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Written by F. William Engdahl. Originally published by GlobalResearch
Most people are bewildered by what is a global energy crisis, with prices for oil, gas and coal simultaneously soaring and even forcing closure of major industrial plants such as chemicals or aluminum or steel. The Biden Administration and EU have insisted that all is because of Putin and Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. This is not the case. The energy crisis is a long-planned strategy of western corporate and political circles to dismantle industrial economies in the name of a dystopian Green Agenda. That has its roots in the period years well before February 2022, when Russia launched its military action in Ukraine.
Blackrock pushes ESG
In January, 2020 on the eve of the economically and socially devastating covid lockdowns, the CEO of the world’s largest investment fund, Larry Fink of Blackrock, issued a letter to Wall Street colleagues and corporate CEOs on the future of investment flows. In the document, modestly titled “A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance”, Fink, who manages the world’s largest investment fund with some $7 trillion then under management, announced a radical departure for corporate investment. Money would “go green.” In his closely-followed 2020 letter Fink declared,
“In the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant re-allocation of capital…Climate risk is investment risk.” Further he stated, “Every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change.” [i]
In a separate letter to Blackrock investor clients, Fink delivered the new agenda for capital investing. He declared that Blackrock will exit certain high-carbon investments such as coal, the largest source of electricity for the USA and many other countries. He added that Blackrock would screen new investment in oil, gas and coal to determine their adherence to the UN Agenda 2030 “sustainability.”
Fink made clear the world’s largest fund would begin to disinvest in oil, gas and coal. “Over time,” Fink wrote, “companies and governments that do not respond to stakeholders and address sustainability risks will encounter growing skepticism from the markets, and in turn, a higher cost of capital.” He added that, “Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects… we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.” [ii]
From that point on the so-called ESG investing, penalizing CO2 emitting companies like ExxonMobil, has become all the fashion among hedge funds and Wall Street banks and investment funds including State Street and Vanguard. Such is the power of Blackrock. Fink was also able to get four new board members in ExxonMobil committed to end the company’s oil and gas business.
Image is by Michael Buholzer / Copyright WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM/swiss-image.ch
The January 2020 Fink letter was a declaration of war by big finance against the conventional energy industry. BlackRock was a founding member of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (the TCFD) and is a signatory of the UN PRI— Principles for Responsible Investing, a UN-supported network of investors pushing zero carbon investing using the highly-corrupt ESG criteria—Environmental, Social and Governance factors into investment decisions. There is no objective control over fake data for a company’s ESG. As well Blackrock signed the Vatican’s 2019 statement advocating carbon pricing regimes. BlackRock in 2020 also joined Climate Action 100, a coalition of almost 400 investment managers managing US$40 trillion.
With that fateful January 2020 CEO letter, Larry Fink set in motion a colossal disinvestment in the trillion-dollar global oil and gas sector. Notably, that same year BlackRock’s Fink was named to the Board of Trustees of Klaus Schwab’s dystopian World Economic Forum, the corporate and political nexus of the Zero Carbon UN Agenda 2030. In June 2019, the World Economic Forum and the United Nations signed a strategic partnership framework to accelerate the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. WEF has a Strategic Intelligence platform which includes Agenda 2030’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
In his 2021 CEO letter, Fink doubled down on the attack on oil, gas and coal. “Given how central the energy transition will be to every company’s growth prospects, we are asking companies to disclose a plan for how their business model will be compatible with a net zero economy,” Fink wrote. Another BlackRock officer told a recent energy conference, “where BlackRock goes, others will follow.” [iii]
In just two years, by 2022 an estimated $1 trillion has exited investment in oil and gas exploration and development globally. Oil extraction is an expensive business and cut-off of external investment by BlackRock and other Wall Street investors spells the slow death of the industry.
Biden—A BlackRock President?
Early in his then-lackluster Presidential bid, Biden had a closed door meeting in late 2019 with Fink who reportedly told the candidate that, “I’m here to help.” After his fateful meeting with BlackRock’s Fink, candidate Biden announced, “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels…” In December 2020, even before Biden was inaugurated in January 2021, he named BlackRock Global Head of Sustainable Investing, Brian Deese, to be Assistant to the President and Director of the National Economic Council. Here, Deese, who played a key role for Obama in drafting the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, has quietly shaped the Biden war on energy.
This has been catastrophic for the oil and gas industry. Fink’s man Deese was active in giving the new President Biden a list of anti-oil measures to sign by Executive Order beginning day one in January 2021. That included closing the huge Keystone XL oil pipeline that would bring 830,000 barrels per day from Canada as far as Texas refineries, and halting any new leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Biden also rejoined the Paris Climate Accord that Deese had negotiated for Obama in 2015 and Trump cancelled.
