Texas Plans to Punish Companies That Move Away From Fossil Fuels

Financial firms, watch out. Texas is coming for you if you are mean to fossil fuel companies.

The state comptroller in Texas is starting to double down on demands that financial companies tell the state more about their climate policies, in accordance with a law passed last June that forbids the state from doing business with corporations that have climate policies. Hegar sent initial inquiries to 19 firms last month.

Hegar said in a statement about the letters he sent last month that some of the companies hold investments in oil and gas. I am glad you are on this important case.

The law gives the state comptroller broad discretion to assemble a list of companies and allows the comptroller to decide which companies to actually contact. If these companies don't respond within 61 days, it will result in the presumption that your company is boycotting energy companies.

Hegar waxes on about the conflict in Ukraine and increasing energy prices resulting from artificial efforts to curb domestic energy production, but the root of this policy began way before the invasion. The law prohibiting the state from doing business with entities that support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, or BDS movement for Palestine was first proposed in February 2021. Dan Patrick said last February that energy companies were being treated like the state of Israel in the oil and gas industry.

This legislation fits right in with a larger set of moves from the right to co-opt the language of social justice movements to defend dirty energy from the big bad banks. In 2020, when the oil and gas industry was in a panic, Republican members of Congress sent a letter to the Trump administration asking it to stop financial institutions from discriminating against America's energy sector.

Natural gas producers and dairy farmers have recently publicly complained about being canceled, and it looks like the funders behind Big Oil are pretty jazzed about that.

Billions of dollars of fossil fuel projects are still funded by big banks even though they promise to be green. Some banks seem to be okay with reassuring state regulators about their private commitments to fossil fuels. Emails from Texas's top climate-denying oil and gas regulator published in March suggest that executives from BlackRock reassured him of their commitment to the industry during a January meeting. Climate resolutions put before shareholders at Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs all failed this week. I don't know if Texas' comptroller has all that much to worry about.