State Treasurer: If they boycott fossil fuels, we won’t do business with them
Kentucky has joined a growing list of conservative states that have begun to boycott banks they charge are discriminating against the fossil fuel industry.
In compliance with a Kentucky law passed in March, State Treasurer Allison Ball yesterday released a list of banks that “are engaged in energy company boycotts.” This list included Wall Street giants BlackRock, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, BNP Paribas, HSBC, and six other smaller banks.
“Energy is important in Kentucky,” Ball told The Epoch Times. “It’s important to the nation, but in Kentucky in particular, about 7.8 percent of our labor force is from the energy sector. We have a lot at stake just because it’s a part of our economy.”
Kentucky’s action to protect its fossil fuel industry follows similar measures by West Virginia and Texas last year. Kentucky is the seventh-largest state in coal production and 71 percent of its electricity depends on coal-fired plants. Kentucky is also responsible for 1.6 percent of America’s oil refining capacity and 2 percent of its natural gas storage. More than half of Kentucky households rely on electricity to heat their homes.
“From an ideological perspective, those industries have been have been targeted for the last few years by the ESG movement,” Ball said. “So our state legislature in Kentucky passed last year a bill that said, ‘If you are boycotting the fossil fuel industry, then we don’t want to do business with you as a state.’ We don’t want to use taxpayer dollars to support an ideology that’s actually targeting and harming our signature industries.”
According to the Kentucky law, known as SB205, the banks on the boycott list have 60 days to dispute the charge and 90 days to “cease engaging in energy company boycotts in order to avoid becoming subject to divestment by state governmental entities.”
Derek Kreifels, CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation, lauded Treasurer Ball’s action, stating: “She and other state financial officers across the country are leading the movement to ensure that money earned by hardworking American families is used in accordance with their values, not weaponized against them.”
Kreifels told The Epoch Times that he expects more states will follow the lead of Kentucky, Texas, and West Virginia in 2023.
“ESG is front and center in this next legislative session,” he said. Issues of concern could range from fossil fuels to firearms, to plains states like Nebraska, Kansas and Iowa working to protect their farming industries that feed the nation.
