Can capitalism save us from the climate crisis? In 2020 it seemed like the answer was “possibly.” That year, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink shook up the investment world in his annual letter to companies, in which he made climate change a major focus. In the letter, Fink wrote that “climate risk is investment risk” and that the world’s largest asset manager would “place sustainability at the center of [its] investment approach.”
For several years, Fink had been raising the profile of environmental, social and governance, or ESG, investing. It’s a wonky term with a simple premise: Companies that manage the risks and opportunities posed by societal issues, like climate change, will perform better, especially in the long term. For a moment it seemed Wall Street could be part of the solution to the climate crisis, driving companies to decarbonize — if not to save the planet, to protect their own bottom lines.
But a fierce backlash followed. Conservative think tanks and legislators funded by the oil and gas industry accused BlackRock and others of practicing “woke capitalism.” Today, 21 states have passed anti-ESG legislation and the phrase has been scrubbed from corporate messaging. Even Larry Fink won’t say it anymore.
In this season of “How We Survive,” we follow the money — from a gathering of religious investors in New York City to a yacht in the Port of Houston — to trace how climate-conscious investing (the E in ESG), evolved from a small corner of the market to a mainstream strategy to a bogeyman of the right. We uncover the ways climate-conscious investing lives on today and ask: Can we invest our way out of the climate crisis?
Correction (April 3, 2025): A previous version of this story misstated the number of states that have passed anti-ESG legislation.
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