Fink told attendees at a 2017 New York Times conference that as an index fund manager, “we are the ultimate long-term holder; we have to own all the companies that are in an index.

“If you’re an active manager and you don’t like a company, you can sell it,” Fink said. “I can’t sell. I have only one power, and I’m going to use that power heavily. And that’s the power of the vote.”

Proxy voting refers to the practice of fund managers voting the corporate shares they own on behalf of the individuals and institutions that invested in their funds. With the rise of mutual funds, pension funds and index funds, more than three-quarters of all stocks in the United States today are held, not by individual investors but by a short list of very large asset management firms.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has more than $8 trillion in assets under management. Vanguard, the second largest, has more than $7 trillion under management. State Street has about $3.5 trillion under management.

At the same time, two proxy agent companies, International Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis, have arisen to advise fund managers on how to vote on numerous shareholder proposals. Critics argue that fund managers and proxy agents now have undue influence over shareholder votes and that they have used that power to successfully push a left-wing agenda known as the environmental, social and governance (ESG) movement on companies.

Congressional Hearings on ESG

In a series of Congressional Financial Services Committee hearings this week, Republican representatives hammered the ESG industry, which the Biden administration has supported, for manipulating free markets for political goals, while Democrat representatives accused the GOP of racism, climate denial and Trotskyism.

“I support shareholder democracy, but it should be their say and not external third parties who exploit the existing process to impose their own social and political beliefs onto American public companies,” Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) stated at the July 12 hearing.

In addition, “We must address the burdensome climate reporting and other requirements imposed by the Biden administration Securities and Exchange Commission,” he said. “The SEC has proposed a 500-page climate disclosure rule that would replace voluntary sustainability reports with mandatory disclosures, and the question of materiality is really thrown out the window.”

“The SEC is not a climate regulator, nor has Congress authorized it to mandate environmental policy via the disclosure regime,” McHenry said.

Democrat lawmakers, however, were united in their view that the ESG hearings should not take place and presented themselves as defenders of free market capitalism.

“Today is the first of six areas this month where Republicans will partner with a network of dark money, climate deniers and conspiracy theorists to wage their latest culture war against responsible investing,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) stated.

“For over 100 years, the followers of Leon Trotsky and the Socialist Workers Party have waged war against this capitalist model,” Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) stated. “Today, elements of the Republican Party join them in that effort. Ronald Reagan would be ashamed.”

How Proxy Voting Works

The hearings focused on how to address the role of proxy agents and how to deal with efforts by financial regulators under the Biden administration to impose extensive climate reporting rules on all listed companies. New regulations by the SEC would require companies to produce audited reports on their CO2 emissions, as well as those of their suppliers and customers.

“Coupled with the recent politicization of the SEC, proxy advisory firms have seized immense power to shift policy … to promote a liberal social and political agenda,” Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.) stated. “The proxy process is broken; it no longer promotes long-term shareholder value and operates without transparency or accountability.”

The proxy process begins with shareholder proposals, for which the SEC acts as a gatekeeper, determining which can proceed to a shareholder vote and which cannot. Under President Biden in 2021, the SEC shifted its policy to make it easier for ESG proposals to be put to a vote.

“The SEC’s new position is that corporate annual meetings must permit the smallest of shareholders to force shareholder votes on any social or policy concerns whether or not it is material to the company’s business,” James Copland, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told Committee members. “This change in policy has predictably led to a significant increase in socially oriented shareholder activism.

“In 2022, the first year after the SEC’s new guidance, the number of shareholder proposals faced by the large companies tracked in our proxy monitor database jumped 33 percent over the prior three-year average,” Copland said. “To date in 2023, with approximately 10 percent of companies yet to file a proxy statement, companies have already seen a record number of shareholder proposals.”

“Environmental and social proposals now represent a majority of all proposals in Russell 3000 companies, 58 percent of proposals in 2022,” Jonathan Berry, a partner at law firm Boyden Gray, testified at the July 13 hearing. In addition, Berry said, the SEC has shown a bias toward green-lighting pro-ESG proposals while rejecting anti-ESG proposals.

“This last proxy season, my client, the National Center [for Public Policy Research], took a shareholder proposal that the SEC had blessed on a discrimination issue and substituted the terms ‘viewpoint’ and ‘ideology’ for the prior proposal’s terms ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity,’” Berry stated. “But the SEC said that my client’s proposal could be struck off the ballot, that viewpoint discrimination in the workplace was not a significant social policy question.”

“In recent years, third parties have hijacked the proxy process,” said National Association of Manufacturers Vice President Christopher Netram. “Activists use the proxy ballot to advance political and social agendas.”

“Proxy firms dictate corporate governance decisions, and the SEC is empowering these groups while also proposing ESG disclosure mandates of its own,” Netram said. “Turning the proxy ballot into a debate club diverts time and resources away from shareholder value creation and forces companies to wade into controversial topics over which they have no control.”

Examples of companies wading into controversial topics include Disney’s fight in 2022 against parental rights laws in Florida, Coca-Cola’s fight in 2021 against voter I.D. laws in Georgia, and Anheuser Busch and Target’s recent attachment of their brands to the transgender movement. In many cases, venturing into politics proved harmful to brand perception, has reduced sales, or caused a substantial decline in the company’s stock price, all to the detriment of end investors.

Those who support ESG say it is merely a means of getting important information to investors and that the SEC’s green accounting mandate and permissive approach toward ESG shareholder proposals is simply the free market at work.

“Investors need to know how companies are addressing climate risk, how they pay their employees, how diverse their workforce is, and more investors want this information, because it’s good for the performance of their investments, which is also good for society,” Waters said. “Rest assured that committed Democrats will continue to thwart this anti-capitalist, anti-investor, anti-business and anti-American effort.”

But ESG critics say there’s more to it than that.

“ESG efforts are not primarily about providing information,” Scott Shepard, director at the National Center for Public Policy Research, told The Epoch Times. “They’re about forcing companies to adopt political-schedule decarbonization, equity-based discrimination and hard-left positions on social policy.”

According to Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, much of the information that comes from environmental or racial audits that companies are compelled to produce will not be used to increase shareholder value but rather “to give far-left activists a cudgel to use against these companies” via lawsuits, negative publicity campaigns, and additional shareholder proposals.

The Proxy Agent Duopoly

The proxy agency market is a duopoly in which ISS and Glass Lewis together represent more than 90 percent of the market.

“Both earlier and recent regulatory actions by the Securities and Exchange Commission have created a duopoly in the market for proxy advisory services and powerful incentives for firms and funds to retain proxy advisors and to adopt their recommendations often on an automatic basis,” Benjamin Zycher, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told lawmakers.

