Liam Denning, Columnist

A New Climate Report Challenges Exxon and BlackRock

The IEA spent 50 years calling for new oil and gas fields. It just laid out a thesis for not doing that anymore.

May 19, 2021 at 9:00 AM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
Photographer: Bloomberg/Bloomberg

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It’s a coincidence that the International Energy Agency released its net-zero roadmap barely a week before a proxy showdown at Exxon Mobil Corp.’s annual meeting. Nonetheless, the report throws down a gauntlet not just to Exxon but also its largest shareholders, BlackRock Inc. in particular.

The single most important line in the IEA’s 200-plus-page report is this one: