Majority Action’s New Report Shows, What’s Blocking Our Path to Sustainability?

Feb 7, 2025 | Bryant Sewell and Whitney Shepard

A Moment of Escalating Risk — and Opportunity

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Without bold intervention, the increasing intensity of the climate crisis will continue to fuel the environmental, social and economic instability crises that threaten us all.

Majority Action’s Climate in the Boardroom 2024 report exposes how, in the 2024 proxy season, the largest U.S.-based asset managers continued to use their proxy voting power to rubber-stamp the status quo at carbon-intensive companies failing to take necessary action on climate change. Our report finds that once again the largest asset managers are choosing to enable corporate strategies that exacerbate systemic risks — threatening not only long-term financial stability of their beneficiaries, but also the very foundations of our democracy, economy, and planet.

We are in a moment of intersecting crises. Climate disasters are becoming more frequent and devastating. Economic inequality and racial inequity are deepening. Democratic institutions are under attack. And yet, rather than addressing the structural failures driving these crises, political and corporate leaders are fueling division — distracting people from the root causes and consolidating power at the expense of the many. As the troubling retreat from and attack on climate goals continues — with major multinational corporations pulling out of global climate alliances, the U.S. withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, and taxpayer-funded courts being weaponized against ESG — our collective future remains at grave risk as long as short-term profit schemes take priority over long-term sustainability.

In large part due to the strategic deployment of disinformation throughout our social, political, and economic spheres, we are witnessing and experiencing a “politics of rage”, which directs public frustration toward fabricated threats in order to avoid confronting the actual systemic failures that truly threaten us as a people. The facts are, when economic and environmental instability grows, so does authoritarianism. Attempted insurrectionist events, such as January 6th, are just the beginning — unless we take action to ensure that people have the facts, the tools, and agency to hold those in power accountable to careful management of that power.
Corporate-driven climate change is deeply tied to this threatening and risky moment.

The same forces that refuse to act on climate are those who profit from economic precarity and political instability. If we allow the world’s largest asset managers to continue enabling destructive and risky corporate behavior, we are complicit in the crises unfolding before us. But there is an opportunity to create new forces. Ones that profit from economic prosperity and political and environmental stability. It is a hard, but worthy choice, to commit to using our power for good.

What the Data Shows: Asset Managers are Blocking Climate Progress

Our Climate in the Boardroom report provides a clear, data-driven analysis of how the largest U.S.-based asset managers are failing to uphold their fiduciary responsibility to long-term investors. Three critical findings stand out:

• A Stark Divergence Between Asset Owners and Asset Managers: We compared how asset owners — those responsible for pensions, endowments, and retirement funds — voted on climate-related shareholder proposals versus how their asset managers voted. The misalignment is glaring. Asset owners are voting in line with their sustainability commitments, yet their asset managers, who are supposed to act in their clients’ best interests, are actively obstructing progress by voting against the interest of workers using their own money.

• Failing to Support Shareholder Proposals with Broad Support: We analyzed shareholder proposals that received at least 20% support and were recommended by leading proxy advisors, ISS or Glass Lewis. These are not fringe proposals — they reflect broad investor consensus on corporate accountability. Yet, large asset managers failed to back them, casting the deciding votes that allow companies to evade meaningful action.

• Greenwashing in ESG Funds: Even within ESG-labeled funds, the largest asset managers consistently failed to vote proxies in alignment with the goals of the Paris Agreement. This exposes the vast gap between marketing claims and actual stewardship practices, revealing that many so-called sustainable funds are little more than a mirage.

The evidence is clear: asset managers are not just failing to meet their fiduciary duty to long-term investors — they are fanning the flames of intersecting systemic risks, from climate change to economic inequality to democratic instability.

A Blueprint for Action

The corporate ecosystem is at a crossroads. As evidenced by our report, there is a robust segment of responsible investors who are voting in alignment with an organized and equitable clean-energy transition, but who are being obstructed by their own asset managers that continue to prioritize corporate interests over the people whose money they manage. If we want to address the systemic crises we face at their root, we need our capital to work with, not against us. Our Climate in the Boardroom report is a tool for anyone who is trying to make sense of why we are failing to see real progress on climate action and economic transformation. It is for:

• Asset owners and trustees responsible for managing retirement and pension funds who want to ensure their capital is not fueling systemic risks.

• Policymakers, researchers, and advocates seeking to understand the structural barriers to sustainable finance.

• Workers, community leaders, and activists demanding economic justice and accountability from the financial institutions that impact their daily lives.

• Funders and investors who believe in a future where capital is deployed for the common good, not for short-term profit maximization at the expense of people and the planet.

Bold Action for Our Collective Future!
We invite you to:

• Download the report and examine the data for yourself.
  Share this research with your networks — trustees, asset owners, funders, policymakers, and organizers who need to understand where the roadblocks are.

• Reflect on the sustainability of the trajectory we are on. If capital markets continue to operate as they are, what does the future look like? What world are we building, and for whom?

Civil and human rights activist Ella Baker reminds us what we are called to in this moment: “It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.” We will win when the foremost stewards of people’s capital — asset owners and asset managers — align with the needs, values, and rights of the people and beneficiaries they serve. And only we, together, have the power to make it so.

Thank you to all of our incredible partners, funders, and supporters who have made this report possible. Our deep gratitude to the amazing Majority Action staff, and primary author of Climate in the Boardroom, Divya Sundar, Director of Research, for your outstanding efforts to make this report exist in the world. May it be part of the larger roadmap for our better tomorrow.

Bryant Sewell and Whitney Shepard are Co-Executive Directors of Majority Action.