“The advisors themselves have weak incentives to consider the fiduciary interests of shareholders and fund participants, thus freeing them to indulge their own political preferences and little or no cost to themselves,” Zycher said. “Unsurprisingly, environmental social and government’s political objectives have come to influence proxy advice heavily.”

Steven Friedman, ISS general counsel, testified that ISS is a registered investment advisor that “provides institutional investors with objective, timely and expert proxy research and vote recommendations based on the proxy voting policies selected by the clients.”

“ISS and other proxy advisors play an important but narrow role in the proxy voting process,” Friedman said. “It’s the client who creates and selects the voting policy guidelines that reflect their own fiduciary obligations and investments strategies.”

A 2018 report by the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance stated that “proxy advisory firms have significant influence over the voting decisions of institutional investors and the governance choices of publicly traded companies. However, it is not clear that the recommendations of these firms are correct and generally lead to better outcomes for companies and their shareholders.”

According to this report, ISS and Glass Lewis are able to swing between 10 percent and 30 percent of shareholder votes in line with their recommendations.

A 2018 report by the American Council for Capital Formation stated that 175 asset managers, with more than $5 trillion in assets under management, followed the advice of ISS more than 95% of the time.

A July 12 Wall Street Journal article stated that both ISS and Glass Lewis supported an audit of Starbucks’ employment practices this year, which shareholders passed with a 52 percent majority, and that the duopoly backed a racial equity audit at McDonald’s that passed with 55 percent support.

Policy recommendations included breaking up the proxy advisor duopoly and passing laws to check the administrative overreach of financial regulators like the SEC.

“One thing they should do is look at why it’s a duopoly in the first place,” Hild said. “Generally speaking, we don’t allow that in any major industries and certainly not something as big and important as the proxy advising services.”

“I urge Congress not to focus on the large asset managers, BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard,” Zycher stated. “Their incentives are roughly efficient, however silly their public pronouncements.

“I urge Congress instead to reform the SEC regulatory framework,” Zycher said. “I urge Congress to enact legislation constraining the efforts of regulatory agencies to pursue climate policies not authorized in the law, uninformed by actual evidence and justified on the basis of fundamentally dishonest benefit-cost analysis.

“Such regulatory efforts continue to engender vast costs and no benefits.”

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

Entitled “No climate crisis: carbon dioxide has zero effect on temperatures,” the piece blows to bits the myth that carbon dioxide, a natural substance that all plants need in order to produce oxygen so we can breathe, has absolutely nothing to do with planetary temperatures.

Using two graphs and less than 300 words, the front-page story demolishes the climate hoax, exposing it as a sinister tool for stripping humans of their basic freedoms, including the right to work, travel and access public places.

Under the guise of promoting “ecological responsibility,” the globalists and their roving bands of climate fanatics aim to shift the world away from freedom and tradition into the tyrannical hands of corporate greed and control.

“The climate hoax is an attack on farming and food production – documentaries bemoan the methane production of cows, while the growth and transportation of soya beans destroys rainforests and requires an immense amount of water,” the article states.

“In terms of CO2, little is done to prevent celebrities and world leaders from flying in private jets from London to Inverness, while we must cycle to work, turn off the lights and eat bugs, while none of it makes any difference …”

(Related: One of the co-founders of Greenpeace is on record as confirming that carbon dioxide is the building block of all life on earth, which used to be taught as a basic science concept in grade school before the climate cult gutted education and turned it into a propaganda factory.)

COVID protocols like single-use masks, gloves and tests massively polluted the world

The article includes two graphs illustrating that even as CO2 levels have risen, air temperatures have remained roughly the same or even decreased at different points throughout recent history.

Over the past several thousand years, in fact, temperatures have been on an over decline, which is why back in the 1970s the corporate media was warning about global cooling. Since then, they shifted to a warming narrative followed by a general climate change narrative that encompasses it all.

During the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19), there was a lot of talk about implementing a “new normal” that dovetailed with the goals of the climate brigade. They took the opportunity to use the “pandemic” as an excuse to push for massive changes in support of the climate, even as they forced the world to use highly polluting things like single-use masks, gloves and tests.

“Post-pandemic, it was said that animals returned to towns and air quality improved,” the article explains. “This was not the case, and also the recent push for reusable plastics was ignored, as single-use plastic COVID tests, gloves and masks were produced and used by the billions, while again making no difference.”

“The idea that we are helping the Earth by staying inside and complicit is pushing the public to accept that, in order to save the world we love so much, we must completely sacrifice our freedom.”

The article is really eye-opening and worth a read, as is the entire 23-page June issue of The Light.

“It’s really a simple hoax,” one commenter wrote about the myth of climate change. “The UN set up the IPCC to find evidence of man-made climate warming – not to investigate if it is actually occurring, but rather to procure anything suggesting that it does without question.”

Learn more truths the climate cult wants you in the dark about at Climate.news.

Sources for this article include:

• TheLightPaper.co.uk
• Expose-News.com
• Newstarget.com
• TheLightPaper.co.uk
• NATURAL NEWS

When we think manufacturing, we think Michigan. As one of America’s leading manufacturing states, it stands in the top third for economic outlook among all the United States, and it’s leading America’s industrial renaissance.

Unfortunately, some Michigan lawmakers are pursuing a series of so-called green legislative efforts that will stop the state’s progress square in its tracks.

The leading culprit is House Bill 4739, which will subject Michigan families and businesses to “a carbon-free energy portfolio of 100%” by 2035, with some minor exclusions. To put it lightly, this would devastate the Michigan economy and provide no environmental benefits.

Let’s first look at the economics.

Michigan gets about 63% of its energy from conventional sources like coal and natural gas (33.4% and 29.4%, respectively). 26% comes from nuclear, while wind and solar provide only around 8%.

This means that two-thirds of Michigan’s most affordable electricity will need to be replaced by more expensive and less reliable renewables.

In other words, higher prices and lower reliability for Michigan residential consumers and businesses.

While the pro-renewable community tries to handwave these problems away, there is enough real-world evidence that shows how harmful a forced transition to renewables actually is—especially to manufacturing-heavy economies.

Take Germany, for instance, where the political class is forcing a transition from conventional fuels to less dense energy sources such as wind and solar. Because of that, industry in the country faces a 40% increase in energy prices.

Many will blame this increase on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but that’s not the real story.

As an initial matter, the residential retail price for electricity in Germany was already triple that of the U.S. average in 2021. Germany’s reliance on Russia was a result of its push towards renewables (and its shift away from nuclear energy), which left it unable to generate the power it needed to fuel its modern industrial economy. It relied instead on Russian hydrocarbons, and that is what created the vulnerability.

