BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has publicly shifted toward what he calls energy pragmatism, admitting that society now demands a balanced approach to meeting power needs rather than adherence to rigid climate agendas. This could be a pivotal moment for global energy policy, as one of the planet’s most powerful financial players steps back from decades of ill-advised “green” mandates.
BlackRock is the world’s top financial manager, overseeing more than $10 trillion in assets that sway markets, companies and even governments. It delivers risk analysis tools that guide how firms allocate capital, set strategies and tackle issues from energy supply to corporate governance. BlackRock’s hand is in everything from pension funds to sovereign wealth, where its votes and investments steer decisions affecting wide swaths of society.
Fink points to China, which leads in new nuclear plants and vast solar installations while importing record volumes of natural gas and oil to meet surging demand. “Society has moved into a better position of having more pragmatism,” Finkstates, “and what you’re hearing from me is I’m echoing what we’re hearing from our clients.” Better to have clients than ideologues steering the ship.
Fink’s tone matches his earlier report of $4 billion lost in ESG-linked assets in 2023, a hit from states like Florida and others pulling funds over concerns about politicized investing. BlackRockdropped the “weaponized” ESG label by mid-2023 and exited the Net Zero Asset Managers group in January 2025 amid antitrust probes and backlash from state governments.
Clients forced Fink’s hand after years of BlackRock deploying their money to advance ESG and related priorities, often with the encouragement of left-leaning managers of public pension funds like New York’s. Fiduciary duty – maximizing investor returns – had taken a backseat as the firm lobbied corporations on “woke” interests ranging from board diversity to cuts in industrial emissions. Now, with lawsuits mounting and states divesting billions, Fink invokes thatsame duty to justify pragmatism.
Fink’s reversal exposes the scam. BlackRock wielded trillions to warp board politics and policies, betraying investors for a clique’s dreams. Now, scrutiny and an outflow of funds force truth. Fink’s admission also validates what skeptics argued: Climate narratives overstated risks to advance costly fantasies. Data show no increase in extreme weather, for which emissions of CO2 have been absurdly blamed. Hurricanes, floods and droughts have followed historical norms.
Climate alarmists’ infatuation with wind and solar energy has run into the reality of physics. So-called “renewables” falter where reliability counts. Their intermittency strands grids during times of peak demands, hiking costs for families and factories. In contrast, fossil fuels and nuclear power human prosperity. They provide the dense, affordable and reliable energy required by modern civilization.
The campaign to abruptly replace them with low-density, weather-dependent alternatives was a mathematical impossibility from the start. A foundation of coal, natural gas and nuclear energy is needed to maintain a modern standard of living. This is why Asian industrial economies continually added fossil fuel capacity behind a veneer of “green” pretense.
Look at global patterns. Growth in wind and solar capacity covers only a small part of rising electricity needs. China builds nuclear faster than anyone and guzzles oil and gas imports to fuel factories and homes. Despite net-zero pledges, India accelerated domestic coal production while exploring small modular reactors to power its 1.4 billion people and hit 8% growth targets.
Even European countries that once championed rapid shifts to “renewables” began to reconsider after the 2022 energy crisis exposed vulnerabilities. In Germany, factories shut down and household budgets strained when Russian gas supplies tightened and wind and solar stalled during calm or cloudy periods.
After years of climate-driven experimentation – forced by deluded or dishonest politicians and business titans – the failures became too many and too consequential to be ignored. Little wonder that Larry Fink has turned his ear away from the rhetoric of alarm and toward client demands for strategic guidance.
Vijay Jayaraj is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation and Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Va. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India. He served as a research associate with the Changing Oceans Research Unit at University of British Columbia, Canada.
The Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) voted unanimously to repeal the state’s Renewable Energy Standard and Tariff (REST) rules during its March 4 open meeting, ending a regulatory framework that has governed renewable energy requirements for nearly two decades.
The REST rules, first adopted by the commission in 2006, required regulated electric utilities to obtain a specified portion of their retail electricity sales from renewable resources. The standard began at 1.25 percent in 2006 and increased incrementally until reaching 15 percent after 2024, with a portion of the requirement reserved for distributed resources such as rooftop solar.
According to the commission, the repeal finalizes a rulemaking process that began in January 2024 under the commission’s rulemaking docket RE-00000A-24-0026.
