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Green Central Banking: The administration of US president Donald Trump has announced that it plans to overturn a rule that allows pension funds to consider ESG factors when making investment decisions and exercising shareholder voting rights.
MSN/Reuters: Texas removed BlackRock from a list of companies seen as boycotting the energy industry, a step the New York asset manager won only with steep cuts to its climate ambitions.
MSN/Reuters: Citigroup said it was rolling back a 2018 policy that placed restrictions on providing banking services to retail clients selling firearms, citing recent regulatory developments.
Yahoo Finance: The venture capital model honed and perfected in Silicon Valley is proving a bad fit for the clean tech industry, and investors should instead accept that they’ll need to commit much bigger sums of money for longer periods of time.
ESG Dive: The Biden administration’s Labor Department finalized the rule, “Prudence and Loyalty in Selecting Plan Investments and Exercising Shareholder Rights,” in 2022, and it has been in effect since January 2023. At the time, the agency said the rule overturned guidance from the first Trump administration which had a “chilling effect” on fiduciaries.
PR Newswire: Significant policy changes are reshaping how many companies approach sustainability, according to a new survey by The Conference Board. 80% of surveyed sustainability executives say their companies are adjusting their ESG strategies in response to the new administration.
ESG Dive: Texas Attorney General Paxton initially filed the lawsuit against the nation’s three largest asset managers in November, supported by 10 other Republican-led states. The lawsuit alleges BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street acquired “substantial” holdings in public coal companies and then pushed those companies to reduce their output.
Yahoo Finance: U.S. government support for a "baseless" case alleging asset managers conspired to reduce competition in the coal sector risks undermining its goal of energy independence, BlackRock said.
ESG News: JPMorganChase has signed a carbon dioxide removal (CDR) offtake agreement with CO280, marking a major investment in scalable, low-cost engineered carbon removal from the U.S. pulp and paper industry.
ESG Dive: Most employers intend to maintain diversity, equity and inclusion programs with either few or no changes even as the Trump administration pursues efforts to end private-sector DEI, according to the results of law firm Littler Mendelson’s latest annual employer survey published May 7.
