Summer Spotlight Series: Your retirement savings might be financing a project that Indigenous leaders oppose

By Amy Gray, Associate Climate Finance Director, Stand.earth

 

The average American has $6,000 invested in fossil fuels through their 401(k), often without knowing it. Last week, that fact got more complicated.

On June 12, 2026, Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs sent a formal letter to ten of Canada’s largest pension funds demanding they deny any investment in LNG Canada, a major liquefied natural gas export terminal in British Columbia, Canada. 

The signatories Chief Na’Moks of the Tsayu (Beaver Clan), Chief Dsta’hyl of the Likhts’amisyu Clan, and Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, President of the Union of BC Indian Chiefs named the project a violation of Indigenous rights and a financially unsound bet. They gave pension funds until June 26 to respond.

The letter was addressed to Canadian pension funds and Export Development Canada. But the money potentially flowing into LNG Canada isn’t only Canadian. Three American private equity giants—Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo—are currently competing to acquire a majority of Shell’s stake in the project. If any of them wins, capital from U.S. retirement savers could end up financing the same infrastructure Indigenous leaders have formally opposed.

Chief Na’Moks was direct: “Any institution that invests in LNG Canada is complicit in the ongoing violation of Wet’suwet’en rights and title. If you invest in LNG Canada, you will face the moral, legal, and financial consequences.” 

Here’s what you need to know and how you can help. 

 

What Is LNG Canada, and Why Does It Matter to Americans?

LNG Canada is Canada’s first major LNG export terminal, located in Kitimat, British Columbia. The mega-project represents the largest private-sector investment in Canadian history, backed by a joint venture consisting of Shell, Petronas, PetroChina, Mitsubishi, and KOGAS. It exports liquefied natural gas to Asian markets and depends entirely on the Coastal GasLink pipeline for its gas supply. LNG Canada halves the shipping transit time to key Asian markets to about 10 days, compared to the 20-day journey from the U.S. Gulf Coast via the Panama Canal 

The 670-kilometer Coastal GasLink pipeline serves as the exclusive gas supply to the Kitimat facility, linking fracked gas from the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin directly to the coast. That pipeline was built through Wet’suwet’en territory without the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent of the hereditary chiefs, the rights holders recognized by the Supreme Court of Canada. 

The legal and reputational exposure that comes with that history does not disappear when the asset changes hands.The Wet’suwet’en didn’t just start fighting when Coastal GasLink arrived; they’ve been systematically re-occupying and protecting their land for years. In 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in a landmark case (Delgamuukw v. British Columbia) that Wet’suwet’en land title had never been extinguished. The land is unceded.

The state and private security response to the Wet’suwet’en land defenders has been intensely heavy-handed. There have been three massive, highly militarized Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) raids (2019, 2020, and 2021) involving multiple arrests, snipers, canine units, and helicopters to clear out camps and checkpoints. 

In response to their peaceful blockades, Canadian authorities have launched multiple militarized police raids, drawing condemnation from global human rights organizations like Amnesty International, which designated Wet’suwet’en Wing Chief Dsta’hyl a prisoner of conscience in 2024. A major exposé by The Guardian uncovered leaked internal documents from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) strategy sessions prior to the January 2019 raid. The documents revealed that RCMP commanders deployed an officer for “lethal overwatch” meaning they were explicitly authorized and prepared to use deadly force against unarmed land defenders.

Frontline community members describe living under constant, intrusive surveillance. Drones fly overhead continuously, private security vehicles follow people down rural roads, and RCMP trucks have been documented driving through peaceful camps at all hours of the night blasting loud music to intentionally induce sleep deprivation. Matriarchs report that children no longer feel safe playing outside on their ancestral lands. 

Amnesty International’s comprehensive human rights report concluded that the state and pipeline private security forces created an intentional “atmosphere of fear and violence” to displace the population.

While pipeline developers point to agreements signed with elected band councils, those councils only hold authority over government-created reserves under Canada’s Indian Act. The broader 22,000 square kilometers of traditional territory is governed by the traditional Hereditary Chiefs, representing five distinct clans. All five clans have explicitly refused to grant the Free, Prior, and Informed Consent required under international law.

The Wet’suwet’en struggle reveals a profound and intense history of land defense. The conflict isn’t just a simple disagreement over a pipeline; it is a fundamental battle over sovereignty, colonial legal frameworks, and human rights that has been building for decades.

The letter sent by First Nations leaders makes the legal position clear: investing in LNG Canada is investing in infrastructure that continues to violate Wet’suwet’en rights. A Phase 2 expansion would compound those violations significantly: new pipeline infrastructure, new construction through unceded territory, and a new round of the same unresolved consent failures.

