CalSTRS hired Chan, a career pension investment officer, as a deputy chief investment officer in 2018 and promoted him to the chief investment officer in July 2024. In the meantime, during a 2022 State Council of Education meeting, Chan pushed back against divesting CalSTRS’s portfolio from fossil fuels, arguing that divestment could result in a $20 billion loss. Instead of divesting, Chan said CalSTRS could use its largesse to engage companies, influence policies, invest in climate solutions, and other matters.
The following year, state records show that Chan began buying and selling fossil fuel stocks. On April 3, 2023, Chan bought between $10,001 and $100,000 in stock for Enterprise Products Partners, a company that provides services for natural gas and crude oil companies. Two months later, he purchased another tranche of the company’s stock worth between $10,001 and $100,000, then sold off all of these investments that October.
That same year, Chan purchased shares of Plains All American Pipeline, which transports and stores oil and gas. He also bought and sold stock of railroad companies CSX and Union Pacific, which are heavily reliant on shipping fossil fuels, and bought shares of Nextera Energy Partners, a renewable energy company that at the time owned natural gas pipelines.
Since then, Chan has increased his trading in the sector. In 2024, Chan bought and sold up to $900,000 worth of stock in eleven fossil fuel companies or utilities that use fossil fuels. The following year, Chan sold shares in eleven fossil fuel and utility companies worth up to $1.1 million.
Other CalSTRS employees have also been dealing in oil and gas investments. Nile Garritson, a portfolio manager for the fund, owned up to $1.7 million in stock in eighteen fossil fuel companies and an exchange-traded fund focused on oil and gas between 2024 and 2025. Those holdings included shares of Phillips 66, Shell, the liquid natural gas exporter Cheniere Energy, and Bloom Energy, which uses fossil fuels and other energy sources to produce fuel cells for data centers and commercial uses.
David Gold, another CalSTRS portfolio manager, owned up to $2 million in Sunoco and Energy Transfer LP stock and up to $100,000 in Chevron stock in 2025.
Other CalSTRS employees have also been investing in fossil fuels. That includes its senior investment director, April Wilcox, who bought up to $10,000 in Nextera Energy stock; its director of risk mitigating strategies, Puneet Kohil, who owns up to $100,000 in BP stock, and its director of its fixed income portfolio, Rosemary Lucchesini, who owns up to $100,000 in Pacific Gas & Electric stock. (Last year, Lucchesini also sold up to $10,000 worth of stock in Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of President Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social).
All of these employees’ holdings, from Chan on down, make it harder for the pension fund to fully divest from the fossil fuel sector because doing so could affect their personal investments, said Brooks.
“Imagine a scenario where tomorrow, CalSTRS decides that it’s going to listen to the science . . . and they say we are going to divest from fossil fuels. The signal that that would send to the rest of the pension sector would be huge,” Brooks said. “The impact on the market could be significant. The impact on the holdings that [Chan] and others have in their portfolio would be detrimental.”