LA Wildfires Conservatives, Progressives Clash Over Climate Change BlackRock Pro-Trump Withdrawal from Climate Fund

LA Wildfires Conservatives, Progressives Clash Over Climate Change BlackRock Pro-Trump Withdrawal from Climate Fund

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As the LA wildfires spread to the US media as a clash between conservatives and progressives over climate change, BlackRock, the largest private equity fund and asset management company directly connected to Korea, has withdrawn from the climate fund as a pro-Trump group.

BlackRock notified its clients on the 9th that it has withdrawn from Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM), a voluntary global asset management group working to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Salon, a progressive liberal online news and commentary site, wrote that the site's money editor, Daria Solovieva, said the wildfires showed that Americans are "unprepared for climate change." “Scientists have been predicting this catastrophic situation for decades,” Solovieva, a Los Angeles resident, said on the 9th. “We are all just one climate disaster away from becoming refugees.” In the US presidential election, Republican candidate Trump attacked climate change as a hoax, and as the election campaign intensified, lawsuits were filed against BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street in 11 states, including Texas and Oklahoma, where Republicans are dominant, last November, accusing them of conspiring to restrict coal supply and push a politicized environmental agenda. BlackRock has been an advisor to the Ministry of Strategy and Finance since the Moon Jae-in administration, and has been providing information to the IMF by visiting its offices separately from the Ministry of Strategy and Finance’s report on the Korean economy.

In the past month, ahead of Trump’s inauguration, the largest US financial companies, including JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs, have also withdrawn from the climate response organization, Net-Zero Banking.

NBC News correspondent Dana Griffin walked with cameras through a devastated LA wildfire neighborhood on “Morning Joe” on the 9th, saying, “During the hurricane-force winds, the embers almost jumped into cars and homes.” Elsewhere in the broadcast, the New York Times reported, “Griffin criticized President Trump’s angry response to the fires,” and “Griffin called California Gov. Gavin Newsom ‘incompetent’ and questioned his past policies on water and fish.”

“It seems impossible to ask him to lead the way on the climate issue that we face as a country and as a world,” said Alex Wagner, host of MSNBC’s “Alex Wagner Tonight.” In an opinion piece published on the 9th, Ryan Teague Beckwith, MSNBC’s newsletter editor, called Trump’s response “a profound misunderstanding of his argument,” saying that the fires were caused not by water or fish supplies but by a combination of “drought, extremely strong winds” and urban planning decisions.

He went on to say that Trump’s “first instinct was to blame his political opponents, raise irrelevant issues and misinform everyone about basic facts.” In another article, The New York Times said, “As deadly wildfires raged across Southern California this week, conservative and liberal media outlets reported similarly on the level of devastation, but they identified very different culprits for it.”

“Right-wing media outlets blamed much of the devastation on Democrats, attacked California’s Democratic leadership and blamed the destruction of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in Los Angeles.” Meanwhile, progressive media outlets have criticized President-elect Donald J. Trump's response to the fires, calling him insensitive, and some have blamed the fires' intensity on climate change. The AP reported that “President-elect Trump is lashing out at Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom for mismanaging the forests and saying he would have handled the crisis much better,” adding that “Trump attacked Newsom with the same rhetoric during the California wildfires in 2019, and is now again blaming his longtime adversary for the state’s fisheries policies that have led to water shortages in urban areas and a shortage of firefighters. He has posted mocking messages online about Newsom and called for his resignation.”

The AP continued that “Trump has used his Truth social media accounts to blame California’s dry conditions on the state’s failure to allocate water resources to farms and cities, and has blamed water management practices that are designed to protect endangered species like the Delta icefish.” “Trump has always sided with business in the long-running battle between California farmers and environmentalists, but the current water shortage in Los Angeles is not related to that, and is a result of the LA water system being overly overburdened by the enormous demands of the metropolitan system.

The reason is that it was not designed to withstand a large fire, and 40% of the city of LA's water supply comes from the state-run water utility in the northern part of the state, but this year, the water supply itself was greatly lacking due to the drought," it said.

The conservative website Breitbart, which supports Trump, reported on the 9th that Alex Marlow, the editor-in-chief, said on the "Alex Marlow Show" that "the LA Fire Department focused on hiring diverse candidates (racial diversity) instead of preparing for the fire."

The New York Times, which investigated conservative bloggers' wildfire coverage sites, said, "Matt Walsh, a conservative blogger who hosts "The Matt Walsh Show," blamed the staffing problems on the administration's efforts to improve diversity, equity and inclusion, often referred to by the acronym DEI."

"Some right-wing influencers have highlighted old fire department documents that signal an interest in increasing the diversity of firefighters and staff, and have blamed the program in the fight to fight this fire. "I turned it around," Walsh said.

Walsh shifted responsibility for the wildfires to a hard-line conservative denunciation of extreme racial prejudice, saying, "DEI is a cancer that destroys everything."

As of the 10th, the fires have killed at least five people, with the sheriff's office saying the exact death toll is still unknown, and 27,000 acres have burned, forcing the evacuation of nearly 180,000 residents in Los Angeles.

Reuters reported on the 10th that American capitalists and large corporations on Wall Street and Silicon Valley donated more than $1 million each to Trump's inauguration on the 20th. The list of donors officially revealed is that Adobe donated $1 million to the Open Fund, US oil and gas major Chevron declined to disclose the amount, Alphabet donated $1 million, Amazon donated $1 million, and Bank of America and Goldman Sachs said the amount was “undecided.”