And it’s being felt by German businesses.

The Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry recently reported that industry pessimism about the economy is as severe now as it was during the 2008 financial crisis and the initial COVID-19 lockdowns. Seventy-eight percent of businesses surveyed identified rising energy and raw material prices as two of the biggest risks they face, contributing to expectations that their businesses will deteriorate.

Another survey found that nearly 25% of Germany’s small- and medium-sized businesses are considering or actually relocating parts of their operations to other countries. One prominent example is German company BASF’s decision to invest in China rather than Germany (or Michigan).

The great irony of the entire episode is that Putin’s gas and oil, which was backfilling for the deficiency of renewables, is now being backfilled by coal.

There are examples closer to home as well.

Like the Michigan proposal, California has a zero-carbon energy goal, which it plans to reach by 2045. Like Germany, California imports energy to make up for its own policy deficiencies—indeed, California is America’s leading electricity importer. Also, like Germany, electricity prices in California are significantly higher than the U.S. average.

The result is that businesses and industry can’t leave California fast enough.

Why would anyone in Michigan want to replicate what’s happening in California or Germany? And who is going to backfill Michigan’s energy shortfalls?

From the fur trade to lumber to auto manufacturing, Michigan has seen its fair share of booms and busts.

Yet somehow, manufacturing always fights back.

Between 1979, when there were around 1.2 million manufacturing jobs in Michigan, and 1983, the state lost over 300,000 manufacturing jobs. Eventually, manufacturing largely stabilized at between 800,000 and 900,000 jobs during the 1990s and then steadily dropped during the 2000s before bottoming out at 431,000 jobs during the 2009 financial crisis. It then fought its way back to over 600,000 manufacturing jobs when COVID-19 struck (or more accurately, governments struck down our economy with their COVID-19 policies).

Michigan needs to succeed, and removing energy options is the way to failure, not success. If Michigan’s politicians believe so much in renewables, they should prohibit electricity from being imported from neighboring states that use coal or natural gas to produce it.

Perhaps most importantly, how is Michigan’s manufacturing and industrial renaissance going to survive such a policy?

Some might argue that while the costs could be severe, it’s a price worth paying to save the planet. So, let’s now look at the environmental impact.

The Heritage Foundation’s chief statistician, Kevin Dayaratna, has investigated exactly this impact using the same models used by government agencies. He found that eliminating all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions would reduce temperatures by no more than 0.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. (The Daily Signal is the multimedia news and commentary site of The Heritage Foundation.)

If Michigan were to eliminate all of its conventional fuel-based emissions, it would result in the infinitesimal temperature reduction of 0.0042 degrees Celsius by 2100. Michigan needs to ask itself, after all that its industry has been through over the past century, after all the fighting back, as it sits at the precipice of a manufacturing renaissance, is it worth throwing all of that away for 0.0042 degrees over a lifetime?

The answer is no.

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal. Image by swskeptic from USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The United States currently has an estimated 149.5 gigawatts (GW) of solar capacity installed nationwide. In the first quarter of 2023, the country installed 6.1 GW of solar capacity, which is its “best first quarter in history,” according to a June 8 press release by research firm Wood Mackenzie. Over the next five years, Wood Mackenzie expects America’s total installed solar capacity to hit 378 GW by 2028.

China is the biggest solar manufacturer in the world and a key supplier of panels to the United States. But trading with China comes with human costs like slave labor.

Last year, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) withheld 1,642 electronic shipments valued at $841 million, including solar panels, due to the implementation of the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act that sought to counter the use of forced labor when sourcing from China. In March, the CBP released 552 pieces of equipment worth $345 million.

The stalled import of solar panels from China caused delays in solar project development programs. But with the release of part of the withheld shipments, the Chinese solar panels will now make their way into American projects.

Besides the human rights issue in the manufacturing process, the solar industry has another hurdle that is yet to be resolved and which is soon touted to be a global ecological nightmare.

Most solar panels have a lifespan of around 25 to 30 years. As these panels stop working or are retired, they pose a significant challenge as countries have to make sound arrangements to deal with the massive amounts of solar panel waste.

Burgeoning Solar Waste

Based on numbers from Yale School of the Environment, solar panels due to retire by 2030 in the United States would cover around 3,000 American football fields.

In a May 13 interview with CNBC, Suvi Sharma, the CEO of Texas-based Solarcycle, stated that solar energy is “becoming the dominant form of power generation” while citing an EIA report which said that 54 percent of new utility-scale electric-generating capacity in the United States this year will come from solar.

However, nothing has been done to make the solar industry “circular,” Sharma said, referring to recycling. At present, there are over 500 million solar panels in America, with tens of millions expected to be added in the coming years.

A 2019 study published in Renewable Energy estimated that the country will see roughly 9.8 million metric tons of solar panel waste between 2030 and 2060.

In China, solar panel waste has become a major issue. Over the past years, China scrambled to boost the production of solar panels without properly maintaining technology standards. As a result, many of these panels are becoming unusable before the end of their expected lifetime.

The scrapping rate of solar panels in China is estimated to have reached around 30 percent per year, Fang Qi, an investment consultant living in the United Kingdom, told The Epoch Times on April 4.

In March, Liu Limin, deputy secretary of the PV specialized committee of China ECOPV Alliance, predicted at a forum that China’s solar module waste will hit 18GW by 2030 and 253GW or 20 million tons by 2040.

Recycling Solar Waste

Solar panel waste presents a substantial pollution problem. The panels consist of numerous toxic chemicals like cadmium telluride, lead, hexafluoroethane, and more. A chemical created as a byproduct of solar panel manufacturing is silicon tetrachloride which can lead to burns on the skin.

Putting solar panel waste in landfills presents a long-term risk to the environment as the toxic minerals and metals can end up seeping into the ground.

However, this is what is being done right now. At present, around 90 percent of defective or end-of-life solar panels are sent into landfills. This is because the costs of recycling solar panels are far higher compared to just dumping them.

According to Sharma, this gap will be “closing over the next five to 10 years significantly” due to a “combination of recycling becoming more cost-effective and landfilling costs only increasing.”

California is the biggest residential solar market in the United States, and as of mid-2022, the state had only one recycling plant that accepted solar panels.

U.S.-based solar panel manufacturer First Solar believes recycling will become profitable. “I’m very confident we will get the costs of recycling below landfill,” the company’s chief quality and reliability officer Patrick Buehler said in an interview with WSJ last year.

According to First Solar, it can recover nearly 95 percent of a solar panel’s materials by weight. The recovered materials can then be used to make semiconductors for brand-new panels.

Another aspect of the distribution network is that when waste management costs are added, the price of individual solar panels will also move up.