Happening now: The ACC voted unanimously to repeal the Renewable Energy Standard and Tariff (REST) Rules, adopted in 2006. “The Commission took action and made a policy decision that actually eliminates costs, which will result in lower energy bills," said Chair Nick Myers. pic.twitter.com/i4mkHiwlZt
— Arizona Corporation Commission (@CorpCommAZ) March 4, 2026
ACC Chairman Nick Myers joined the other commissioners in the unanimous 5-0 vote. In a statement following the decision, Myers said the mandates were no longer aligned with current conditions in Arizona’s electricity market.
Commission officials said the REST framework achieved its original goal of expanding renewable energy generation in Arizona. The state’s major regulated utilities, Arizona Public Service (APS), Tucson Electric Power (TEP), and UNS Electric (UNSE), have met or exceeded the renewable energy targets established under the rules.
Myers added, “The reality is that the renewable energy landscape in Arizona has changed dramatically in the past 20 years.”
Since the program began, the utilities have collected more than $2.3 billion in REST surcharges from customers to fund renewable programs and incentives, according to the commission. More than $779 million of that amount was distributed as incentives for renewable energy programs approved by the ACC. According to the commission, that amount does not include “above-market amounts paid out to rooftop solar customers under net metering and the current RCP approach.”
— Arizona Corporation Commission (@CorpCommAZ) March 5, 2026
Commissioners also cited long-term power contracts entered into under the mandate as contributing to costs borne by ratepayers. One example highlighted by the commission involves a 30-year solar power agreement between APS and the Solana Generating Station, under which APS customers have paid approximately $274.3 million above market prices for power to date.
“The Solana plant is basically providing energy at 15 cents a kilowatt-hour when the rest of solar these days are around 2 to 2 1/2 cents a kilowatt-hour,” Myers said during the meeting.
Under the REST rules, utilities were required to obtain at least 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025, with 30 percent of that renewable requirement coming from distributed sources such as rooftop solar.
Myers said utilities will continue to procure energy resources through competitive procurement processes designed to identify cost-effective and reliable power generation options.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes released a statement in September and sent a letter to the commission opposing the repeal. During her tenure on the commission from 2003-2010, Mayes, then holding office as a Republican, participated in the adoption of the REST Rules and Arizona’s Electric Energy Efficiency Standard Rules (EEES Rules).
The Arizona Corporation Commission regulates the state’s investor-owned utilities and has authority over energy policy decisions such as renewable energy standards and utility rate structures.
Property tax subsidies for wind and solar projects may be coming to an end in Arizona.
On Wednesday, an Arizona House committee approved HB 2918, legislation to hold renewable energy to the same taxation standards as other forms of energy production. The bill passed the Natural Resources, Energy and Water (NREW) Committee only with support from Republican lawmakers.
According to Joint Legislative Budget Committee estimates, renewable energy companies benefit from about $180 million annually in tax exemptions in the state.
The millions in exemptions come from two “stacked” subsidies: a reduction in the taxable original cost, which reduces a project’s starting valuation base below the actual amount invested through the value of certain federal incentives, and a valuation of 20 percent of depreciated cost, which sets the full cash value of renewable energy and storage equipment at 20 percent of the cost determined following establishment of the taxable original cost.
Republican lawmakers argue this benefit has gone on far enough, given how well-established the renewable energy industry has become. Legislative leaders say these sorts of benefits should be exclusive to emerging industries, like data centers.
Wednesday’s lack of support from Democratic lawmakers indicated the desire to shift resources away from renewable energy is rooted in a partisan desire to shrink the state’s foregone revenues.
NREW Committee chair Gail Griffin (R-LD19) said this legislation would put the merits of renewable energies to the test on the free market while keeping power reliable and affordable. Griffin said the “preferential treatment” of renewable energy lacked justification for further continuance.
“The American public has known from day one that these projects could not stand on their own feet without massive state and federal tax breaks,” said Griffin. “If renewable energy projects like wind and solar are truly the lowest-cost resource, then they should have no problem repealing the massive property tax break for new projects going forward.”
Last month, Gov. Katie Hobbs targeted the benefits given to data centers during her state of the state address.
House Majority Leader Michael Carbone (R-LD25) countered in a press release issued Wednesday that data centers have justification for their tax exemptions — renewable energies, not so much. Data center tax exemptions amount to about $38 million annually, less than one-fourth the amount received by renewable energy.
“The Governor said during her State of the State that, over a decade ago, ‘we made a strategic decision to grow data centers by creating a tax exemption for them,’ but then asked, ‘Should taxpayers continue subsidizing the data center industry?’” said Carbone. “I think the same question should be asked of large, utility-scale renewable energy projects like wind and solar. Years ago, this state gave renewable energy projects a massive tax break, substantially more than data centers, and now it’s appropriate to ask whether it’s fair to have Arizona taxpayers continue subsidizing the renewable energy industry.”
