"Citing Climate Change, BlackRock Will Start Moving Away from Fossil Fuels", 16 January 2020

In the past few months, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Mutual, and the Hartford Financial Services Group, Inc., have all put forth new climate policies, and the European Investment Bank—the largest international public bank in the world—announced that it would stop lending to fossil-fuel projects altogether... BlackRock’s actual policy changes... [don't] directly address BlackRock’s main business, which is passive index funds. The company has previously maintained that it can’t do anything about the contents of those indexes... BlackRock’s announcement suggests that this position is changing... [BlackRock could] persuade Standard & Poor’s and other index makers to produce “sustainable” versions of their main products—at which point, if BlackRock began nudging its biggest customers into those investments, the shift of money would be far greater...  “I... see this as the beginning of the end for the fossil-fuel system,” Kingsmill Bond, an analyst who used to work at Citibank and Deutsche Bank, and is now with the London-based Carbon Tracker Initiative, told me. “Who, now, will want to hold the stranded assets of the fossil era?”