Business
EXCLUSIVE: Investment Giants Leveraged Red State Universities’ Endowment Funds To Back Anti-Oil Agenda, Report Finds
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Jason Cohen
Several asset managers leveraged two major Texas university systems’ endowment funds to advance anti-fossil fuel shareholder proposals in 2022 and 2023, according to a report from the conservative watchdog group American Accountability Foundation (AAF).
BlackRock-owned Aperio Group, Cantillon, former Vice President Al Gore-chaired Generation Investment Management, GQG Partners and JP Morgan Asset Management collectively manage approximately $4 billion for The University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Company (UTIMCO) as of July, which handles the university systems’ endowments. Despite the company’s policy against it and Texas’ status as the leading crude oil and natural gas-producing state, UTIMCO’s asset managers backed over 150 shareholder resolutions under the environmental, social and governance(ESG) umbrella, including proposals that could undermine the oil and gas industry, according to documents AAF obtained through a public records request and shared exclusively with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Once again, woke ESG ideology has infected a public institution and hijacked its money for their own purposes. This is an outrageous betrayal of the public’s trust,” AAF president Thomas Jones told the DCNF. “[Republican Texas] Gov. Greg Abbott must take immediate action to end this nonsense. He must shake up the leadership at UT/A&M that let this happen and use his influence with UTIMCO to ensure that it never happens again.”
UTIMCO told the DCNF that the ESG and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)-related votes violate “a long-standing policy that prohibits using the endowments’ economic power to advance social or political agendas” and that a review found they consist of 0.3% out of around 45,000 proxy votes in recent years. The endowment manager added that it has since modified its guidelines after finding the violative votes and will impose them on all of its third-party investment managers before future proxy votes, and revoking voting authority for those that cannot follow them.
🚨EXCLUSIVE🚨Swing State’s Pension Funds Used By Wall Street Titans To Push ‘Racial Equity’, Climate Agenda, Report Finds from @jasonJournoDC https://t.co/LXx3y4WZPV
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) January 25, 2024
The company’s asset managers voted in favor of a total of 159 shareholder proposals between them that include “racial and gender pay gap reports, efforts to defund conservative candidates and pro-business trade associations, radical climate policy, targeting of gun purchasers, and proabortion initiatives,” according to the watchdog.
UTIMCO oversees the largest public endowment fund in the U.S., managing over $76 billion as of Aug. 31.
“UTIMCO’s mission is to ‘generate superior long-term investment returns to support The University of Texas and Texas A&M University Systems,’ yet these votes endorse political agendas that run contrary to the Systems’ best interests,” American Energy Institute CEO and former Republican Texas state Rep. Jason Isaac told the DCNF. “By supporting proposals that harm American energy producers, UTIMCO’s fund managers are violating their fiduciary responsibility.”
Texas leads the nation in crude oil and natural gas production and in 2023 was responsible for 43% of crude oil output, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. However, AAF found many examples of UTIMCO’s asset managers voting in favor of proposals aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) emissions and other actions to mitigate so-called climate change, which the watchdog alleges comes at the expense of producing value for investors.
For instance, at ExxonMobil’s May 2023 yearly shareholder meeting, Aperio Group voted in support of a proposal to recalculate its GHG emissions to account for the assets it has sold. The resolution asserted that “the economic risks associated with climate change exist in the real world rather than on company balance sheets” and argues that the investments ExxonMobil sells may lower emissions on paper but that they fail to actually help achieve the goal of keeping global temperatures from rising by 1.5 degrees Celsius — which is an objective of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement — potentially exposing the company and its stakeholders to what it calls “climate risk.”
Some of Aperio Group’s clients have access to customize their individual proxy voting policy, according to BlackRock. BlackRock itself voted against this ExxonMobil proposal on behalf of most of its clients.
AAF’s “report on UTIMCO’s investment practices should alarm every Texan who values our state’s proud oil and gas industry,” Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian told the DCNF. “It’s outrageous to see Texas university investments being used to support radical ESG agendas, decarbonization, and dangerous policies like Net Zero and the Paris Accord, which threaten our energy independence and economy. We must put an end to the woke political agendas that undermine the very foundation of Texas’ success and ensure our investments align with the values of hard-working Texans.”