The legislation would impact large, out-of-state corporations. It would not apply to those facilities owned by or engaged in a power purchase agreement with the state’s public utilities — part of a grandfathering provision to ensure tax break eliminations don’t trigger a jump in customer rates.
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Our country is facing an energy crisis. No, not because of new demand from data centers or AI. Instead, it’s because utilities in nearly every state, due to government imposed “renewable” mandates, self-imposed mandates, and the supercharging of the Green New Scam under the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” have been shutting down vital coal resources and building out almost exclusively intermittent and costly resources like solar, wind, and battery storage.
A new report from McKinsey & Company, the “Global Energy Perspective,” lays bare what many of us – dismissed as “climate deniers” – have been asserting all along: Coal, oil and natural gas will continue to be the dominant sources of global energy well past 2050.
The McKinsey outlook for 2025 sharply adjusts prior projections. Last year, the management consultant’s models had coal demand falling 40% by 2035. Today, McKinsey projects an uptick of 1% over the same period. The dramatic reversal is driven by record commissioning of coal-fired power plants in China, unexpected increases in global electricity use, and the lack of viable alternatives for industries like steel, chemicals and heavy manufacturing.
The report states that the three fossil fuels will still supply up to 55% of global energy in 2050, a forecast that looks low to me. Today’s share for hydrocarbons is more than 60% for electricity generation and more than 80% for primary energy consumption.
In any case, McKinsey’s report confirms what seasoned energy analysts and pragmatic policymakers have long maintained: The energy transition will not be swift, simple, or governed solely by climate targets. In fact, this energy transition will not happen at all without large scale deployment of nuclear, geothermal or other technological innovations that prove practical.
In places such as India, Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the top energy priorities are access, affordability and reliability, which together add up to national security. Planners are acutely aware of a trap: Sole reliance on weather-dependent power risks blackouts, industrial disruption, economic decline and civil unrest.
That is why many developing nations are embracing a dual track: continued investment in conventional generation (coal, gas, nuclear) while developing alternative technologies. McKinsey says this in consultancy lingo: “Countries and regions will follow distinct trajectories based on local economic conditions, resource endowment, and the realities facing particular industries.”
In countries like India, Indonesia and Nigeria, the scale of electrification and industrial expansion is enormous. These countries cannot afford to wait decades for perfect solutions. They need “reliable and good enough for now.” That means conventional fuels will be retained.
McKinsey’s analysis also underscores what physics and engineering dictate: Intermittent and weather-dependent sources, such as wind and solar, require vast land areas, backup batteries and generation and power-grid investments, none of which come cheaply nor quickly.
The technologies of wind and solar branded as renewable should instead be called economy killers. They make for expensive and unstable electrical systems that have brought energy-rich nations like Germany to their knees. After spending billions of dollars on unreliable wind turbines and solar panels and demolishing nuclear plants and coal plants, the country is struggling with high prices and economic stagnation.
The Germans now have a word for their self-inflicted crisis: Dunkelflaute. It means “dark doldrums”—a period of cold, sunless, windless days when their “green” grid fails. During a Dunkelflaute in November 2024, fossil fuels were called on to provide 70% of Germany’s electricity.
If “renewables” were truly capable, planners would shut down fossil fuel generation. But that is not the case. While wind and solar are pursued in some places, coal and natural gas remain much sought-after fuels. In the first half of 2025 alone, China commissioned about 21 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired capacity, which is more than any other country and the largest increase since 2016.
Further, China has approved construction of 25 GW of new coal plants in the first half of 2025. As of July, China’s mainland has nearly 1,200 coal plants, far outstripping the rest of the world.
McKinsey points to a dramatic surge in electricity demand driven by data centers, which is estimated to be about 17 % annually from 2022 to 2030 in the 38 OECD countries. This kind of growth in electricity use simply cannot be met by wind and solar.
When analysts, journalists and engineers point out these realities, they’re branded as “shills” for the fossil fuel industry. However, it is not public relations to point out the physics and economics that make up the math for meeting the world’s energy needs. Dismissing such facts is to deny that reliable energy remains the bedrock of modern civilization.
The cost of foolish “green” policies is being paid in lost jobs, ruined businesses, disrupted lives and impoverishment that could have been avoided by wiser choices.
For those who have repeated energy realities for years, the vindication is bittersweet. The satisfaction of being right is tempered by the knowledge that many have suffered because reality has been ignored.
Vijay Jayaraj is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation andScience and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Fairfax, Va. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