Any pension or retirement fund that acquires a stake in LNG Canada inherits that exposure. Climate risk is financial risk—and it does not go away when ownership changes hands.

 

The Private Equity Connection to Your 401(k)

Private equity doesn’t show up in your 401(k) the same way a mutual fund does. It’s embedded in infrastructure and real assets funds, often with names that sound reassuringly neutral. But the exposure is real.

Most people think of their 401(k) as holding stocks and mutual funds and for the publicly traded portion, that’s true. But over the last decade, major asset managers have increasingly added private market funds to workplace retirement plans, packaging private equity and infrastructure investments inside vehicles with names like “diversified real assets” or “alternative income.” These sit inside your plan’s menu alongside your target date fund, often without any indication of what’s underneath.

Major PE firms like Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo all offer products that appear directly in 401(k) plan menus at major employers. Blackstone’s BREIT and similar vehicles have been added to retirement plans administered by Fidelity and other major recordkeepers. The line between “institutional” and “retail” retirement exposure to private equity has been steadily eroding by design.

Private equity firms like Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo also raise capital through funds that institutional investors including public pension funds commit to as limited partners. Those pension funds manage the retirement assets of teachers, nurses, and municipal workers. When a state pension fund commits $200 million to a Blackstone energy fund, that capital is drawn from the contributions of public employees. And when that fund invests in an LNG terminal, the chain runs from the terminal straight back to the worker’s retirement account invisibly, and without their input. Workers everywhere are exposed whether you have a 401k or a pension and no one gave us a choice. 

Here’s the basics on the big private equity firms involved: 

Blackstone is simultaneously bidding to acquire Shell’s LNG Canada stake while already holding an investment in Ksi Lisims LNG, another proposed Canadian LNG export terminal, through its Blackstone Energy Transition Partners IV (BETP IV) fund. Despite its name, the fund’s flagship investment is a new natural gas power plant in West Virginia. Its cash returned to investors to date? Essentially zero. 

KKR, alongside Alberta Investment Management Corporation, is a co-owner of the Coastal GasLink pipeline itself , the same pipeline whose construction the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs have formally and legally opposed. KKR’s infrastructure funds are widely held across institutional and retail retirement vehicles in the United States.

Apollo is the third bidder. Apollo’s infrastructure and credit funds similarly appear across U.S. retirement plans

None of this is disclosed to you at the point of enrollment. When you sign up for your 401(k) and choose a target date fund or a diversified portfolio, you are not told whether that capital will end up financing a pipeline built without Indigenous consent or an LNG terminal that foreign energy majors are actively exiting.

 

Why Are the Foreign Majors Leaving?

Shell and Mitsubishi are not exiting LNG Canada because the project is thriving. Train 1 operated at roughly 50% capacity through much of its first year due to turbine and refrigerant unit failures. The facility flared 350 million cubic metres of gas in 2025—more than any other LNG export facility on record globally in 2024—triggering health authority investigations in the region. 

The broader market is not cooperating either. LNG Canada’s entire premise rests on growing Asian demand for Canadian gas. Analysts tracking the fallout from the Iran conflict have documented how energy price volatility is accelerating the shift to renewables among Asia’s price-sensitive buyers, a pattern that mirrors what happened in Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. LNG projects have already been cancelled in China and Vietnam. A global LNG supply glut, long predicted, is still expected to materialize. Canada has a well-documented record of major infrastructure coming online late, over budget, and into a less -than-favorable projected market.

When the companies with the deepest knowledge of a project are racing for the exit, that is a signal. Private equity firms buying in at this stage are not doing so because the fundamentals improved. They are more risk tolerant and are notorious for buying companies that are in trouble. They are doing so because there is a price at which they believe they can make the numbers work and the risk that those numbers don’t work ultimately lands on the limited partners in their funds, which includes 401k’s and through them, you.

 

What You Can Do

99% of 401(k) plans in the United States have no climate-friendly investment option. That is a design choice, not an inevitability, and it is one that you can push back on.

• Step 1: Find out what you own. Go to Fossil Free Funds and search your funds and ETFs by name or ticker. The tool tracks exposure to fossil fuel companies across thousands of U.S. funds and can show you what is sitting in your retirement portfolio.
• Step 2: Ask for a climate-safe option. If your plan has no fossil-free alternative, you can request one. Plans can and do change when enough participants ask. Use the Advocacy Toolkit to help you get started.
• Step 3: Add your voice. The Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs and UBCIC have put Canada’s pension funds on notice. Stand.earth is demanding those funds stay out of LNG Canada. Tell them you’re watching too. Take action: demand pension funds stay out of LNG Canada →