Warning: Your retirement fund may have been Shanghaied by BlackRock or other Wall Street asset managers who’ve unilaterally decided that the tens of trillions of dollars of other people’s money they control should be used to advance political causes they favor – to “make the world a better place.”
As most people know, ESG stands for Environmental protection, Social justice, and Governance of corporate and societal affairs. They’re all noble-sounding causes. However, under ESG they’re centered around progressive, woke agendas, with the prevention of “manmade climate cataclysms” uppermost. Fund assets are used to drive “net zero” climate agendas and punish or de-fund fossil fuel companies.
That narrow focus creates serious problems. Those trillions of dollars are supposed to be passively invested in the index and other funds, under fiduciary obligations to secure maximum returns in support of the state, local, corporate and personal retirement and investment accounts. Under ESG, however, strong returns are too often sacrificed to serve politicized agendas, often in collusion with governments, activists, and other financial institutions, and thus also in violation of antitrust laws and basic ethical principles.
That’s why Asset manager Vanguard recently left the UN-sponsored “Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.” Meanwhile, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, and other states are pulling tens of billions of dollars out of BlackRock, State Street, and other Wall Street asset management firms, for violating fiduciary duties.
A second ESG ethical dilemma arises from the way practitioners employ narrow definitions of ES&G to virtue-signal, pontificate, and impose prescriptive agendas. When the “existential threat of manmade climate change” is the primary arbiter, enormous problems associated with replacing fossil fuels with “clean renewable energy” are simply ignored, suppressed, and censored from the analysis.
Here are some of the people and planet realities that must be included in any ESG analysis.
Environmental protection. Rather than looking only at the temperatures, storms, droughts, rising seas and other environmental costs that climate models falsely blame on fossil fuel emissions – any accurate and honest ESG scorecard must also assess the ecological impacts from the wind-solar-battery (WSB) energy systems that will supposedly replace oil, gas, and coal.
WSB systems and associated transmission lines do not appear spontaneously, via Materials Acquisition for Global Industrial Change (MAGIC). They require mining on unprecedented scales. President Biden’s initial batch of offshore wind turbines alone would require 110,000 tons of copper, refined from 25,000,000 tons of ore, after removing 40,000,000 tons of overburden – plus millions of tons of iron, manganese, aluminum, nickel, concrete, plastics, and other materials ... from billions of tons of ores.
Replacing all U.S. coal and gas electricity generation with WSB – plus gasoline vehicles and gas stoves and furnaces – would require tens of thousands of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of battery modules for vehicles and backup electricity storage, and thousands of miles of new transmission lines. Has BlackRock calculated the ore body and mining requirements for that? For a global transition?
All those turbines, panels, modules, transmission lines, mines, processing plants, and factories have to be located somewhere. Have the ESG potentates determined in whose backyards they will go? (Probably not Larry Fink’s or John Kerry’s.) Have they assessed the impacts on scenery, habitats, and wildlife? the air and water pollution from the mines and other operations? Did those operations get ESG scores?
Social justice. ESG theology holds that the poor and people of color suffer most from climate change. In reality, they benefit most from having abundant, reliable, affordable fuels and electricity – for cars, jobs, modern homes, cooking, heat, and air conditioning. The poor and people of color are not faring all that well in Britain and Europe, where the “transition to green energy” is well underway.
Over seven million British households have fallen into “fuel poverty” this winter, and special “warm rooms” have been set up to help people survive freezing weather. Recent headlines warn that Britain could have nationwide blackouts and extensive factory shutdowns and layoffs this winter. In Germany, families are stocking up on candles, so that they can at least read while they shiver in their homes.
Developing countries desperately need dependable, affordable electricity to create jobs, lift families out of poverty, modernize homes, schools, and hospitals, provide clean water, and replace wood and animal dung for cooking and heating. Even today, millions of parents and children die from respiratory and intestinal diseases that are unheard of in wealthy countries.
ESG scoring ignores all of this, actively stymies investment in fossil fuel power plants in Africa and other countries, and attempts to limit financing to wind and solar energy and whatever jobs and living standards this limited, weather-dependent energy can support. That’s hardly ethical or socially responsible.
Governance of corporate and societal affairs. ESG activists and financial institutions coopt and collude with corporate, federal, state, and local governments to serve the climate crisis agenda, and drive investment out of fossil fuel endeavors and into “renewable” energy. In essence, this is fascism, an economic system in which government doesn’t own the means of production but controls them through laws, policies, and arrangements with financial institutions, corporations, activists, media, and academia.
Equally troublesome, ESG inevitably results in modern industrialized nations de-developing, as their factories and jobs migrate to China, India, and other countries that are not obligated under climate agreements to reduce their coal and natural gas use anytime soon, have no intention of doing so and are burning record amounts of coal to ensure reliable and affordable electricity.
This also raises disturbing national security concerns, as the United States and its allies become ever more dependent on China and Chinese-controlled supply chains for wind, solar, battery, transformer, communication, computing, healthcare, and even defense/weaponry raw materials and technologies.
ESG advocates minimize these concerns, even as they ignore how soaring raw material demands under Net Zero plans would trigger skyrocketing prices for increasingly scarce commodities, and thus imperil the economies of nations across the globe.
The words scam and fraud come to mind. But an even better term is Shanghaied: using trickery, intimidation, or violence to force someone to serve your navy ... or company. In this case, ESG pressures are forcing investors, companies, and countries to serve the interest of China’s government and corporate sectors, which control supply chains and manufacturing for technologies of every description, especially in the energy sector.
This Christmas or Hanukkah, let’s all give the gift of wise, honest, accurate, and insightful Environmental, Social, and Governance principles to our friends, relatives, and financial institutions.
Paul Driessen is a senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environmental, and human rights issues.
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