{"id":7084,"date":"2023-08-09T05:20:11","date_gmt":"2023-08-08T17:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=7084"},"modified":"2023-08-09T05:20:11","modified_gmt":"2023-08-08T17:20:11","slug":"government-and-blackrock-aiming-at-100-clean-energy-what-is-blackrock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=7084","title":{"rendered":"Government and BlackRock aiming at 100% clean energy: What is BlackRock?"},"content":{"rendered":"

BlackRock is setting up\u00a0a $2 billion fund with the government<\/a>\u00a0to invest in green energy. But what is BlackRock?<\/p>\n

The Big Apple-headquartered firm is the world’s largest asset manager and one of the biggest investors in fossil fuels globally, but\u00a0is also blacklisted<\/a>\u00a0in Texas for being too ‘woke’.<\/p>\n

Its chief executive and billionaire co-founder Larry Fink\u00a0today praised New Zealand<\/a>\u00a0for being a leader “in decarbonisation globally”,\u00a0but recently faced calls<\/a>\u00a0by climate activists to step down over accusations of ‘green-washing’.<\/p>\n

His position, and that of his firm, is the very definition of the cleft stick.<\/p>\n

As the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/i>reported seven months ago<\/a>: “Right-wing officials are attacking BlackRock for overstepping. Those on the left say the world’s biggest asset manager is not doing enough”.<\/p>\n

The firm makes a very large target.<\/p>\n

With $NZ15 trillion (trillion, not billion) in assets under management, it has been expanding into the Asia-Pacific recently, but has had a heck of a year at home Stateside.<\/p>\n

\"Climate<\/p>\n

Climate activists in Munich demonstrating against US wealth manager BlackRock and calling for debt relief for poorer countries during the G7 summit, on 28 June 2022.\u00a0<\/span>Photo:\u00a0AFP\/ Daniel Karmann<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

“The attacks have been unrelenting,” the\u00a0Washington Post<\/i>\u00a0reported in May<\/a>, about an onslaught from the right, in this case.<\/p>\n

“BlackRock executives have begun waving away the climate targets they once committed to helping the world meet as irrelevant to the current moment,” the paper said.<\/p>\n

Republican state politicians had pulled more than $6b out in protest that the funds BlackRock runs are going too far with the environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) model Fink has championed – and still does, though\u00a0in June he said<\/a>\u00a0he had stopped using the term “ESG” itself because it had become too politicised. Other US investors, though, put in more than $200b at the firm.<\/p>\n

ESG encompasses<\/a>\u00a0ethically responsible business practices, from curbing carbon emissions to cracking down on workplace discrimination. Investments in such funds skyrocketed from 2019 to 2021, then\u00a0plummeted worldwide<\/a>\u00a0last year, with Americans so leery the dropoff amounted to an actual 20 percent dropoff in the size of the combined US ESG funds, to $300b.<\/p>\n

Governments are increasingly weighing in to back them, or set standards over them, so that a mere green-wash will not do.<\/p>\n

RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BlackRock is setting up\u00a0a $2 billion fund with the government\u00a0to invest in green energy. But what is BlackRock? The Big Apple-headquartered firm is the world’s largest asset manager and one of the biggest investors in fossil fuels globally, but\u00a0is also blacklisted\u00a0in Texas for being too ‘woke’. Its chief executive and billionaire co-founder Larry Fink\u00a0today praised […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":7085,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7084"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7084\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7086,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7084\/revisions\/7086"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}