Practical and efficient energy policies need to be adopted by lawmakers. There are many drawbacks presently concerning the solar industry ranging from dependance on China’s slave labor to effectively getting rid of old panels.

Unless actual progress is made in the entire supply chain, it is not recommended to deploy solar panels on a large scale, and develop a dependence on such environmentally unsustainable technology.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

Many people are unaware of this, but nearly half of all American agriculture is grown in California, generating more than $50 billion a year in revenue. The Midwest primarily grows genetically modified (GMO) corn and soybeans, along with wheat, while California grows most of the country’s fruits, vegetables, nuts, and leafy greens.

Because these atmospheric river storms have been hitting California one after another after another following many years of mostly dry conditions, a lot of that water is flowing from higher elevations to lower elevations rather than absorbing into oftentimes rock-hard soils. The result is many destroyed farms and farmers who have “lost everything.”

(Related: In the midst of covid, communist China saw similar heavy rains for a period of time that resulted in catastrophic destruction.)

The Sierra Nevada mountains are packed with record levels of snow that will eventually melt, delivering even more devastation to California farms

The worst-affected county right now is Tulare County, which is the second-largest county in the entire United States in terms of food production, generating more than $8 billion annually. One-fourth of that is dairy sales, while the rest is citrus and nuts.

Kern County, located just to the south of Tulare County, is the nation’s number-one producer of agriculture, with Fresno County, located just to the north of Tulare County, being third in terms of food production.

All three of these counties are being devastated by all this rain, as is Monterey County, located on the Central Coast of California, which is the nation’s fourth-largest food-producing county. Like the others, Monterey is experiencing devastating flooding, wiping out most of its vegetable and strawberry farms.

Brian Shilhavy, the editor of Health Impact News, put together a video with testimony from friends and family members he knows who live in these areas. Be sure to watch that video below to see for yourself their first-hand experiences with all that rain:

Even when the rains finally stop, it will not mean an end to the devastation. California’s vast Sierra Nevada mountain range is packed with record levels of snow that will eventually melt, delivering a double whammy to the farms below it.

“This is horrible and I feel so bad for these devastated people,” one commenter wrote about the horrific devastation occurring in California, as depicted in the above video. “As an animal lover, my heart broke when I saw the cats on the roof (but thank God they survived!) and the confused and panicked cattle being driven through the water by the chopper.”

Another wrote that Americans had better wake up fast and learn how to grow food the traditional way, starting in their own backyards (if possible) and around their local communities.

“As the technology crashes, more and more Americans are going to have to learn how to do actual work that produces something, rather than entertainment-based technology that produces NOTHING,” this person added.

“But the technologists haven’t figured this out yet, even as tens of thousands of jobs seem to disappear every week now. They are still throwing away money on AI and chat bots and other such useless products. But their banks are failing now, and their money will eventually run out.”

First it was not enough rain; now it is too much rain. You can keep up with the latest news about the “birth pangs,” as the Bible calls them, at Prophecy.news.

Sources for this article include:

• HealthImpactNews.com
• NaturalNews.com
• NATURAL NEWS

• One key environmental threat facing mankind today is the increasing lack of potable water, worldwide, thanks to a combination of water pollution and scarcity. Infrastructure — especially in the U.S. but also elsewhere — is also in dire need of repairs and upgrades
• During a single week in September, 2022, E.coli contamination was found in Baltimore, toxic arsenic levels were discovered in New York City, and in Jackson, Mississippi, 180,000 people are left without running water due to a water system breakdown
• Hazardous water pollutants include but are not limited to arsenic, fluoride, nitrate, pharmaceutical drugs, pesticides, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and microplastics
• In San Francisco, wastewater from 37 sewage plants has turned the San Francisco Bay a murky brown, and dead fish litter its shores. The cause for the die-off is a toxic algae bloom, triggered by the nitrogen and phosphorous from the feces and urine in the discharged wastewater
• NASA mapping of groundwater storage trends for the earth’s 37 largest aquifers reveals 21 aquifers have already exceeded their sustainability tipping points and are being depleted, and 13 of them are considered “significantly distressed, threatening regional water security and resilience”

While the globalist cabal claims “climate change” is the No. 1 threat to humanity, necessitating radical quality of life sacrifices and the total relinquishing of privacy and freedom, there are far more pressing problems. One key environmental threat facing mankind today is the increasing lack of potable water, thanks to a combination of water pollution and scarcity. Without potable water, we’re in immediate lethal peril.

Groundwater aquifers rapidly depleting, resulting in water scarcity, higher prices, land cave-ins and water wars. On top of that, much of the world’s remaining water supply has become too contaminated to drink or even bathe in, and infrastructure — especially in the U.S. but also elsewhere — is nearing the end of its useful life and is in dire need of upgrades.

Water Contamination Commonplace Even in Developed Countries

News of dangerous water contamination in the U.S., reported in the first week of September 2022 alone, include:

• E.coli contamination in Baltimore, Maryland, thanks to aging water pipes and poorly maintained wastewater infrastructure.¹

• Toxic arsenic levels in New York City tap water rendering it unsafe to drink.²

• The complete breakdown of the water infrastructure in Jackson, Mississippi, after the treatment plant got flooded, leaving some 180,000 people without running water.³ When something does come out of the tap, it’s mud brown.

As in Baltimore and Flint, Michigan,⁴ this crisis could have been avoided if proper maintenance and upkeep of infrastructure had been prioritized.

The Biden administration has now earmarked $429 million to help repair Jackson’s crumbling water and wastewater systems, but the final price tag has been quoted to run into the billions, and will take many months, if not years, to complete. In the meantime, residents are in a life-or-death crisis.⁵

According to the World Health Organization, more than 2 billion people worldwide drink water contaminated with feces,⁶ resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths due to preventable diseases each year.

Water sources in both developing and developed countries are also contaminated with toxic chemical pollutants that treatment plants are not prepared to filter. Among the most hazardous water pollutants are arsenic, fluoride, nitrate, pharmaceutical drugs, pesticides, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and microplastics.⁷

Algae Blooms Are a Costly Problem

According to a September 5, 2022, article in the San Francisco Chronicle,⁸ wastewater from 37 sewage plants dumped into the San Francisco Bay has turned the water a murky brown, and dead fish litter the shores. (While hard to believe, an estimated 80% of global wastewater is released into the environment untreated.⁹)

An estimated 10,000 yellowfin goby and hundreds of striped bass and white sturgeon have washed ashore so far. The cause for the die-off: toxic algae bloom, triggered by the nitrogen and phosphorous from the feces and urine in the discharged wastewater.

