The mechanism. Since 2021, roughly a dozen red states have passed laws — Texas's SB 13 and SB 19 are the model — barring public pension funds and state contracts from doing business with financial firms deemed to "boycott" fossil fuels or firearms. The target was always BlackRock: Louisiana and Missouri each pulled $500 million in 2022, Texas's teacher and school funds divested billions in 2023-24, and the political theater has been real. But theater has a release valve. Texas's comptroller quietly removed BlackRock from the state's official boycott list in 2025 after the firm reworked its ESG proxy-voting policy, and a federal judge in February 2026 ruled the Texas divestment statute unconstitutionally vague. The underlying capital never actually fled asset management — it fled the public-markets, proxy-voting version of asset management. Money that state treasurers wanted out of ESG-flagged index funds increasingly lands instead in private infrastructure vehicles, where there's no proxy ballot to boycott, no shareholder climate resolution to vote down, and no annual 13F disclosure for an attorney general to scrutinize. That's Blackstone's lane.
Who cashes in.
- Blackstone (BX) — Blackstone Energy Transition Partners closed BETP IV at its $5.6 billion hard cap and has spent 2026 stacking fossil-adjacent infrastructure: a $7 billion private-credit financing package for phase two of Sempra's Port Arthur LNG terminal, an expanded equity stake alongside EQT in the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and a sold-down position in the Rover gas pipeline. None of this shows up in a headline ESG fight because private infrastructure LPs, not public shareholders, hold the vote — pension money can flow in without a proxy season ever happening.
- Marsh McLennan (MMC) — every LNG terminal, cross-border pipeline JV, and multi-billion-dollar project financing needs structured credit insurance and political-risk cover; MMC's brokerage and risk-advisory arms sit on the fee line of exactly this infrastructure build-out regardless of which side of the ESG fight wins, collecting placement and advisory fees on deal volume, not on political sentiment.
- Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) — as both a permanent-capital energy owner (BHE's pipelines and utilities) and reinsurer with no public ESG mandate to defend, Berkshire absorbs capital and deal flow redirected away from asset managers with proxy-voting baggage, without ever having to answer a boycott questionnaire.