Moreover, at defense contractor Raytheon Technologies’ yearly shareholder meeting in May 2023, J.P. Morgan Asset Management backed a proposal urging the company to publish a report on efforts to reduce GHG emissions in alignment with the Paris Climate Agreement.
“Raytheon Technologies creates significant carbon emissions from its value chain and is exposed to numerous climate-related risks,” it states. “Failing to respond to this changing environment may make Raytheon less competitive and have a negative effect on its cost of capital and shareholders’ financial returns.”
Isaac told the DCNF that UTIMCO’s “managers are discriminating against fossil fuel” companies through ESG investing based on the definition of “boycott” in Texas’ Senate Bill 13, which Abbot signed in 2021 and the former representative said he helped create.
The bill defines boycotting energy companies as refusing to engage or ending business with a company involved in fossil fuels “without an ordinary business purpose.” It also specifies actions aimed “to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with a company because the company” does business related to fossil fuels and fails to “pledge to meet environmental standards beyond applicable federal and state law.”
Isaac added that the asset managers “should be held accountable and placed on Texas’ list of “financial companies that boycott energy companies,” which mandates Texas public investment entities subject to SB 13 “avoid contracting with, and divest from, these companies unless they can demonstrate this would conflict with their fiduciary duties.”
The S&P Global Clean Energy Index, which includes companies that engage in energy production from renewable sources, has fallen about 7% so far in 2024, while the S&P 500 Energy Index, which features many oil and gas companies, has risen close to 3% in that same time.
Louisianans’ pension funds were similarly leveraged to push climate-related proposals within publicly traded companies, the DCNF reported in April, based on another public records request by AAF.
“UTIMCO’s asset managers’ apparent promotion of leftist objectives, including ESG, is extremely troubling and contrary to Texas law banning boycotts and discrimination against fossil fuels. The legislature must exercise oversight and hold UTIMCO accountable,” Republican Texas state Rep. Brian Harrison told the DCNF. “Governmental bodies, including their proxies, should not pursue objectives that harm the Texas economy and go against our values.”
Cantillon, GQG Partners, Texas A&M and Abbot’s office did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment. Aperio Group, Generation Investment Management, JP Morgan Asset Management and the University of Texas declined to comment.
It finally happened. Canada received a federal budget earlier this month, after more than a year without one. It’s far from a budget that’s great. It’s far from what many expected and distant from what the country needs. But it still passed.
With the budget vote drama now behind us, there may be space for some general observations beyond the details of the concerning deficits and debt. What kind of budget did Canada get?
Haultain’s Substack is a reader-supported publication.
To receive new posts and support our work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Try it out.
For a government that built its political identity on social-program expansion and moralized spending, Budget 2025 arrives wearing borrowed clothing. It speaks in the language of productivity, infrastructure, and capital formation, the diction of grown-up economics, yet keeps the full spending reflex of the Trudeau era. The result feels like a cabinet trying to change its fiscal costume without changing the character inside it. Time will tell, to be fair, but it feels like more rhetoric, and we have seen this same rhetoric before lead to nothing. So, I remain skeptical of what they say and how they say it.
The government insists it has found a new path, one where public investment leads private growth. That sounds bold. However, it is more a rebranding than a reform. It is a shift in vocabulary, not in discipline.
A comparison with past eras makes this clear.
Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin did not flirt with restraint; they executed it. Their budgets were cut deeply, restored credibility, and revived Canada’s fiscal health when it was most needed. The Chrétien years were unsentimental. Political capital was spent so financial capital could return. Ottawa shrank so the country could grow. Budget 2025 tries to invoke their spirit but not their actions. Nothing in this plan resembles the structural surgery of the mid 1990s.
Stephen Harper, by contrast, treated balanced budgets as policy and principle. Even during the global financial crisis, his government used stimulus as a bridge, not a way of life. It cut taxes widely and consistently, limited public service growth, and placed the long-term burden on restraint rather than rhetoric. Budget 2025 nods toward Harper’s focus on productivity and capital assets, yet it rejects the tax relief and spending controls that made his budgets coherent.