Harmful algae bloom (HABs) will turn the water red and release neurotoxic compounds that are then passed up the food chain. It also depletes the water of oxygen, eventually — if not properly addressed — creating a dead zone where no life can be sustained.¹⁰ As reported by the San Francisco Chronicle:¹¹

“The regional water board has told agencies that it will probably require caps on nutrients in wastewater when their regional permit comes up for renewal in 2024.

But upgrading dozens of aging treatment facilities could cost $14 billion, which would double or triple ratepayers’ water bills, [executive officer of San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, Eileen] White said in an interview.

‘It’s a multibillion-dollar Bay Area issue that needs to be thought through very carefully, taking the science into effect,’ she said. ‘There’s all of sorts of different treatments, and none of them are cheap’ …

Federal, state and local governments and the treatment plants themselves have spent millions to research the issue, but like much of climate change planning, the science and policy are moving slower than the problem is progressing.”

Some water treatment plants could help address the problem using already existing infrastructure. The San Jose/Santa Clara Regional Wastewater Facility, for example, has been able to reduce the nitrogen load of its wastewater from 17 to 11 milligrams per liter, at no extra cost, simply by directing the water through a series of four tanks containing nitrogen-consuming bacteria before it’s discharged.

Wastewater Could Be a Source of Reusable Phosphorous

One of the important resources found in wastewater is phosphorus. This mineral is an essential nutrient for plant growth, which is why many fertilizers include it. And, while widespread across the Earth, there are limited areas where it is found in concentrated form.

However, wastewater contains a significant amount, as phosphorus is not only found in human excrement but also in detergents. Removing and reusing phosphorus from wastewater would not only increase supply, but would also reduce the risk of algae blooms.

The U.N. has proposed¹² that removing and recovering phosphorus, nitrogen and other nutrients from wastewater could prevent hyper-growth of HEBs in lakes and rivers, while simultaneously providing a unique business opportunity to recuperate a finite resource essential for agriculture. The Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant has been doing this for years already, as seen in the 2012 video report above.

Pharmaceutical Pollution Is Widespread

Anything and everything you flush down the drain ends up somewhere and, oftentimes, the end destination is your local waterways. Pharmaceutical drugs are particularly problematic, as water treatment plants are not equipped to filter out these compounds.

Water treatment plants fail to filter out an estimated 93% of the drug compounds in wastewater, and a 2017 U.S. Geological Survey found 80% of U.S. waterways contained pharmaceutical pollution,¹³ which can have a devastating impact on aquatic species.

Proper disposal of drugs, lotions, creams and perfumes is paramount to the reduction of water pollution. By using all-natural and unscented personal care products, dropping off unused and expired drugs at a drug take-back site and not flushing any medication down the toilet, you can reduce your personal pharmaceutical footprint.

If you’re in the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration has tools to help you find a local drug take-back location on its Drug Disposal: Drug Take Back Locations page.¹⁴

Firefighting Foam Contaminates Water Across the US

Firefighting foam also poses a serious threat to our water supplies. In 2015, investigative journalist Sharon Lerner published an extensive series¹⁵ of articles about the dangers of PFAS¹⁶ (two of the most well-known ones of which are PFOA and PFOS) and the industry’s attempts to cover up the damage.

Part 15¹⁷ addressed the U.S. military’s affinity for toxic flame retardants, despite the fact that billions of dollars are being spent trying to clean up drinking water contaminated by firefighting foam used on military installations. Many other PFAS chemicals¹⁸ — such as PFHxS, PFHpA, PFBA and PFBS — have also been detected in drinking water, yet the military is only attempting to clean up PFOA and PFOS contamination.

Around hundreds of U.S. military bases, PFAS have leached through the ground, contaminating surrounding groundwater. In addition to prostate cancer and thyroid problems, these chemicals have been linked to other types of cancer as well, including kidney, testicular and bladder cancer, as well as immune dysfunction, reproductive problems and hormone disruption.

Considering the public health threat posed by PFAS contamination, courtesy of firefighting foam, you’d think the U.S. government would take proactive measures to eliminate the use of these toxic chemicals. After all, other countries are using PFAS-free firefighting foam, and it works just as well. Alas, this is not happening.

Incomplete data make it very difficult to ascertain how widespread the PFAS-contamination might be, but drinking water near at least 46 military installations in the U.S. have been found to contain PFOA and/or PFOS at levels exceeding 70 parts per trillion (ppt), which is the EPA’s health advisory level for drinking water.¹⁹

If you live anywhere near a military installation or fire department fire-training area, consider getting your tap water tested for PFAS and other toxic contaminants. Water testing is a prudent step no matter where you live these days, as is filtering your water, as there are literally hundreds of potential water contaminants that can harm your health.

Factory Farm Contamination

Another major source of water contamination is runoff from factory farms. In addition to farming chemicals such as nitrates, which pose a serious threat to water quality, there’s the issue of drug-resistant bacteria, which are a result of antibiotic overuse in livestock.

When it comes to water pollution from farms, the problem is twofold. First, regular farming is exempt from the Clean Water Act. Second, while farms registered as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are regulated under the Act, many simply don’t apply for the required National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits, which dictate what you’re allowed to discharge into national waterways.

Between 2011 and 2016, the number of CAFOs in the U.S. increased by 956, to a total of 19,496, yet the total number of CAFO discharge permits didn’t go up but actually declined by 1,806 during that period.²⁰ Many farmers also don’t bother with nutrient management planning, which is voluntary, even though there are plenty of conservation practices that can help reduce water pollution.²¹

The Global Crisis of Vanishing Groundwater

Industrial farming also uses enormous amounts of potable water for irrigation, and in many areas, aquifers are being drained faster than they can be refilled, resulting in water scarcity.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about 80% of U.S. consumptive water (and more than 90% in many Western states) is used for agricultural purposes.²²

NASA mapping²³ of groundwater storage trends for the earth’s 37 largest aquifers reveals 21 aquifers have already exceeded their sustainability tipping points and are being depleted, and 13 of them are considered “significantly distressed, threatening regional water security and resilience.” Considering groundwater accounts for 99% of potable freshwater,²⁴ the depletion of aquifers is a serious concern. As reported by the Pacific Institute:²⁵

“Depleted groundwater aquifers can take thousands of years to be replenished by rain, snow, and other sources. This option can be off the table when an aquifer becomes so depleted it loses its capacity to store water.

In the U.S., the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches across parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming, illustrates this concern.

A history of groundwater overdraft threatens to deplete the aquifer. Once depleted, it’s estimated the Ogallala Aquifer could take more than 6,000 years to be naturally replenished …

A 2021 Pacific Institute study²⁶ highlighted connections between California groundwater management and local communities’ ability to access water — with significant water equity concerns.

