BlackRock BS: Voted For 99% Of Directors In Energy, Auto, Utility,Less Than 10% Of Climate Plans
BlackRock and Vanguard voted for nearly all (99%) U.S. company-proposed directors across the energy, utility, banking, and automotive sectors reviewed in this report. BlackRock’s 2020 votes come just months after CEO Larry Fink declared that BlackRock would put climate change at the center of its investment strategy.
BlackRock and Vanguard not only voted with management more often than most of their asset manager peers— they were just as likely to support management at utilities that had not made a net-zero commitment as at those that had made one prior to their annual meeting.
BlackRock and Vanguard voted overwhelmingly against the climate-critical resolutions at S&P 500 companies reviewed in this report, with BlackRock supporting just three of the 36, and Vanguard only four. At least 15 of these critical climate votes would have received majority support of voting shareholders if these two largest asset managers had voted in favor of them. These included proposals that would have held JPMorgan Chase’s board accountable for its role as the world’s largest fossil fuel financier and bring much-needed transparency to the lobbying efforts of Duke Energy, one of the largest and highest-emitting electric utilities in the U.S.
Despite joining Climate Action 100+ in early 2020, BlackRock voted against 10 of the 12 shareholder proposals flagged by the coalition, undermining the largest global investor efforts for accountability and transparency in the energy, utility, industrials and automotive sectors.
EDIT
https://www.majorityaction.us/asset-manager-report-2020
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink eloquently talks the talk about fighting climate change, but does his company walk the walk? A recent report by fund tracker Morningstar on climate change related shareholder proposals seems to indicate it doesn’t.
EDIT
To gain BlackRock’s support, she says, climate-related proposals should be “material,” and “urgent,” to the company’s prospects. The content of some rejected proposals, Boss adds, can “be excessively binding in terms of prescriptive nature.” That rejected proposals are excessively binding is a surprising argument, given the fact that shareholder proposals in the U.S. are technically non-binding, and can’t be legally enforced. They are purely a mechanism to express to executives the direction in which shareholders want the company to go. Support conveys a powerful message, but not an absolute one.
“Climate change is such an urgent risk to financial stability, that it really has to be addressed with all of the strategies available to investors,” says Jackie Cook, Morningstar’s Head of Proxy Voting and Investor Stewardship Research. “Proxy voting is really a very obvious and powerful strategy.”
While Cook says BlackRock’s voting against climate-risk denying directors is powerful, she adds that “they didn’t invoke that strategy in enough cases for it to have been powerful enough to move the dial on these issues.” According to BlackRock, although it voted against a significant 5,100 directors in 2020, only 55 of those no votes were “for insufficient progress on climate disclosures.” Worse, corporate governance advocacy group Majority Action found in a review of the 2020’s director votes at 56 major oil, electric utility, financial services, and automotive companies in the S&P 500 that BlackRock—and Vanguard—supported 99% of them.
EDIT
https://www.barrons.com/articles/blackrock-supports-fewer-shareholder-requests-for-climate-risk-disclosures-51603024200
