Divesting vs greenwashing: are BlackRock and Gates actually exiting fossil fuels?

Under Trump's presidency, accountability has never been more important.

Screenshot from divestmentdatabase.org, which reports on the success of the fossil fuel divestment movement. But who is verifying that these organizations are actually divesting?

Hundreds of organizations around the world—from NGOs to pension funds to philanthropies to private companies—have committed to divest from fossil fuels, part of a powerful political campaign that hopes to starve industry of the financing it needs to expand. As activists send a powerful message that fossil fuel income is blood money, companies like Shell have taken note, citing divestment as a potential institutional risk to investors.

Tracking this vibrant movement is divestmentdatabase.org, which Politico, Friends of the Earth, Environmental Law Review, and others cite to show that 1600 institutions, with assets exceeding $40 trillion, are moving away from fossil fuels.

However, many of the journalists, scholars and activists citing the database appear to misunderstand, and misreport, what the database is actually showing. It isn’t showing divestment. Nor is the database showing ‘data.’ It’s presenting unverified pledges to divest.

The investment giant BlackRock is listed in divestmentdatabase.org because of a statement the company made in 2020, signaling it would end “investments that present a high sustainability-related risk, such as thermal coal producers.” With trillions of dollars in assets under management, BlackRock appears to represent nearly a quarter of the value of the divestment database.

In the years after BlackRock’s announcement, however, activist groups repeatedly challenged the company, with one report calling BlackRock the “world’s largest investor in coal developers.” When I followed up with BlackRock late last year, the press office seemed surprised by questions, telling me “BlackRock doesn’t have a firm divestment policy for coal.”¹

This contradiction in the divestment database speaks to larger problems related to accountability in the fight against climate change. Following Trump’s election, many of the world’s leading corporate actors— Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and others—have backtracked on pledges they previously made on climate change. Likewise, the Bezos Earth Fund, run by multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos, has ended its funding of an accountability initiative aimed at tracking emissions, a move widely seen as designed to curry favor with Trump. These moves don’t signal a weakening of the fight against climate change as much as they expose the fragility, or bankruptcy, of climate campaigns organized around voluntary pledges—without strong accountability mechanisms.

A full audit of the hundreds of organizations in the divestment database almost certainly would show contradictions beyond BlackRock—where the database is overstating divestment or amplifying bogus claims. The risk of greenwashing is a particular concern for the more than 100 for-profit ventures that have claimed to divest, like Allstate, Allianz, AXA, AXIS Capital, Banco Santander, Lemonade Insurance, Liberty Mutual, Lloyd’s of London, MetLife, Munich Re, Prudential, and Société Générale SA. Is anyone verifying these companies are actually divesting?

Not the scorekeepers behind divestmentdatabase.org, a group named Stand.earth. The non-profit organization told me it does not independently verify that the institutions it includes in its database are actually divesting. And, as I learned reporting this story, Stand.earth, even when directly presented with evidence of a bogus divestment claim, will not remove an organization from its database.

This trust-but-do-not-verify approach means that, in places, the divestment database may be distorting public understanding of climate change or spreading misinformation, if not also breeding complacency and damaging the credibility of climate activism. Knowledge about the impacts of divestment is being built, and campaigns are being organized, around this database—with little understanding that it is based, in places, on wishful thinking.

A case study for this problem is multi-billionaire Bill Gates, who has used divestment claims to shore up his growing influence over climate policy.

In 2021, Gates announced that his philanthropic foundation had two years earlier “divested all direct investments in fossil fuels.” From this announcement, Stand.earth reports in its database that the Gates Foundation—-which currently boasts $76 billion in assets—has committed to a “full” divestment, defined as:

a binding commitment to divest (direct ownership, shares, commingled mutual funds containing shares, corporate bonds or any assets classes) from any fossil fuel company (thermal coal, oil, gas) within a set timeline.

More than five years after Gates supposedly divested, the foundation continues to hold stocks and bonds in fossil fuel giants like BP, Inpex and Chevron. The foundation also reports an $8.9 billion stake in the investment firm Berkshire Hathaway, which, in turn, has 11 percent of its portfolio invested in Chevron and Occidental Petroleum. The foundation’s investment in Berkshire—alone—may give the foundation a nearly one-billion-dollar exposure to fossil fuels.²

Snapshot of the Gates Foundation Trust’s most recent financial reporting, from 2023, showing a $122.4 million stake in Inpex, which calls itself “Japan’s largest petroleum and exploration company.”

