+] [-] roenxi|6 years ago|reply
Also as a counter argument, attempting to pressure China economically by choking their imports would probably end badly for us.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_coal_prod...
[+] [-] loufe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h9n|6 years ago|reply
I'm definitely not an economist, but would it be feasible, if coal production could be co-ordinated nationally, to manipulate the market through (I'm guessing) either or alternately dumping coal on it or suddenly cutting it off, possibly in an unpredictable manner? Does Australia have enough weight to make a difference? And would this have any effect greater than cutting off production entirely?
[+] [-] rb808|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flukus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justincormack|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|6 years ago|reply
https://costs.infomine.com/costdatacenter/miningcostmodel.as...
[+] [-] pyuser583|6 years ago|reply
If Australia was able to double the price of coal, it would be what it was back in 2011.
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|6 years ago|reply
It's so blatantly obvious the current political leadership in Australia is in bed with the coal industry, but like all the other democracies that have been bought by mega corps - what are you going to do?
[+] [-] ogre_codes|6 years ago|reply
As bankers and insurers start to internalize this idea, the number of people willing to continue investing, insuring, or financing coal operation is going to vanish and the industry will collapse completely.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2018/12/03/plu...
[+] [-] dv_dt|6 years ago|reply
https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/12/17/us-fracking-shale-wood...
[+] [-] hodder|6 years ago|reply
Smoking has been in decline for decades yet cigarette companies have been phenomenal investments.
[+] [-] uoaei|6 years ago|reply
To a broader point, this is how real change is enacted: make it matter to enough folks, usually by means of economic pressures. I.e., make bad things cost more than good things. Although obviously ham-fisted tariffs, etc. aren't very effective for a host of reasons. You gotta be more subtle than that.
[+] [-] khawkins|6 years ago|reply
That article cites a report written by climate change activists who want coal to be banned as fast as possible. If their fantasy were a reality, market forces would achieve their goals without intervention. Naturally, they're going to argue that government intervention is necessary to speed things along.
Federal reports suggest coal will decline slightly over the next several years, but won't disappear. Some forms of renewables are competitive with coal (onshore wind, hydro, geothermal), but they cannot be used everywhere. Solar and offshore wind are still not competitive with coal, nuclear, or natural gas.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/aeo2019.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
[+] [-] ehnto|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bureaucrat|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hodder|6 years ago|reply
It can (and often does) make sense to invest in industries in terminal decline as price paid for an asset’s cash flow is the primary determinant if returns for the investor. You can buy coal stocks for 25%+ earnings yields. Even if those plants are phased out in 6 or 7 years, one can make solid returns.
Indeed I have invested in cigarette shares in the past while wishing the government would do more to stop smokers. The fact that I hold the equity doesn’t change demand for cigarettes, and only in aggregate does the investor appetite effect WACC. Someone must always hold existing shares. For every buyer there is a seller and vice versa.
Lastly I should mention that metallurgical coal as opposed to thermal coal is a necessary “evil” to smelt steel.
I’ve used this recent hate for coal investments(and weakness in NG) to take positions at high earnings yields in ARCH and HCC.
[+] [-] flgb|6 years ago|reply
Hydrogen can be used to smelt steel, and hydrogen can be produced from renewable energy.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/thyssenkrupp-tests-use-...
[+] [-] akira2501|6 years ago|reply
It's worth pointing out that only about 7% of coal is used for metallurgical purposes.
[+] [-] eigenvalue|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ogre_codes|6 years ago|reply
For Blackrock, those 25% yields you talk about don't exist. If Blackrock were to retain a significant investment in those companies, share prices would be higher and yield lower.
What makes sense for a small investor often doesn't make sense for large corporate investors.
That said, investments like what you describe have their own risks. At this point it largely depends on contracts and how quickly alternative power sources can ramp up.
You are the second person to mention tobacco, and I think it's a poor comparison. People are literally addicted to tobacco which guarantees long term demand. Even if that demand is decreasing over time, it's predictable and not severe. Coal does not share those characteristics.
[+] [-] H8crilA|6 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
I wish it died but it won't. Not yet.
[+] [-] hughpeters|6 years ago|reply
With that being said, it's nice to see that the coal industry is losing its economic strength. Hopefully other environmentally unfriendly industries follow suit soon.
[+] [-] andrewgleave|6 years ago|reply
"The future can’t be built on lay-away; we need a loan. America’s strength for much of the 20th century was inventing new financing models and exporting those banking skills to the world. We need to put that to work once again, this time for climate change. The key insight here is to extend infrastructure financing closer to the home where the infrastructure of the 21st century will sit."
[1] https://medium.com/otherlab-news/how-do-we-decarbonize-7fc2f... [2] https://medium.com/otherlab-news/solving-climate-change-with...
[+] [-] adrianmonk|6 years ago|reply
> contradiction between the company’s new activist stance and
I don't think I agree with calling BlackRock activists. An activist investor uses investment choices as leverage to apply pressure to achieve some other goal.
But BlackRock's statement seems to say that they are doing this for financial reasons. It says they're doing it because regulation (existing or potential) is making those investments riskier. From BlackRock's letter (as quoted in the article):
> Thermal coal production is significantly carbon intensive, becoming less and less economically viable, and highly exposed to regulation because of its environmental impacts. ... we do not believe that the long-term economic or investment rationale justifies continued investment in this sector
They also mention "ESG risk" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social_and_corp...) later.
So in other words, BlackRock isn't using pressure to change the world. It's responding to pressure and uncertainty. This is just market forces causing BlackRock to keep its distance purely for financial reasons.
[+] [-] samsonradu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smabie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ur-whale|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] supernova87a|6 years ago|reply
What is usually happening is that other technological or consumer behavior is already leading to the decrease in business of some industry, and the divestment push happens simultaneously (because of people's awareness) and is merely a symptom of their final decline.
Take South Africa in the 80s, or the ridiculous grape boycott of the 90s, etc. None of those symbolic acts led to actual changes happening -- those were all consumer or political changes already in flight.
People create much more effect by voting with their dollars than by symbolically calling for divestment. It usually turns out that there is someone willing to take your place as a buyer when you choose to divest. It's only through fundamental change in demand or supply that a business is affected. Stop believing in the effectiveness of the feel-good boycotts. Even Blackrock won't make a difference.
[+] [-] gersh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpflan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineedasername|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thoughtstheseus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gzu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] woodpanel|6 years ago|reply
I would also hesitate to label it a decision made out of moral reasoning. Neither BlackRock nor (the majority of) their clients want to reduce coal exposure because of that. They rather want to reduce their exposure because they expect more regulatory hurting to come for those companies.
[+] [-] 01CGAT|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] proc0|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericdykstra|6 years ago|reply
I don't really see any future where this doesn't happen. If you remove coal subsidies, or tax them, then some of the energy production currently handled by coal will change to oil, but once the oil becomes expensive enough to extract, coal mines will open back up again.
This just seems inevitable to me. Is there an angle I'm missing?
[+] [-] IndiaLends|6 years ago|reply
They also offer an Online Personal Loan [1].
[0] https://indialends.com/personal-loan
[1] https://indialends.com/credit-card
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|6 years ago|reply
Hopefully this loop is starting.
[+] [-] funnygrass|6 years ago|reply
If you invest in energy you want renewables. Purely because of the economics of it. The only exception is if you get some shady Adani deal.