The climate crisis is a leadership crisis. State treasurers can change that.

State Treasurers, through their roles in overseeing state pensions, 529 college savings plans and other assets, have untapped power over decisions that affect climate change. State Treasurers are usually elected – sometimes appointed – public officials who have influence over huge pools of assets.

We engage and leverage community power to identify and implement effective strategies to pressure state treasurers and others who control large public pension funds. State treasurers and other public officials oversee hundreds of millions in assets– assets that come with power attached.These public officials have a seat at the table on climate policy at the largest U.S. corporations, and they can play a critical role in pressuring companies to decarbonize with time-bound goals for reducing emissions.

Using the power of public money to fight climate change

For as long as there has been a fossil fuel industry, it has always, always been deeply bound up with the finance sector. Banks lend money to keep polluting operations going, investors buy stock in new drilling companies, and shareholders vote to approve CEO pay packages no matter how much coal or gas a company uses. Even today, 65% of the people who sit on the boards of directors of large global banks have some connection to polluting sectors.

We already know two things:

If we’re going to confront global warming, we have to stop companies from making it worse — and to do that, we have to go to where the money and power is.
Thefinance and the fossil fuel sectors aren’t just going to separate themselves — we have to pull them apart.

State Treasurers are key actors

We must move capital to address climate change, and some of the largest pools of capital are owned and managed by the public sector. Government defined benefit (DB) pension plans — including federal, state, and local government plans—held $7.1 trillion in assets as of the end of March 2021.

State Treasurers, through their roles in overseeing state pensions, 529 college savings plans and other assets, have untapped power over decisions that affect climate change.State Treasurers are usually elected — sometimes appointed — public officials who have influence over huge pools of assets.The state pension funds they oversee in the U.S. are worth over $4.5 trillion. Pension funds are the retirement savings of public employees such as teachers, firefighters, and social service workers.

State treasurers have an even greater ability to influence the biggest investors in the world: asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street.These asset managers can decisively pressure the highest emitting companies causing the climate crisis. Treasurers and assets they represent are some of the largest, most valuable customers/clients of the asset managers. So treasurers can use the shareholder power they have and also pressure their asset managers to do the same.

The public ownership of these assets represents untapped power to confront the climate crisis.These asset owners (state treasurers and other public officials) can and should use their outsized power to push for significant change at the companies where this capital is invested.

We believe that these public officials can be moved to exercise their shareholder power through community power being brought to bear to pressure them to do so. We believe the will exists, the activists exist, and the strategic opportunities exist to organize and leverage this community power to make shareholder power a much more powerful force to address the climate crisis.

We believe that this work requires building the power and capacity of existing grassroots groups within those states, and that building power in states on climate finance takesconsistent engagement.