Then there is Justin Trudeau, the high tide of redistribution, vacuous identity politics, and deficit-as-virtue posturing. Ottawa expanded into an ideological planner for everything, including housing, climate, childcare, inclusion portfolios, and every new identity category. Much of that ideological scaffolding consisted of mere words, weakening the principle of equality under the law and encouraging the government to referee culture rather than administer policy.
Budget 2025 is the first hint of retreat from that style. The identity program fireworks are dimmer, though they have not disappeared. The social policy boosterism is quieter. Perhaps fiscal gravity has begun to whisper in the prime minister’s ear.
However, one cannot confuse tone for transformation.
Spending is still vast. Deficits grew. The new fiscal anchor, balancing only the operating budget, is weaker than the one it replaced. The budget relies on the hopeful assumption that Ottawa’s capital spending will attract private investment on a scale that economists politely describe as ambitious.
The housing file illustrates the contradiction. The budget announces new funding for the construction of purpose-built rentals and a larger federal role in modular and subsidized housing builds. These are presented as productivity measures, yet they continue the Trudeau-era instinct to centralize housing policy rather than fix the levers that matter. Permitting delays, zoning rigidity, municipal approvals, and labour shortages continue to slow actual construction. Ottawa spends, but the foundations still cure at the same pace.
Defence spending tells the same story. Budget 2025 offers incremental funding and some procurement gestures, but it avoids the core problem: Canada’s procurement system is broken. Delays stretch across decades. Projects become obsolete before contracts are signed. The system cannot buy a ship, an aircraft, or an armoured vehicle without cost overruns and missed timelines. Spending more through this machinery will waste time and money. It adds motion, not capability.
Most importantly, the structural problems remain untouched: no regulatory reform for major projects, no tax competitiveness agenda, no strategy for shrinking a federal bureaucracy that has grown faster than the economy it governs. Ottawa presides over a low-productivity country but insists that a new accounting framework will solve what decades of overregulation and policy clutter have created. More bluster.
To receive new posts and support our work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
From an Alberta vantage, the pivot is welcome but inadequate. The economy that pays for Confederation, energy, mining, agriculture, and transportation receives more rhetorical respect in Budget 2025, yet the same regulatory thicket that blocks pipelines and mines remains intact. The government praises capital formation but still undermines the key sectors that generate it.
Budget 2025 tries to walk like Chrétien and talk like Harper while spending like Trudeau. That is not a transformation; it is a costume change. The country needed a budget that prioritized growth rooted in tangible assets and real productivity. What it got instead is a rhetorical turn without the courage to cut, streamline, or reform.
Canada does not require a new budgeting vocabulary. It requires a government willing to govern in the best interest of the country.
Haultain’s Substack is a reader-supported publication.
Help us bring you more quality research and commentary.
I view the recent announcements by the Government of Canada as window dressing, and not addressing the fundamental issue which is that projects are drowning in bureaucratic red tape and regulatory overburden. We don’t need them picking winners and losers, a fool’s errand in my opinion, but rather make it easier to do business within Canada and stop the hemorrhaging of Foreign Direct Investment from this country.
Thanks for reading William’s Substack!
Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Changes are afoot—reportedly, carve-outs and tweaks to federal regulations that would help attract investment in a new oil pipeline from Alberta. But any private proponent to come out of this deal will presumably be handpicked to advance through the narrow Bill C-5 window, aided by one-off fixes and exemptions.
That approach can only move us so far. It doesn’t address the underlying problem.
Anyone in the investment world will tell you a patchwork of adjustments is nowhere near enough to unlock the large-scale energy investment this country needs. And from that investor’s perspective, the horizon stretches far beyond a single political cycle. Even if this government promises clarity today in the much-anticipated memorandum of understanding (MOU), who knows whether it will be around by the time any major proposal actually moves forward.
With all of the talk of “nation-building” projects, I have often been asked what my thoughts are about what we must see from the federal government.
