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Texas has removed BlackRock from a blacklist of companies it barred from receiving the state’s investment funds, three years after targeting the asset manager for its environmental policies.
The decision by the state’s comptroller, Glenn Hegar, will allow Texas pension and investment funds with about $300bn in assets to buy BlackRock shares and invest in its funds. State-run funds are also now permitted to turn to the New York-based group for financial advice and risk management guidance.
BlackRock earlier this year dropped out of the UN-sponsored climate coalition known as the Net Zero Asset Managers. That followed its move to step back from the Climate Action 100+ group in 2024.
Tuesday’s announcement amounts to a victory for Texas lawmakers and the oil and gas industry, which have sought to counter efforts by asset managers to mitigate climate change through investment allocations.
Hegar said: “This is a meaningful victory and validates the leadership Texas has shown on this issue, which has seen a monumental shift in the way companies, governments and individual Americans view the energy sector.”
BlackRock said it appreciated the comptroller’s “resolution of this matter” and that the more than $400bn its clients had invested in the state “support the continued growth of the Texas economy”.
The asset manager has come under fire from Republican-voting states, with some passing laws that have barred or limited how states dole out work or invest with companies with certain environmental, social and governance policies.
The company is locked in a legal battle with the Texas attorney-general, who has alleged BlackRock and some of its biggest rivals illegally conspired to manipulate energy markets as part of their green energy policies. BlackRock this week said the lawsuit “makes no sense, factually or legally”.
BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink was once a vocal supporter of corporate action on the environment, using his 2020 letter to chief executives to warn “climate risk is investment risk”.
“Every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change,” he said at the time, detailing “a number of initiatives to place sustainability at the centre of our investment approach”.
But in the years that followed, BlackRock became a target of conservative policymakers, who sought to limit how the $11.6tn asset manager used its heft in markets to influence corporate behaviour.
Hegar in 2022 added BlackRock and a handful of other financial services firms including BNP Paribas and UBS to the Texas blacklist, which aimed to influence how a $200bn teachers pension fund and a more than $40bn government employee retirement system invested.
BlackRock has been working to repair relationships with those clients, distancing itself from the ESG movement. Fink himself has said he had stopped using the term “because it has been entirely weaponised”.
Hegar on Tuesday said: “We never set out to punish any of these firms, and the hope was always that any firm we included on the list would eventually take steps to ensure they were removed.”
He added BlackRock’s decision to limit its support for activist investors seeking to minimise usage of fossil fuels showed a “real commitment to overall policy changes and a desire to act as a trusted partner”.
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