It was a bad day for BlackRock.

The Texas Permanent School Fund, an endowment fund established in 1845 to help boost public education, pulled its $8.5 billion investment from the asset-management giant BlackRock on Tuesday, saying its internal governance policies are harmful to the state’s energy industry.

Aaron Kinsey, chairman of the State Board of Education, issued a formal statement saying the New York company that bills itself as “one of the world’s preeminent asset management firms” is among the leaders in the movement known as “environmental, social and governance,” or ESG, and therefore under state law is ineligible for investments by Texas governmental entities.

“BlackRock’s dominant and persistent leadership in the ESG movement immeasurably damages our state’s oil and gas economy and the very companies that generate revenues for our PSF,” Kinsey wrote. “Texas and the PSF have worked hard to grow this fund to build Texas’ schools. BlackRock’s destructive approach toward the energy companies that this state and our world depend on is incompatible with our fiduciary duties to Texans.”

As the “environmental” component of ESG pushes climate cult pseudoscience, thereby hurting the fossil fuel industry that is a mainstay of the Texas economy.

Yet, BlackRock persists.

BlackRock, though, argues that it is helping millions of Texans and emphasized its investment in the state.

“On behalf of our clients, we’ve invested more than $300 billion in Texas-based companies, infrastructure and municipalities, including $125 billion invested in the energy sector, including $550 million [in] a joint venture with Occidental,” a spokesperson said in a statement provided to the Washington Examiner. “We recently hosted an energy summit in Houston designed to explore how to strengthen Texas’ power grid.”

The actual numbers argue otherwise:

The fossil fuel industry contributed about $26 billion in state and local taxes in 2023 — about $1.8 billion of which went into the fund.

That means fossil fuel money accounts for about 80 percent of the $2.2 billion annual budget of K-12 schools. (The total amount in the fund is about $53 billion, which is invested with thir-party asset managers like BlackRock.)

As a reminder, ESG is a financial concept that centers on imposing progressive priorities related to environment and social change through investment and divestment. The pushback against the policies and assumptions that underline EGS has damaged its brand so much that marketers recently decided to rebrand the whole concept as “Responsible Business.”

It looks like the administrators of Texas Permanent School Fund were the ones actually to practice “responsible business”.

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