California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) was created to help protect groundwater, but the study showed minimum groundwater thresholds defined by SGMA would leave many people vulnerable to losing their water access.”

What Are the Solutions?

There tends to be a “free-for-all” mentality at play where the one who can afford to drill the deepest well wins in the short term, but everyone loses in the long term. Groundwater as a resource needs proper governance and management. Farmers also need more efficient irrigation systems, and we need engineering solutions to improve the refill rate of aquifers.

On a personal level, we also need to make changes in how we use water, and how we grow crops. Selecting the most appropriate crops for any given area would result in more efficient water usage, and would reduce the amount farmers would have to draw from our aquifers. In short, we need to grow food with less water.

The good news is we already know how to do that, and it’s called regenerative agriculture. It’s been well-proven that regenerative agriculture biodynamic farming is far more water efficient than industrial farming. To learn how, see “Regenerative Food and Farming: The Road Forward.”

With water wars becoming a reality even in developed nations (just look at California, where the battle over water allocation has been ongoing for more than a decade²⁷), you’d be wise to give serious thought to emergency water preparations.

Not only do you need a source of water, were your tap water to stop running, but you also need to have the proper supplies on hand to filter and decontaminate that water to make it safe to drink.

Filtering the water you use for drinking, cooking and bathing is, I think, an absolute necessity these days, no matter where you live — unless you’ve had your water tested and are satisfied that it’s pure (which is rare). I recommend installing a whole-house filter system to ensure optimal water quality from your tap.

In an emergency situation, however, when tap water is unavailable, you’ll need to source your water elsewhere and that can be a real challenge, as people in Jackson, Mississippi, are now finding out.

In “How to Secure Your Water Supply for Emergencies,” I review ideas for alternative water sources, such as collecting spring water, or water from a local stream or river, which is far from ideal but might work in the short-term, and setting up a rain catchment system, which is a far more sustainable, long-term solution.

I also go over basic water purification and disinfection guidelines. Rainwater is often thought to be pristine, but it’s not, so even rainwater needs to be properly filtered before drinking.

The time to sort out your emergency plans is now, while municipal water and supply chains are still operational. Once an emergency hits, it’s too late to start thinking about installing wells or rain barrels and buying water filters, as by then the things you need might be incredibly difficult to get.

• ¹ Washington Post September 6, 2022
• ² The Guardian September 6, 2022
• ³ Washington Post September 1, 2022
• ⁴ NRDC, Flint Water Crisis
• ⁵ NBC September 2, 2022
• ^6, 7 WHO Drinking Water Fact Sheet March 21, 2022
• ^8, 10, 11 San Francisco Chronicle September 5, 2022 (archived)
• ^9, 12 The United Nations World Water Development Report 2017
• ¹³ Great Lakes Echo, January 25, 2017
• ¹⁴ FDA Drug Disposal: Drug Take Back Locations
• ¹⁵ The Intercept, The Teflon Toxin Series
• ¹⁶ EPA.gov, What Are PFAS?
• ¹⁷ The Intercept, The Teflon Toxin Part 15
• ¹⁸ The Intercept, The Teflon Toxin Part 16
• ¹⁹ EPA.gov, Health Advisory PFOA and PFOS
• ²⁰ Center for Public Integrity August 22, 2017
• ²¹ Farm and Dairy April 7, 2022
• ²² USDA, Economic Research Service, Irrigation & Water Use, Overview
• ²³ NASA Map of Groundwater Storage
• ^24, 25 Pacific Institute March 22, 2022
• ²⁶ Pacific Institute June 22, 2021
• ²⁷ Cal Matters April 4, 2022

During the last two years, the federal agency has provided $1,369,000 to fund some 40 climate-focused projects. The 29 such grants approved for fiscal year 2022 include support for multidisciplinary artist Hajra Waheed’s collaboration “with researchers and organizers on issues such as land sovereignty and food and climate justice”; development of a Baltimore Center Stage production titled, “A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction”; and a grant to the Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, Maryland, to use “movement and storytelling to explore the ways different landscapes and communities are navigating climate change.”

Never mind the prospect of reins on executive climate action in light of the Supreme Court’s stinging regulatory rebuke last week: These art projects are one small piece of an explosion of climate spending since President Biden called during his first days in office for a “whole-of-government approach to combating the climate crisis.” In response, every department, bureau, and agency has climate-related budget lines, responding to Biden’s mandate by claiming a slice of the climate pie.

Where the Trump administration’s 150-page budget overview for the fiscal year 2020 mentioned the word climate just once (and that was a reference to “school climate” – that is, educational environment), the current White House 2023 budget overview mentions the word “climate” 187 times and the phrase “climate crisis” 33 times in its 158 pages.

The administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2023 calls for “a total of $44.9 billion to tackle the climate crisis,” $16.7 billion more than climate spending in 2021, according to the president’s budget.

“Climate change is not only a real and growing threat,” Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan said, “but it also presents an economic opportunity.” These include:

• The Department of Health and Human Services plans to boost spending on the CDC’s Climate and Health Program from $10 million to $110 million, to “identify potential health effects associated with climate change and implement health adaptation plans.”
• The National Institutes of Health are ramping up research on “climate change impact on health,” with grants for projects “that address the impact of climate change on health” and technologies for measuring “the effects of climate change and extreme weather events on human health.”
• Even as it struggles with the growing crisis on the southern border, the Department of Homeland Security in its 2023 fiscal year budget asks for $55 million to battle climate change. Of that, $2 million will be spent “to stand up a Climate Change Program Management Office,” and $4 million will go to the bureaucratic activities of “tracking, monitoring, and auditing … environmental planning compliance actions.” DHS is also committed to electrifying half its fleet of motor vehicles by the end of the decade.
• The State Department is seeking $2.3 billion for a broad range of climate-related expenditures including $2 million on “support for post-led climate diplomacy”; $7 million for “global climate diplomacy”; $2.6 million for the “Climate Change Public Diplomacy Fund”; $7.9 million for the “Center of Climate and Sustainability”; $17 million for “Overseas Climate Resilience, Building Energy, and Sustainability Projects”; and over $16 million to support the “Special Presidential Envoy for Climate” — aka John Kerry currently.  State is also seeking $5 million to buy or lease electric vehicles for the department.

Linda J. Bilmes, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who studies the federal budget, says that the Biden administration is “trying to send a message that in everything we do, we should be attentive to the issue.” Part of “the problem of dealing with an issue so big,” Bilmes added, “is that responsibility is so fragmented.”

