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A small group of “super investors” composed of asset managers and powerful investment firms – is quietly fuelling the global oil industry’s retreat from climate targets, according to a new report by the Centre for Climate Crime and Climate Justice at Queen Mary University of London, shared exclusively with Byline Times.
The report, Toxic Investors: The Dirty Dozen’s insatiable drive for oil and gas profits, reveals that BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, the so-called “Big Three” asset managers, have dramatically increased their shareholdings in the world’s 12 largest publicly listed oil and gas companies, dubbed the “Dirty Dozen” by the report.
Collectively, these three investment firms now own more than 18% of the total shares of these companies, a 30% increase on their holdings at the time of the Paris Agreement of 2015.
Ownership of fossil fuel companies is increasingly concentrated in the hands of just 25 companies, according to the report.
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Over the past three years major US oil companies Exxon Mobil, Chevron and Conoco Phillips have increased their oil production.
In 2024 BP scrapped its target for a reduction in oil production and Shell downgraded its climate targets, halving its plans for reducing oil output from 2% to 1% a year.
“The world’s biggest oil and gas companies have been retreating from their climate commitments and are planning to increase fossil fuel production,” said co-author of the report Bill Spence, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Queen Mary university of London. (QMUL)
“They’re doing this in the service of their largest shareholders — firms that most people have never heard of, but which wield enormous power behind the scenes.”
The report uses original analysis of Capital IQ shareholder data to track how ownership has shifted since 2015. It shows that the number of investors required to form a controlling stake, i.e. more than 50% in these companies has dropped from 37 to just 30 on average.
Citing lawsuits by Republican states against BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, over claims that they promote “a destructive, politicised environmental agenda”, the report argues that the repeal of climate targets by big oil companies and the increased investment by these firms should be “seen in the context of an international, largescale pushback against attempts to limit fossil fuel exploitation and profits”.
Professor of Climate Justice at QMUL, David Whyte, one of the report’s co-authors, said “political leaders are currently showing unprecedented support for Big Oil, and appear to be weakening the transition to a low carbon economy. This evidence shows that the financial elite has at the same time hugely extended its capacity to profit from oil in the decade since the Paris Agreement. If we really want to ‘drain the swamp’, we need to start with the big asset managers who are able to keep getting richer and richer by increasing fossil fuel production”.
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He added that “this story also tells us that international law is failing the planet. As political leaders line up to condemn ‘woke’ policies, it is clear that our climate policies have had no impact on the rate of oil and gas production, or the rate of profit accruing to shareholders.”
A BlackRock spokesperson said: “Our only agenda is maximizing returns for our clients, consistent with their choices. The money we manage belongs to our clients and we invest at their direction. Over the last 5 years, client assets in BlackRock’s sustainable strategies have grown by approximately 850 percent, and in 2024 we crossed $1 trillion invested in sustainable strategies on behalf of clients. Anchored in our fiduciary duty to clients, BlackRock’s approach to sustainability aligns with our broader firmwide investment approach: we provide choice to our clients, we seek the best risk-adjusted returns within the mandates clients give us, and we underpin our work with research, data, and analytics.”
The spokesperson added “as a minority investor, BlackRock cannot and does not dictate a company’s strategy or its implementation. That is the responsibility of a company’s management and its board.”
In September 2024 Bloomberg reported that BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street had significantly cut their support for environmental shareholder proposals compared to one year prior, with BlackRock supporting four per cent of proposals between June 2023 and June 2024, compared to seven per cent the year before.
The UK Government has engaged closely with BlackRock. In a letter to company executive Anthony Manchester