Texas is standing as much as bullies—large banks that bully oil and gasoline, that’s. This week, the Texas’s comptroller’s workplace launched a listing of monetary companies and funds it has decided are “boycotting” the oil and gasoline trade, directing pensions and different state funds to divest from these entities in accordance with Texas regulation.

On the list are 10 main banks and monetary companies, together with BlackRock, BNP Paribas, and Credit Suisse, that the comptroller’s workplace has decided are being meanies to poor, harmless oil and gasoline. Another portion of the record names practically 350 particular person funding funds that the comptroller’s workplace has additionally outlined as problematic for fossil fuels.

“It’s political theater,” mentioned Andy Behar, the CEO of nonprofit As You Sow. “I look at [the list] and go, what? It doesn’t quite make sense to me. They’re looking more at the name of the funds than the holdings.”

The impetus for the record comes from a regulation handed final 12 months that forbids the state from doing enterprise with entities that “boycott energy companies,” impressed by the same piece of laws handed in 2017 designed to stop Texas from doing enterprise with entities who help the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, or BDS motion, for Palestine. The law gave the comptroller’s workplace a huge berth to design analysis to find out which entities fell below the definition of “boycotting” oil and gasoline.

“The environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) movement has produced an opaque and perverse system in which some financial companies no longer make decisions in the best interest of their shareholders or their clients, but instead use their financial clout to push a social and political agenda shrouded in secrecy,” Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar mentioned in a statement.

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The last record of corporations and funds launched this week is… very bizarre, to place it bluntly. The methodology supplied by the Comptroller’s workplace supplies a number of particulars as to how the record was created, together with taking a look at environmental social governance (ESG) information and membership in teams like Climate Action 100 and the Net Zero Banking Alliance. But lots of the corporations and funds on the record nonetheless make investments considerably in oil and gasoline, with no plans to cease within the close to future.

Take BlackRock, the highest listed agency and proprietor of a number of funds on this record. In latest years, the financial institution has emerged because the proper’s major goal in its struggle in opposition to “woke” investing, thanks partly to CEO Larry Summers’ (comparatively gentle) statements that monetary establishments ought to perhaps do one thing about local weather change. The comptroller’s workplace appears to have painted a goal on the monetary big’s again from the beginning of its investigation—even if BlackRock executives in January privately assured Texas officers that it didn’t actually imply these nasty issues it mentioned about oil and gasoline, and wrote a letter to the comptroller’s office in May detailing its funding within the fossil gas trade.

Many of BlackRock’s funds labeled as ESG which can be on the comptroller’s naughty record, Behar mentioned, nonetheless have substantial investments in major oil companies. The firm has confirmed that it’s Texas’s single largest investor in oil and gasoline, with some $290 billion in belongings in Texas fossil gas corporations.

The incontrovertible fact that BlackRock has substantial oil and gasoline holdings in Texas “did not enter into their calculation here,” Behar mentioned. “[The Comptroller’s Office] does not care if they harm the Texas oil industry.”

The thought of punishing corporations which can be incorporating techniques to maneuver away from fossil fuels has been pushed by pro-fossil gas assume tanks just like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and has picked up steam ideologically on the proper in latest months. Oklahoma, Indiana, and Louisiana all had laws both handed or launched this 12 months discouraging the state from doing enterprise with entities that “boycott” fossil fuels. Last month, West Virginia mentioned the state may not do enterprise with five major banks—BlackRock, Goldman Sachs Group, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo—as a result of they had been engaged in a “boycott of energy companies.” (It’s price noting that many of those banks are nonetheless main funders of fossil gas tasks, regardless of making public statements in help of local weather motion.)

Divesting from these funds and banks may have actual implications for individuals in Texas and different states that observe swimsuit.

“You move your money into an established diversified asset manager to a completely new experience, you start losing money,” Behar mentioned. “A lot of people living in red states are going to lose a ton of money, these states are going to spend a lot on interest, and they’re not going to have money to spend on infrastructure. It could actually cause a lot of hardships to people.”