Increased funding to protect coastlines, inspect wind turbines and solar farms, and promote the use of carbon-free energy sources directly align with Biden’s call to address what he calls the “existential threat” of climate change. But there are other organizing principles – reflecting progressive concerns – that inform the budget requests. Chief among these is Biden’s belief that climate should be addressed across the government as an issue of “environmental justice.” The NIH supports that agenda, stating that “Research has shown the impact of climate change differs across populations depending on socioeconomic advantages.”

The Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to spend over $1 billion in “climate resilience and energy efficiency improvements.” For example, HUD promises to advance “climate resilience and environmental justice by redeveloping and replacing distressed public and multifamily housing and neighborhood amenities with resilient and energy-efficient structures.” It might be pointed out, however, that one of HUD’s main responsibilities is to redevelop distressed public housing. Is HUD’s commitment to confronting the threat of climate change a new imperative, or just a new way to justify the department and its activities?

The Environmental Protection Agency is also pursuing environmental justice. Under EPA’s new strategic plan, the top goal is to “Tackle the Climate Crisis.” Following a close second is Goal 2, which commits the EPA to “Take Decisive Action to Advance Environmental Justice and Civil Rights.” In practice that means embedding environmental justice into all of the agency’s “Programs Policies and Activities.”

It isn’t clear, however, whether the EPA will be able to re-invent itself as a ministry of environmental justice, given the Supreme Court’s consequential decision Thursday limiting what powers the agency can exercise without explicit authorization by Congress.

The Court’s ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, with its requirements that regulators stick to their lanes, may also put the brakes on President Biden’s efforts to turn every department and agency into climate police.

At least for now, the Department of Justice is committed to “environmental justice” too. Don’t confuse the new effort with the old. The Environment and Natural Resources Division at DOJ, has been enforcing federal environmental laws for more than a century. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced in May a new DOJ Office of Environmental Justice. “Although violations of our environmental laws can happen anywhere, communities of color, indigenous communities, and low-income communities often bear the brunt of the harm caused by environmental crime, pollution, and climate change,” he said.

The Army Corps of Engineers is tasked with advancing environment justice, as is the Department of Energy. DOE recently awarded $3.6 million in cash prizes to fund “Climate solutions for underrepresented communities.” Climate change isn’t just a crisis, it is a crisis that demands redistribution, which in turn calls for greater intervention by the federal government. The prizes involved various offices and entities within Energy – the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of Economic Impact and Diversity, and the Office of Technology Transitions.

In response to the president’s call for “climate adaptation plans” across the government, the Department of Education came up with a “Green Ribbon Schools” award for institutions that “teach effective environmental and sustainability education.” This year’s Green Ribbon School winners were announced in April. One awardee was Escuela Verde in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a public charter school devoted to “ecopedagogy.” The Department of Education celebrates the “school’s emphasis on food and food justice” which “has led to an entirely vegetarian school lunch.”

“I’ve seen this before,” says Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute. “When an issue gets hot, every federal agency knows they can maximize their budget by tailoring their programs and messaging around the hot theme.”

Among the topics that have been used to justify spending are everything from rural broadband to gender and structural racism. “Even the Department of Transportation is receiving money to deal with past racial discrimination related to the Interstate Highway System.”

The sweeping agenda has also inspired projects that tap into New Deal nostalgia. With overtones of the Great Depression program to put young, unemployed men to work on public lands – the Civilian Conservation Corps – the Department of the Interior proposes to launch a new Civilian Climate Corps. And Interior is hardly the only department getting into that action: The Department of Labor proposes spending $10 million “to partner with AmeriCorps and other agencies to establish a Civilian Climate Corps.” Among those agencies is the department’s Employment and Training Administration.

Kate DeAngelis, international finance program manager for Friends of the Earth, says she is pleased with the Biden administration’s whole-of-government approach. She’d actually like to see even more of it. “Unfortunately,” she says, “not every agency is doing its fair share to combat climate change.” DeAngelis’ complaint is that agencies such as the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the U.S. International Development Corporation continue to support fossil fuel projects around the world, “despite the devastating impacts it will have on the climate.”

Still, some agencies appear to be hard-pressed to find a slice of the climate pie they can call their own.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is promoting new building codes, calling for research on “the impacts of climate change” to shape those codes. (One easy approach might simply be for state and local governments to deny permits for oceanside high-rises built on sand.) FEMA shows how departments and agencies have been using the specter of a climate crisis to build political support for government actions. One of FEMA’s main goals is to “Drive public action on building codes,” an effort spurred by using “climate science messaging to increase public demand for building codes and standards.”

Agencies few Americans have ever heard of are trying to get in on the action. Among the environmental initiatives being promoted at the Department of the Treasury are those found at the office of the Inspector General for Tax Administration, or TIGTA. With a proposed budget for the 2023 fiscal year of $182 million, TIGTA has many responsibilities. It is tasked with protecting taxpayer information, improving tax compliance, and overseeing Internal Revenue Service “efforts to implement tax law changes.” The tax IG investigates scams targeting the elderly; prosecutes cyber criminals who attack IRS web sites; and improves “the integrity of IRS operations by detecting and deterring waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct.”

Treasury promises that in its audits and investigations TIGTA will support the department’s strategic goals. Among them, “Combat Climate Change.” But how? TIGTA points to its fleet of 200 vehicles and promises to replace them with electric vehicles.

But that may be easier said than done. Plans to replace government cars and trucks with electrics, whether at TIGTA, Homeland Security, or the State Department, “are not to be taken seriously,” says Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Eliminate every vehicle used by the federal government and the effect on the climate – even under the worst-case scenario calculations – would be vanishingly small. Even if one were to eliminate the auto emissions of the entire federal government, the change in expected global temperatures would be “essentially zero.”

Professor Bilmes says that energy efficiencies are important across the federal government, and particularly at the Department of Defense, given that DOD “is the world’s single largest purchaser of fuel and vehicles.”

“We spend so much money on government,” says Bilmes, “that government should be in the vanguard of being energy efficient.”

Image by COP26 via Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Article cross-posted from Real Clear Investigations.

