American finance giant BlackRock Inc., an early industry leader in ESG investing under the leadership of risk and responsibility evangelist Larry Fink, saw a $17 billion redemption from PFZW, the giant Dutch pension fund that manages nearly $300 billion, during the first half of 2025.
The redemption — essentially a withdrawal of assets from BlackRock’s stewardship — occurred during a period in which BlackRock de-emphasized, under pressure from the Trump administration, many of its core investment strategy principles concerning climate and social governance issues.
Bloomberg, which spoke with a representative from BlackRock who confirmed the redemption, reported that “PFZW is the latest asset owner to voice discontent with US money managers that have retreated from climate alliances amid an all-out assault on net zero policies by the White House.”
Notably, ESG pressure on BlackRock and other finance giants started to coalesce before Trump won re-election. Feeling the forces — especially a public sentiment shift against “woke” investment — that helped propel the President back into office, Fink began changing the way BlackRock talked about ESG and climate sensitive investing when Joe Biden was still in office.
As the Harvard Business Review explained, “In the summer of 2023, a prominent business trend seemed to reach a dramatic and an unexpected end. Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager with more than $9 trillion under management at the time, announced that he would no longer use the term ‘ESG’ to describe the company’s approach to investing.”
[Note: By the time of his 2025 annual Chairman’s Letter to Investors, Fink had also abandoned ESG-adjacent phrases like stakeholder capitalism, sustainable investing, and climate investing.]
JUST IN: @BlackRock CEO Larry Fink *absolutely lost it* on their latest earnings call, after the Texas Permanent School Fund pulled $8.5 billion from the woke asset manager over their continued ESG activism:
— Will Hild (@WillHild) April 12, 2024
🔊 pic.twitter.com/ohTOoMKf4U
In 2024, Forbes reported that de-emphasizing ESG had become visible in the company’s treatment of shareholder proposals concerning “environmental and social issues,” which showed that “from July 2023 until June [2024], the firm backed only 4% of the 493 such proposals. In 2021, BlackRock supported 47% of such proposals by shareholder activists.”
[NOTE: Critics have long complained that the marriage of ESG concerns– environmental, social, and governance — was a rocky one, as “social” concerns like equality were largely ethical or moral, even when tied loosely to the bottom line, whereas strictly “environmental” concerns — if one takes climate science seriously — must be a primary consideration for any business planning for future success. ExxonMobil, for example, considers climate science in all its planning.]
The Trump administration, as it promised, has made numerous changes designed to hobble and/or eradicate so-called “woke” investing, including a plan to roll back a 2022 Biden-era Labor Department rule allowing ERISA-governed pension investments to consider ESG as a factor, as long as “pecuniary” goals remained the chief focus. (Biden’s first veto protected the rule from Congress’s objection.)
Trump has also pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement, deleted EV subsidies and promoted more fossil-fuel production (“drill, baby, drill”).
It can sometimes feel like the world has been upended this year. Watch Wei Li, BlackRock’s Global Chief Investment Strategist, to discover the three themes of our 2025 Midyear Global Outlook: https://t.co/d1kM9OvHs9 pic.twitter.com/gYMeXNcGIO
— BlackRock (@BlackRock) August 25, 2025
Yet as the venerable McNees law firm informs clients in a brief called ‘ESG as Risk Management and Profitability’:
“Even with the administration’s approach to these policies, many investors and companies continue to work within ESG frameworks, recognizing that ESG is increasingly viewed through the lens of risk management, strategic opportunity and profitability. For example, investors continue to demand increased transparency and reporting to evaluate risks related to climate change, environmental issues, geopolitical uncertainty, trade wars and other global risk factors.”
PFZW, the Netherlands pension fund, is among those investors making the demand described above by McNees — and reportedly determining that a BlackRock in alleged retreat from investing principles that accurately rank climate considerations may not be adequately evaluating risks.
This ESG advocacy position holds that ESG investing creates higher long-term returns for investors because, as CNBC summarizes, “companies that adopt such practices are poised to be more resilient, and therefore more successful, than peers.”
Political winds are variable and blow in unpredictable patterns, this theory contends, separating these from actual winds — unaffected by opinion, optics, or political influence — which can be harnessed as an energy source.
And while “anti-woke” investing is being pushed from Republican leadership and having its moment, a Morgan Stanley study from 2024 — cited by CNBC — found more than 80% of individual investors in the U.S. remain interested in sustainable investing.
Even after Fink opted against including ESG terminology in future BlackRock communications, the firm continued to anticipate possible erosion of its business due to the changing political environment surrounding DEI and environmental factors.
Enumerating risk factors in its 2024 10-K filing with the SEC, BlackRock conceded that “matters subject to scrutiny, such as ESG, may be viewed differently by various stakeholders and adversely impact BlackRock’s reputation and business, including through redemptions or terminations by clients, and legal and governmental action and scrutiny.”
That assertion appeared to consider redemptions by those parties who assessed BlackRock’s investment strategy as being unnecessarily yoked to ESG principles — possibly to the detriment of profitability. The PFZW redemption tells the other side of the story: that capitulation — real or merely perceived — to pressures demanding a rollback of environmental commitments is also a danger.
Eluding potential legal repercussions and criticism from Trump by downplaying or neglecting ESG may please the administration, but it cannot please investors who believe such considerations are critical aspects of both responsibility and profitability.
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