Last year, the chief executive officer of a Houston-based oilfield services firm wrote a four-page letter to the head of The North Face, after the popular outdoor-clothing brand declined to make an order of jackets with his company’s logo as an employee Christmas present.
“The irony in this statement is your jackets are made from oil and gas products the hardworking men and women of our industry produce,” Adam Anderson, CEO of Innovex Downhole Solutions, wrote in a letter first reported by a local TV news station in Odessa, Texas. “I think this stance by your company is counterproductive virtue signaling, and I would appreciate you re-considering this stance.” The North Face didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The state didn’t always take such a combative stance toward Wall Street though. In fact, Christian cited investor concerns when the Railroad Commission said it would crack down on natural gas flaring after months of backlash against the agency’s policy toward the practice. Texas has one of the worst records for flaring in the U.S., with large volumes of gas being burned in the prolific Permian Basin.
“We cannot continue to waste this much natural gas and allow the practice of flaring to tarnish the reputation of our state’s thriving energy sector to the general public and investors on Wall Street,” Christian said during a commission meeting in June of last year.
By early January, Christian began taking aim at Wall Street. In a press release, he decried “an assault from all fronts on energy independence.” And in a statement last month, he said “extremists are coming after your retirement account vis-à-vis ESG investing.”
In an e-mail to Bloomberg, Christian said flaring “is not the existential threat to the environment it is made out to be,” adding that improvements are being made to reduce the practice and that “that message needs to get out to Wall Street.”
For Senate Bill 13, the next step for the state will be to determine how it will implement a divestment directive that applies to pension funds and retirement systems that manage hundreds of billions of dollars.
“That may include phased divestment and/or mechanisms to apply for exemptions,” said Michael Sury, a senior finance lecturer at the UT’s McCombs School of Business. If a state fund “is invested in a non-compliant but critical investment activity,” he said, “there will likely be some process for applying for relief.”
—With assistance from Danielle Moran and Amanda Albright.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.