When I approached Stand.earth last year, I showed them the Gates Foundation’s financial records and asked why the philanthropy was listed in divestmentdatabase.org. I also sent a link to an investigation I published in 2021, in the British Medical Journal, pointing out contradictions in the foundation’s divestment claims.³

At the time I wrote that piece, the divestment database was run by a different group, 350.org, which I quoted as saying: “It would be very weird for an institutional investor to announce divestment but fake it. We are happy to make the adjustment on our database if the Gates Foundation can’t meaningfully respond to requests for clarification.”

The Gates Foundation never meaningfully responded to requests for clarification. And no adjustments were ever made to the divestment database.

Stand.earth, in emails and in a phone interview, repeatedly defended the foundation’s inclusion in its database. The group minimized Gates’s stake in fossil fuels and asserted that it believed the foundation was moving purposefully toward divestment. “It’s encouraging at least to see it go the right direction,” Stand.earth told me via email.

The group’s responses, however, frequently seemed to contradict public-facing financial records. When I asked Stand.earth how they arrived at their findings—-maybe they had access to financial data that I didn’t?—the group told me it hadn’t actually examined Gates’s finances.

Stand.earth also disputed that the foundation was deriving any PR benefit from its divestment claim and dismissed concerns about greenwashing. “I don’t think they’re getting a lot of green credit for that action,” Stand.earth’s climate finance director Richard Brooks told me in an interview.

In reality, myriad news outlets—Financial Times, Reuters, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Hindu, Bloomberg and The Financial Post—have all amplified Gates’s divestment claim.⁴

Three months after I first contacted Stand.earth, Jacobin published a long investigation exposing Gates’s bogus divestment claim. The outlet’s analysis—published last month—showed that the foundation appears to be increasing its holdings in fossil fuels, not divesting. (Jacobin’s story did not mention the divestment database.)

Jacobin reached out to the Gates Foundation about its supposed divestment and, like me, received no response. (I was quoted in the article, as the author of the book, “The Bill Gates Problem.”)

As writer Alex Park wrote, Gates’s divestment claim is part of “his attempts to anoint himself a leader on climate change.” Said another way, the ‘green credit’ Gates’s divestment announcement generated has helped stand up his moral authority, and given him the social license he needs to insert himself as a leading voice on climate change. Today Gates can be found giving speeches at the World Climate Action Summit, presenting himself as a climate warrior in the New York Times, pushing U.S. taxpayers to richly subsidize his nuclear company, or meeting with government leaders around the world to formulate climate policies.

After climate activists spent decades doing the difficult and unpopular work of making people pay attention to climate change, Gates has used his wealth and celebrity—and his showy divestment claim—to bully his way into a leadership position, shaping government policy and spending. Myriad scholars and writers have sharply criticized Gates’s influence, including leading climate scientist Michael Mann, from the University of Pennsylvania. According to reporting in The New Statesman:

Gates is a classic example of a “first-time climate dude,” believes Mann. This phenomenon is “the tendency for members of a particular, privileged demographic group (primarily middle-aged, almost exclusively white men) to think they can just swoop in… and solve the great problems that others have spent decades unable to crack”. The result is a mess, “consisting of fatally bad takes and misguided framing couched in deeply condescending mansplaining.”

In truth, the ‘privileged demographic group’ that Gates belongs to might be best described as the oligarchs. The primary reason anyone cares what Gates thinks about climate change is because of his extraordinary wealth, which he has effectively used to make his voice heard.

Months after I first contacted Stand.earth, I followed up with the group, showing them Jacobin’s investigation. Now confronted with multiple accounts of Gates’s bogus divestment claim, Stand.earth finally seemed ready to take action, telling me, “The accuracy of our database is a top priority, and in light of the new information available, we are in the process of making an update to reflect that the Gates Foundation does not appear to be committed to divestment at this time.”

A month later, the “update” has taken the form of a three-word statement buried in the database, indicating that the foundation’s divestment “commitment [is] under review.” How much more review needs to be done at this point? Couldn’t we ask the same question about BlackRock’s continued inclusion in the database?

