Eleven Republican state attorneys general, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, are suing three of the world’s biggest asset managers. Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard, Paxton’s office claims, are engaged in a “conspiracy” to “artificially constrict the market for coal through anticompetitive trade practices.” The Republicans’ case seems to hinge on the fact that these three financial firms were at one point members of Climate Action 100+ and Net-Zero Asset Managers, “investor-led” initiatives meant to align corporations behind a somewhat vague set of commitments to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
The push is part of a yearslong effort by the GOP to target environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, investment criteria. The GOP claims that these have been a vehicle for major financial institutions to push woke, green agendas through stock ownership. In this case, the attorneys general contend that the asset managers have deliberately acquired large shares in publicly traded coal companies and then used their “combined influence over the coal market” to exert anticompetitive pressure in order to simultaneously “accommodate ‘green energy’ goals” and drive up coal prices, allowing them to see “extraordinary revenue gains.”
It’s a wild claim on a few fronts. Coal usage has been steadily declining in the United States for well over a decade. From 2000 through 2010, coal accounted for an average of 48.6 percent of U.S. electricity generation. The last year it was above 40 percent was in 2011. Coal generation declined steadily—by about 10,000 megawatts per year—through 2020, per the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. As the Covid-19 pandemic set in that year, coal was fueling just 20 percent of U.S. electricity generation; this year, it provided only around 16 percent of power here. Coal production has rapidly declined over the same time period. In 2014, the U.S. produced more than one billion short tons of coal. Last year, it produced 578 million.
Those declines are due largely to the shale boom, wherein cheap methane gas was able to replace coal on the grid throughout most of the country. Those trends have been especially dramatic in Texas, which is also a leading wind producer. Last year, Texas got just 13 percent of its power from coal; 22 percent came from wind and 51 percent from gas.
The three financial firms Paxton is suing, moreover, have never given the impression of being all that committed to environmental goals: Vanguard withdrew from the Net-Zero Asset Managers alliance in 2022 and was never a member of Climate Action 100+. State Street left C100+ in February, and Blackrock transferred its membership in that initiative to a smaller international arm after the alliance announced that members would need to ramp up corporate disclosures and take some actions to actually reduce emissions.
It’s a losing battle to try to point out all the incoherence here. Anti-ESG crusaders argued that asset managers like Blackrock were “discriminating” against oil and gas companies while those same companies enjoyed record profits and as domestic oil and gas production hit record highs. If the financial sector is orchestrating a vast conspiracy to undermine the fossil fuel industry, it doesn’t seem to be going very well.
Whether any Republican elected officials actually believe that to be the case is basically irrelevant, though. As the next Trump administration prepares to take over, the GOP is presumably hoping to use the Justice Department and the many other new tools at its disposal to defend the fossil fuel industry against its supposed enemies on Wall Street, long-standing market trends, and even itself. Cases like this one are just more grist for the mill—however little sense they make.
