BlackRock CEO Calls Out Big Oil For Selling Off Polluting Assets To Private Companies

On Monday, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink issued a sharp rebuke to oil companies for selling off their most polluting assets to private companies, obscuring insight into how much they may be polluting.

Speaking at a conference on the sidelines of the COP26 conference on climate change in Glasgow, Scotland, Fink praised publicly listed companies for increasing their reporting on carbon emissions, but he rebuked those that he said sell their pollutant assets to private investors.

“We can’t just ask public companies to move forward without the rest of society," Fink told CNBC.

"We’re seeing that more hydrocarbons have been sold to private companies in the last few years than almost any time ever. That doesn’t change the world at all. It actually makes it, the world even worse," he continued.

Fink said that these activities amount to “greenwashing” by companies, a term applied to marketing spin that makes deceptive or exaggerated environmental claims. However, he insisted that the energy transition to a carbon-free future should be “radically rethought.”

The reason, Fink argues, is because the world is still too dependent on oil and gas for its energy needs even if the priority should be to usher in a decarbonized future. Internationally, he added that the continued dependence of developing countries on dirty energy sources should be taken into account as they are encouraged to set greener energy goals like industrialized nations have.

Fink has frequently and publicly urged the private sector to do more to arrest the progress of climate change. Fink’s BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, will play its part in achieving an objective of net zero emissions by the year 2050.

However, BlackRock has been accused of not always matching its rhetoric with its actions. The company has been previously reported to have supported only 13% of green-oriented resolutions last year, down from 20% in 2019. It also continues to hold shares in large oil companies like ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil.

A spokesperson for BlackRock shared BlackRock Investment Stewardship's (BIS)'s own report summarizing voting by its shareholders between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021, and it showed that BIS supported 64% of environmental shareholder proposals in its most recent proxy season.