The same day, Biden set in motion a change of the so-called “Social Cost of Carbon” that imposes a punitive $51 a ton of CO2 on the oil and gas industry. That one move, established under purely executive-branch authority without the consent of Congress, is dealing a devastating cost to investment in oil and gas in the US, a country only two years before that was the world’s largest oil producer.[iv]
Killing refinery capacity
Even worse, Biden’s aggressive environmental rules and BlackRock ESG investing mandates are killing the US refinery capacity. Without refineries it doesn’t matter how many barrels of oil you take from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. In the first two years of Biden’s Presidency the US has shut down some 1 million barrels a day of gasoline and diesel refining capacity, some due to covid demand collapse, the fastest decline in US history. The shutdowns are permanent. In 2023 an added 1.7 million bpd of capacity is set to close as a result of BlackRock and Wall Street ESG disinvesting and Biden regulations. [v]
Citing the heavy Wall Street disinvestment in oil and the Biden anti-oil policies, the CEO of Chevron in June 2022 declared that he doesn’t believe the US will ever build another new refinery.[vi]
Larry Fink, Board member of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, is joined by the EU whose President of the EU Commission, the notoriously corrupt Ursula von der Leyen left the WEF Board in 2019 to become EU Commission head. Her first major act in Brussels was to push through the EU Zero Carbon Fit for 55 agenda. That has imposed major carbon taxes and other constraints on oil, gas and coal in the EU well before the February 2022 Russian actions in Ukraine. The combined impact of the Fink fraudulent ESG agenda in the Biden administration and the EU Zero Carbon madness is creating the worst energy and inflation crisis in history.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
Notes
[i] Larry Fink, A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance, Letter to CEOs, January, 2020, https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/2020-blackrock-client-letter
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Tsvetana Paraskova, Why Are Investors Turning Their Backs On Fossil Fuel Projects?, OilPrice.com,
March 11, 2021, https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Why-Are-Investors-Turning-Their-Backs-On-Fossil-Fuel-Projects.html
[iv] Joseph Toomey, Energy Inflation Was by Design, September, 2022, https://assets.realclear.com/files/2022/10/2058_energyinflationwasbydesign.pdf
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Fox Business, Chevron CEO says there may never be another oil refinery built in the US, June 3. 2022, https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/chevron-ceo-oil-refinery-built-u-s
Call blackrock a trust and invoke antitrust no such thing as too big to jail
apart from being evil, these people have lost their fucking minds, money makes people crazy.
You cant power the worlds toughest tanks and fire power with fake currency, try gold + fossil power!
Russia should sanction BlackRock and it’s board.
How? Blackrock owns 80% of the world. I wonder if China is not deep into Blackrock shit, too. Russia might have the support of almost all reasonable people who know what happens on this wrecked planet but Blackrock owns our food, shelter, states and all those in power. I think Blackrock is behind WEF.
Something very bad is happening.
Corporate persona non gratis in Ukraine would be a start.
“The American state is just a shell for a conglomerate of huge corporations that rule the country and try to dominate the world,” Patrushev said.
Maybe you guys should get a copy of The Nameless War by Archibald Ramsay and have read of that, it may help you to understand who has already total influence of the western governments, I could go on but I won’t because what I want to say could be taken in the wrong way. Anybody who tries to tell the truth will be lambasted for it.
Actually, John, it’s far more involved than that and goes back practically two thousand years. Don’t forget that Londinium was founded by the Roman Empire, basically for ‘offshoring’ their money supply. The Pope almost a thousand years after that instructed his Norse mercenaries to reconquer the British Isles to recover it, about the same time they were establishing the Kingdom of Sicily under his auspices and fighting the Byzantine (Eastern Orthodox) Empire – which they are still doing today. Don’t forget the Rothschilds are know as the Vatican’s bankers. Wheels within wheels…..
And Black Rock never would have come into existence had it not been for the help of The “Dick” Cheney and his a$$ puppet G.W. Bush – https://wikispooks.com/wiki/9-11…
And if the U.$. Federal Reserve manages to survive Thursday’s deadline from the BIS https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/yellen-warns-us-will-hit-debt-limit-next-thursday-will-take-extraordinary-measures-avoid?… Then we know that the PRC, India, Iran and perhaps even Russia were instrumental in creating a new debt ceiling with their collective contribution with their biggest loan EVER in keeping the “Franken$tein”s M0n$ter ALIVE ironically at their collective expense!?….
Because they ALL must be afraid of the little terrorist and what he might be responsible for doing if he finally die$ on the operating table!… One can only now imagine in hindsight how many in this World would have been spared especially Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine had they all demanded an international investigation of THIS https://www.ae911truth.org/instead of allowing China and India to maintain their silence https://www.911research.wtc7.net/wtc/groundzero/cleanup.html in exchange for America’s manufacturing and looted energy from those 5 countries just mentioned?!…
They have to stop the neocons way of life. Too painful, better throw the world in total war .
Destroy the coven of Satanic pedovore filth when the demons congregate in the Davos sewer. The tools for the exorcism lie in the hands of Mother Russia, the last Christian nation on an ever darkening Earth. The multi headed beast must be destroyed.
Z
They are resizing the economy for less people due to the bioweapon injection.
Destroy the coven of Satanic pedovore filth when the demons congregate in the Davos sewer. The tools for the exorcism lie in the hands of Mother Russia, the last Christian nation on an ever darkening Earth. The multi headed beast must be destroyed.
“Renewables” didn’t do squat here. Stop talking rubbish. Europe is and will remain heavily reliant on fossil energy for years to come, and it will have to remain cheap, otherwise the European economy will crash.
What they’ve accomplished last year is buying themselves some time, largely borrowing from the future and sacrificing part of the citizenry. It’s not gonna end well unless they come to their senses.
EU is fucked big time, just look how much the industry suffers. There is no substitute for oil and gas. The “renewables” us a FTX style scam like the electric car etc.
No country should allow their infrastructure ie: Power, water, roads, rail etc, to be in private or foreign hands.
These phoney rich bastards control nothing insomuch as real world commodotys,they are not in any position to change anything as it will show once the us petrol dolla is ditched for freedom in the real world,that being said blackrock are nothing burger parasite wannabe artists of no real value (period)