NYC Comptroller Brad Lander Disrupted by Climate Protestors at CII Conference

A panel discussion Monday kicking off the Council of Institutional Investors’ Fall 2024 Conference and featuring New York City Comptroller Brad Lander and Bob McCormick, executive director of the CII, was disrupted by a group of climate protestors.

The protestors argued that the comptroller and the New York City pension system were not doing enough to divest fossil fuel investments.

“Comptroller Lander, if you will not use your power as New York’s comptroller to take care of New Yorkers, how can we trust you to do so as mayor?” a protestor yelled as he stormed the stage, referencing expectations that Lander will be a mayoral candidate in 2025. “It’s time for Brad Lander to move the city’s pension funds away from dirty asset managers and private equity firms,” the protestor continued.

“Are you proud of yourself, Lander? Do you still have money in BlackRock and KKR? Aren’t you ashamed?” a protestor was seen telling Lander in a video of the disruption.

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“We just disrupted Brad Lander, NYC’s Comptroller & mayoral candidate. Lander has ignored NYCers for years now, refusing to Divest our billions in city pension funds from dirty asset managers funding new fossil fuels,” the organization behind the protest, Planet over Profit, posted on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.

“Welcome to Brooklyn. We have a lot of characters here,” Lander remarked after the protestors were escorted off the stage. “Many of them believe in good corporate governance, apparently.”

In response to the protestors, who were swiftly removed from the premises, Lander pointed to the New York City pension system’s investor activism as a proxy voter pushing for environmental, social and governance initiatives across its 3,000 portfolio companies.

“Not withstanding what happened on this stage a few minutes ago, the work that we are doing in our office is some of the boldest and most thoughtful and ambitious of fiduciaries working on decarbonization and the climate transition,” Lander said.

Lander pointed to a landmark agreement between the pension system and three portfolio companies— Citibank, the Royal Bank of Canada and J.P. Morgan Chase—to disclose the ratio of their fossil fuel lending to their clean energy lending.

The five New York City pension systems—the Teachers’ Retirement System of NYC, the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, the NYC Police Pension Fund, the NYC Fire Pension Fund and the NYC Board of Education Retirement System—collectively manage $274.38 billion in assets, as of June 30, for 800,000 beneficiaries.