The evil of ESG

 Andrea Widburg:

Environment, Social, and Governance, better known as ESG, is a metric that measures whether a nation or corporation can demonstrate the maximum amount of corporate virtue-signaling.  The most striking example is Sri Lanka, the former government of which massively increased its ESG by mandating only organic fertilizer in the small nation, leading to massive inflation, famine, and the violent overthrow of its government.  ESG is bad business and, as Sri Lanka demonstrates, dangerous to human well-being.  Now Governor Ron DeSantis has announced that Florida is leading the way to stand against this utterly toxic metric.

For just one example of the mindless gobbledygook behind ESG, take a gander at this recent write-up from Kyle Peterdy at CFI, which is an accredited provider of online content for finance professionals (that is, it's teaching this crap to the next generation):

ESG is an acronym for Environmental, Social, and Governance. ESG takes the holistic view that sustainability extends beyond just environmental issues.

ESG is best characterized as a framework that helps stakeholders understand how an organization is managing risks and opportunities related to environmental, social, and governance criteria. 

While the term ESG is often used in the context of investing, stakeholders include not just the investment community but also customers, suppliers, and employees. All of them are increasingly interested in how sustainable an organization's operations are.

Blah.  Blah.  Blah.  I'm sure Mr. Peterdy is a nice man, but this is a wall of garbage words aimed at imposing every kind of leftist policy, provided it's wrapped in virtuous language, on financial and political marketplaces.

Read on and get to the key takeaway: "ESG has changed how many investment and capital allocation decisions are made."  In other words, if a corporation or country virtue-signals its green credentials, that will drive money toward it in the short term.  The problem is that, in the long term, those same virtue-signaling acts are unsustainable, and they either destroy corporate profits (wiping out investors and employees) or push countries into famine and blackout territory.

...

Florida has announced that its pension funds will not invest in any operation that uses ESG.  That is a good move and others should join them in opposing this disaster attack on commonsense. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains

James Robbins: ... Bin Laden suggests that President Bush should allow Zarqawi’s body to be returned to his family in Jordan, but this is a matter that is up to the Jordanian government, which so far has not shown much interest in facilitating a homecoming. Bin Laden mocks King Abdullah II, calling him a Coalition minion, and asking “w hat scares you about Abu Musab after he’s dead? You know that his funeral, if allowed to happen, would be a huge funeral showing the extent of sympathy with the mujahedin.” A large crowd would definitely turn out, though most people would be on hand to demonstrate their anger and disgust. Last November’s hotel bombings in Amman , masterminded by Zarqawi, are still fresh in people’s memory, and mentioning them to Jordanians has the same visceral impact as memory of the 9/11 attacks does here. Jordan has adopted a zero-tolerance policy towards those who choose to mourn the country’s least favorite son, and four opposition members of parliament who paid con
Read more