The energy sector is the file the feds have to get right. It is by far the largest component of Canadian exports, with oil accounting for $147 billion in 2024 (20 percent of all exports), and energy as a whole accounting for $227 billion of exports (30 percent of all exports).
 |
Furthermore, we are home to some of the largest resource reserves in the world, including oil (third-largest in proven reserves) and natural gas (ninth-largest). Canada needs to wholeheartedly embrace that. Natural resource exceptionalism is exactly what Canada is, and we should be proud of it.
One of the most important factors that drives investment is commodity prices. But that is set by market forces.
Beyond that, I have always said that the two most important things one considers before looking at a project are the rule of law and regulatory certainty.
The Liberal government has been obtuse when it comes to whether it will continue the West Coast tanker ban (Bill C-48) or lift it to make way for a pipeline. But nobody will propose a pipeline without the regulatory and legal certainty that they will not be seriously hindered should they propose to build one.
Meanwhile, the proposed emissions cap is something that sets an incredibly negative tone, a sentiment that is the most influential factor in ensuring funds flow. Finally, the Impact Assessment Act, often referred to as the “no more pipelines bill” (Bill C-69), has started to blur the lines between provincial and federal authority.
All three are supposedly on the table for tweaks or carve-outs. But that may not be enough.
It is interesting that Norway—a country that built its wealth on oil and natural gas—has adopted the mantra that as long as oil is a part of the global economy, it will be the last producer standing. It does so while marrying conventional energy with lower-carbon standards. We should be more like Norway.
Rather than constantly speaking down to the sector, the Canadian government should embrace the wealth that this represents and adopt a similar narrative.
The sector isn’t looking for handouts. Rather, it is looking for certainty, and a government proud of the work that they do and is willing to say so to Canada and the rest of the world. Foreign direct investment outflows have been a huge issue for Canada, and one of the bigger drags on our economy.
Almost all of the major project announcements Prime Minister Mark Carney has made to date have been about existing projects, often decades in the making, which are not really “additive” to the economy and are reflective of the regulatory overburden that industry faces en masse.
I have always said governments are about setting the rules of the game, while it is up to businesses to decide whether they wish to participate or to pick up the ball and look elsewhere.
Capital is mobile and will pursue the best risk-adjusted returns it can find. But the flow of capital from our country proves that Canada is viewed as just too risky for investors.
The government’s job is not to try to pick winners and losers. History has shown that governments are horrible at that. Rather, it should create a risk-appropriate environment with stable and capital-attractive rules in place, and then get out of the way and see where the chips fall.
Link to The Hub article: Large-scale energy investments remain a pipe dream
Formerly the head of institutional equity research at FirstEnergy Capital Corp and ATB Capital Markets. I have been involved in the energy sector in either the sell side or corporately for over 25 years
Thanks for reading William’s Substack!
Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Carney fails to undo Trudeau’s devastating energy policies
Trump says release the Epstein files
Calgary mayor should retain ‘blanket rezoning’ for sake of Calgarian families
Sports 50/50 Draws: Make Sure You Read The Small Print
Cost of bureaucracy balloons 80 per cent in 10 years: Public Accounts
Activists Claim Dealers Can Fix Canada’s Drug Problem
Alberta Offers Enormous Advantages for AI Data Centres
-
Carbon Tax19 hours ago
Carney fails to undo Trudeau’s devastating energy policies
-
Business16 hours ago
Budget 2025: Ottawa Fakes a Pivot and Still Spends Like Trudeau
-
Health16 hours agoTens of thousands are dying on waiting lists following decades of media reluctance to debate healthcare
-
Daily Caller2 days agoTrump Gives Zelenskyy Until Thanksgiving To Agree On Peace Deal, With U.S. Weapons And Intel On The Line
-
Business2 days agoI Was Hired To Root Out Bias At NIH. The Nation’s Health Research Agency Is Still Sick
-
Business2 days ago
Large-scale energy investments remain a pipe dream
-
armed forces1 day agoCanada At Risk Of Losing Control Of Its Northern Territories
-
International1 day agoCanada’s lost decade in foreign policy