CHARLESTON — West Virginia Treasurer Riley Moore and 14 treasurers across the nation are threatening to pull assets from banks that succumb to pressure from President Joe Biden and climate czar John Kerry to pull investments in fossil fuels.

Moore sent a letter Tuesday to Kerry, Biden’s special presidential envoy for climate, signed by the 15-member coalition raising concerns about White House pressure on banking and financial institutions to halt lending to the fossil fuel industry.

Moore accused Kerry of pushing for divestment that will force banks to discriminate against coal, oil and natural gas companies.

“As a collective, we strongly oppose command-and-control economic policies that attempt to bend the free market to the political will of government officials,” Moore wrote. “It is simply antithetical to our nation’s position as a democracy and a capitalist economy for the Executive Branch to bully corporations into curtailing legal activities.”

The letter cites a Politico article that revealed that Kerry, a former U.S. Senator, Democratic presidential candidate and secretary of state under President Barack Obama, was pressuring banks in the U.S. to focus more on climate change mitigation. This included encouraging banks to create a net-zero banking alliance in conjunction with President Biden’s Earth Day goal to curb greenhouse gas emissions by more than 50 percent of 2005 levels by 2030.

Kerry and the Biden White House also are reportedly pressuring other banks to disclose their fossil fuel-related lending and investment activities.

“The Biden Administration’s top-down tactics of picking economic winners and losers deprives the real determinate group in our society, the people, of essential choice and agency,” Moore wrote. “We refuse to allow the federal government to pick our critical industries as losers, based purely on President Biden’s own radical political preferences and ideologies.”

Moore and the state treasurer coalition urged banking institutions to not succumb to the pressure from Kerry and the White House to divest from coal, oil and natural gas. Moore said the banks that do choose to divest under pressure could see state treasurers pull their holdings from those same banks.

“We intend to put banks and financial institutions on notice of our position, as we urge them not to give in to pressure from the Biden Administration to refuse to lend to or invest in coal, oil, and natural gas companies,” Moore wrote. “As the chief financial officers of our respective states, we entrust banks and financial institutions with billions of our taxpayers’ dollars. It is only logical that we will give significant weight to the fact that an institution engaged in tactics that will harm the people whose money they are handling before entering into or extending any contract.”

Between West Virginia and the 15-state coalition, they manage more than $600 billion in assets, including pension plans and other state accounts.

The coalition includes Alabama Treasurer John McMillan, Arizona Treasurer Kimberly Yee, Arkansas Treasurer Dennis Milligan, Idaho Treasurer Julie A. Ellsworth, Kentucky Treasurer Allison Ball, Mississippi Treasurer David McRae, Missouri Treasurer Scott Fitzpatrick, Nebraska Treasurer John Murante, North Dakota Treasurer Thomas Beadle, Ohio Treasurer Robert Sprague, Oklahoma Treasurer Randy McDaniel, Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity, South Carolina Treasurer Curtis Loftis Jr. and South Dakota Treasurer Josh Haeder.

McMillan is the only Democrat in the group.

(Adams can be contacted at sadams@newsandsentinel.com)