The Patriot Post® · Good News: ESG Is on the Rocks
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has been in the news a lot of late, walking the rest of us through the “crime scene” of the Twitter Files, but something he said months ago in his capacity as Tesla CEO is also bearing fruit for freedom-lovers everywhere.
“ESG is a scam,” Musk said back in May. “It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”
ESG, the innocent-sounding acronym of Environmental, Social, and Governance, is an integral part of The Great Reset and represents nothing less than a new way of evaluating the business enterprise. Rather than assessing traditional factors such as revenue, profit, debt, the quality of goods and services, brand loyalty, and other metrics, ESG assesses companies according to their fealty to social justice and other “progressive” causes.
At its core, ESG is about wealth redistribution — a leveling of the economic playing field by moving away from the extraordinarily effective wealth-production model of shareholder capitalism toward a so-called “stakeholder capitalism” model, which turns decent countries into socialist dystopias. Briefly put, ESG is where wokeness meets Wall Street.
And lately, it’s where wokeness has been getting pounded.
“It turns out that most ESG funds are lagging an already bad market,” notes Power Line’s Steve Hayward. That’s good news, of course, but the even better news came when Hayward revealed the best performing sector of the stock market this year: Fossil fuel companies. “In other words,” he continues, “energy that works. If you are overweight in oil, gas, and coal, you’re up on the year. That’s one reason to run as fast as you can away from any fund that boasts it doesn’t invest in oil or other forms of energy that work.”
Who knew investing could be so politically satisfying?
ESG is taking hits at the state level, too. As Fox Business reports, a coalition of 13 Republican attorneys general recently asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to hold a hearing “examining whether Vanguard Group should be given blanket authorization to purchase large quantities of public utility stocks due to its support for environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing.”
The backstory here is that last year, Vanguard, an investment advisor that manages around $7 trillion in global assets, joined the Net Zero Asset Managers Alliance — a group of nearly 300 managers who work together to “accelerate the transition towards global net-zero emissions.” The problem, then, as the AGs’ filing noted, is that by committing itself to such a nakedly “green” initiative, “Vanguard necessarily abandoned its status as a passive investor in public utilities and adopted a motive consistent with managing the utility.”
Lo and behold, Vanguard blinked. As The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editors note: “Emperors of finance may finally be discovering that climate virtue-signaling isn’t without costs. Credit to Vanguard last week for pulling out of the Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) pledge to purge fossil fuels and CO2-emitting companies from its funds.”
Hey, Republican state AGs get results.
Elsewhere in ESG, BlackRock, whose $10 trillion in assets under management make it the world’s largest asset manager, is planning “a slew of leadership changes across divisions” as it resists pressure to remove its CEO, Larry Fink, who along with the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab has become one of the most visible faces of ESG and socialist stakeholder capitalism.
All this is good news, but, as Hayward noted back in October, “The greens will go back to the drawing board, and will bring [ESG] back again under a new name.”
Still, with these gargantuan investment funds now failing to deliver decent returns due to the wokeness of their investments, they now have a very real fear of legal action for having failed in their fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns.
Which is bad news for ESG, but good news for the rest of us.