Throughout my correspondence with Stand.Earth, the group’s reflexive defense of its work telegraphed a message that the organization may be more interested in defending its own reputation, or maybe avoiding a black eye for the divestment movement, than it is thoughtfully and humbly communicating the limitations of its work.

Stand.earth disagrees, insisting that the limitations of the database are clear. Readers can judge that for themselves. Nowhere on the database’s “about” page, which offers a slim methodology, does Stand.earth make clear that the database is built on unverified pledges. Nor does the group alert users that the database is vulnerable to bogus divestment claims.

While the database is technically called the “Global Fossil Fuels Divestment Commitments Database”—my emphasis added—Stand.earth’s press releases and social media posts at times present the database as showing actual divestment, trumpeting that “over $40 trillion has been divested.” News outlets, academic researchers, think tanks, and activists also present the database as showing actual divestment—rarely, if ever, explaining these are unverified pledges to divest.

Urgewald, a climate activist group and a partner to Stand.earth, defended how divestmentdatabase.org presents information. Urgewald aggressively campaigns against BlackRock’s massive, ongoing coal investments, but the group told me that it doesn’t see its accountability work as being in conflict with Stand.earth’s decision to include BlackRock in divestmentdatabase.org.

“Stand.Earth simply shows who has made a commitment,” the organization told me via email. “They show how much money is moving, in a glass half-full approach. That can incentivize financial institutions to follow, to be ambitious without being singled out as too progressive.”

Creating peer pressure, offering political cover, and building momentum around divestment makes sense as a political strategy, but if doing so means amplifying and legitimizing bogus claims to inflate the impact of divestment, doesn’t this also threaten the credibility of the divestment movement? Given the existential threats posed by climate change, now magnified with Trump’s presidency, and given how important divestment is to reducing emissions, is there a point at which activists stop giving oligarchs and corporate actors the benefit of the doubt? At what point is the glass “half-full,” and at what point is it a complete mirage?

Stand.earth told me it has plans to explore potential accountability measures in 2025 to address some of the issues my reporting raised, but the group was vague on its ambitions. Reorganizing divestment scorekeeping away from aspirational pledges and wishful thinking will dramatically reduce the stated impacts of divestment—but it has to be done. Climate change is it too important of an issue to allow bad actors to muddy the waters and distort the truth.

1. The BlackRock spokesperson later added, “The communication in 2020 pertained to active portfolios only where we have discretion—in those portfolios we exited positions in companies that derived more than 25% of their revenue from thermal coal. We are a fiduciary to our clients and none of the money BlackRock manages is our own—it belon[g]s to our clients and we manage it according to their goals and the mandates they give us. Some passive index fund we offer may still have exposure to coal and our clients may choose those funds if it aligns with their investment objectives.”

BlackRock’s statement seems at odds with how Stand.earth presents the company—as having made a “binding commitment to divest (direct ownership, shares, commingled mutual funds containing shares, corporate bonds or any assets classes) from any thermal coal companies.”

2. The Gates Foundation endowment’s most recent financial filings show $8.9 billion invested in Berkshire Hathway. According to CNBC’s “Berkshire Hathaway Portfolio Tracker,” the investment firm has 6.8% of its portfolio invested in Chevron and 4.5% of its portfolio in Occidental Petroleum Corp. This 11.3% exposure to fossil fuels, applied to Gates’s $8.9 billion stake in Berkshire— $8.9 billion x 11.3% —shows $1 billion in exposure to fossil fuels. (The foundation has additional exposure to fossil fuels through its stocks and bonds in companies like Inpex.)

3. An investigation I wrote for The Nation in 2021 offers more details on Gates’s climate contradictions.

4. At one point, Stand.earth’s repeated defense of Gates seemed so at odds with other public records and published reporting that it occured me the group might be funded by Gates. The group said no. When I asked who Stand.earth’s funders were, I learned that several of the organization’s philanthropic sponsors appear in the divestment database. How can Stand.earth possibly hold its own funders accountable for their divestment commitments? How does it manage this financial conflict of interest? Stand.earth told me it thought questions about financial conflicts were “inappropriate” because it is a “climate advocacy organization and an NGO” that is independent of its sponsors.