On Tuesday, elected officials and experts joined a panel discussion about the right wing’s ongoing assault on responsible investing, through “anti-ESG” state legislation and executive action that hijacks the language of civil rights and justice to try to bar investors from responding rationally to climate risk.
The assault has been especially ferocious in Texas, where senior state officials have bullied major banks into pulling back on their climate commitments—putting partisan politics over sound policy at a time when the state faces a dangerous and disruptive cycle of extreme weather exacerbated by climate change. They’re supported by national right-wing figures who are attacking banking CEOs aggressively by name to try to block climate-responsible investing.
“This is really bad,” said former U.S. Representative from Michigan Andy Levin of the coordinated GOP assault. “It goes against the basic tenets of American freedom—of the ability of citizens, whether individual investors or workers who have their pensions, from just optimizing their own economic situation by taking all these risk factors into account.”
This week’s panel discussion followed the June release of Pleiades Strategy’s 2025 Statehouse Report, which analyzed 106 bills designed to undermine climate progress in the states—including several based on model legislation from extremist groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom. The Pleiades report laid out political tactics seen in this year’s bills, including the use of “debanking” language to compel financial professionals to do business with the fossil fuel industry and hate groups. Although only 11 of the bills passed, they all contributed to companies pulling back on their climate commitments and rhetoric.
“Politically motivated attacks on ESG that tie the hands of investors are bad for investment returns, bad for retirees, and bad for America’s long-term economic competitiveness,” said Oregon State Treasurer Elizabeth Steiner. And Oregon is pushing back: its Climate Resilience Investment Act, enacted last month, requires climate-responsible investing of pension funds.
Frances Sawyer, Pleiades Strategy’s founder and 2025 Statehouse Report co-author, said the national trend is clear. “As we’ve watched right-wing activists and politicians seem to weaponize capital markets and state powers to delay the climate transition, we’ve heard from retirees, unions, chambers of commerce, financial officers, and bankers associations, all concerned about paying the price.”
“Fossil fuel-backed politicians are pushing policies that drive up costs, ignore risk and bully private businesses into political compliance. In Texas, officials openly bragged about bullying financial actors into watering down their climate commitments,” said Kyle Herrig, spokesperson for Unlocking America’s Future.
By prioritizing ideology over responsible investment, leaders in GOP-led states are contributing to accelerating extreme weather disasters like flooding and wildfires, while putting pension returns at risk for retirees and raising public borrowing costs—all while driving up the fossil fuel industry’s record profits.
“The anti-ESG legislative trend in the states is an extension of that decades-long effort to delay the transition away from fossil fuels, indeed, even to confuse constituents about the need for such a transition to occur,” said Connor Gibson, Pleiades Strategy researcher and Statehouse Report co-author.
Read the full Pleiades 2025 Statehouse Report here.