• ESG, or environmental, social and governance, funds are supposed to be those focused on companies with strong environmental ethics and responsibility
• Further investigation reveals rampant greenwashing has occurred, and many ESG-labeled funds are far from “sustainable”
• The SEC is investigating Goldman Sachs overs its ESG funds, including whether the bank’s management of ESG funds differs from what it has disclosed to investors
• In May 2022, electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla was removed from the S&P 500 ESG Index, despite its focus on creating environmentally conscious vehicles
• Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk tweeted in response that ESG is a scam, considering Exxon Mobil is still listed in the S&P 500 ESG Index top 10

Pouncing on investors’ interest in environmentally friendly, sustainable investing, the S&P 500 ESG Index was launched in 2019.¹ ESG, or environmental, social and governance, funds are supposed to be those focused on companies with strong environmental ethics and responsibility, but further investigation reveals rampant greenwashing has occurred, and many ESG-labeled funds are far from “sustainable.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been scrutinizing ESG funds for years, as their popularity soared. While funds focused on socially responsible investing were valued at $2.83 billion in 2015, this grew to $17.67 billion by 2019, when Alex Bernhardt, U.S. head of responsible investments at investment consultant Mercer, told The Wall Street Journal, “In every asset class, in every region, ESG product development is the thing right now.”²

Fast-forward to 2022, and the SEC is cracking down on ESG labels, with multiple investigations launched into ESG greenwashing on Wall Street by multiple mega-banks. Globally, $41 trillion are expected to flow into ESG funds in 2022.³

Murky Guidelines Mire ESG Label Credibility

A glaring problem with ESG labels is the lack of regulations that define what qualifies as a company that’s environmentally or socially responsible. In 2019, the SEC began sending letters to asset managers asking for what models were used to determine ESG investments.

In 2019, Betty Moy Huber, co-head of law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP’s environmental, social and corporate governance group, told The Wall Street Journal, “This is a relatively new area. Now the SEC is saying, ‘Wait, how do you know these are ESG products and that you don’t have a fossil fuel company with known, poor ESG performance in there?’”⁴

S&P and MSCI have established their own ratings system for ESG labels, with controversial methodologies. For instance, ESG funds may hold up to 20% of their shares in non-ESG stocks, such that “fossil fuel-free” funds may actually hold fossil fuel companies.⁵

“As a result, many “ESG” funds still hold major emitters like ExxonMobil, and are only marginally less carbon-intensive than the market average,” Quartz reported.⁶ It wasn’t until May 2022 that the SEC announced plans to develop stricter standards for ESG labels.⁷

SEC Goes After Goldman Sachs

After an investigation into greenwashing by Deutsche Bank in 2021 — that led to a raid of the bank’s offices in Germany by German authorities⁸ — and a $1.5 million fine to BNY Mellon for “misstatements and omissions about ESG considerations,” the SEC is now going after Goldman Sachs.

In the BNY Mellon case, one ESG fund included 185 investments, 67 of which had no ESG-quality score when the security was purchased, but shareholders were told its strategy included “identifying and considering the environmental, social and governance risks, opportunities and issues throughout the research process.”⁹ But in the case of Goldman, as reported by Quartz:¹⁰

“The Goldman investigation is focused on mutual funds. Because there is no legal standard for ESG definitions, the SEC will determine whether the bank’s actual methods for managing ESG funds differ from what it has disclosed to investors, not whether the funds are really green or not.”

Goldman manages at least four ESG or “clean energy” funds and renamed its Blue Chip Fund the U.S. Equity ESG Fund in June 2020. According to The Wall Street Journal:¹¹

“Goldman says in regulatory documents that its ESG fund aims to keep 80% of its net assets in stocks issued by companies that meet the fund manager’s criteria. They exclude companies that earn most of their revenue from selling alcohol, tobacco, weapons, coal, oil and gas, and some other products.

Goldman says holdings in the U.S. Equity ESG Fund undergo an ESG analysis but reserves the right to invest in some companies without such a screening. It can also invest up to 20% of its net assets in stocks that deviate from its ESG standards.”

When the SEC first began scrutinizing ESG labels, it was done via compliance examiners, who would forward any concerns to SEC enforcement attorneys. An SEC enforcement task force was launched in 2021 to further investigate greenwashing related to ESG investing products, and the Goldman investigation could result in formal enforcement action.¹²

‘The World’s Largest Ponzi Scheme’

BlackRock founder and CEO Larry Fink, who has close ties to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) head Klaus Schwab, and joined WEF’s board in 2019, stated in October 2021, “Short-term policies related to environmentalism in terms of restricting supply of hydrocarbons has created energy inflation, and we’re going to be living with that for some time … We’re in a new regime.”¹³

On Twitter, Russ Greene wrote, “ESG advocates have sought to portray as a conspiracy theory the link between ESG and higher oil and gas prices, but if so it’s one that’s shared by many of the most successful figures in finance, including ESG investors,” referring to Blackstone cofounder, billionaire Steve Schwarzman, who has said that a focus on ESG is “driving a credit crunch for oil and gas companies.”¹⁴

However, investment firm BlackRock has more power than most governments on Earth, and it also controls the Federal Reserve, mega-banks like Goldman Sachs and the WEF’s Great Reset, according to F. William Engdahl, a strategic risk consultant and lecturer who holds a degree in politics from Princeton University.¹⁵

BlackRock also has ties to Blackstone — the largest landlord in the U.S. as well as the largest real estate company worldwide, with a portfolio worth $325 billion¹⁶ — as Schwarzman and Fink started out in business together.¹⁷ BlackRock, Engdahl believes, may control the world’s economic future, in part via ESG investing:¹⁸

“Fink … now stands positioned to use the huge weight of BlackRock to create what is potentially, if it doesn’t collapse before, the world’s largest Ponzi scam, ESG [Environment, Social values and Governance] corporate investing. Fink with $9 trillion to leverage is pushing the greatest shift of capital in history into a scam known as ESG Investing.

The UN ‘sustainable economy’ agenda is being realized quietly by the very same global banks which have created the financial crises in 2008. This time they are preparing the Klaus Schwab WEF Great Reset by steering hundreds of billions and soon trillions in investment to their hand-picked ‘woke’ companies, and away from the ‘not woke’ such as oil and gas companies or coal.

BlackRock since 2018 has been in the forefront to create a new investment infrastructure that picks “winners” or “losers” for investment according to how serious that company is about ESG — Environment, Social values and Governance.

For example a company gets positive ratings for the seriousness of its hiring gender diverse management and employees, or takes measures to eliminate their carbon “footprint” by making their energy sources green or sustainable to use the UN term.

How corporations contribute to a global sustainable governance is the most vague of the ESG, and could include anything from corporate donations to Black Lives Matter to supporting UN agencies such as WHO.

… Oil companies like ExxonMobil or coal companies no matter how clear are doomed as Fink and friends now promote their financial Great Reset or Green New Deal.”

Elon Musk Calls ESG a ‘Scam’

In May 2022, electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla was removed from the S&P 500 ESG Index, despite its focus on creating environmentally conscious vehicles. Incidents of racial discrimination at a company factory were cited as one factor in its removal, and Tesla was said to be “ineligible for index inclusion due to its low S&P DJI ESG Score, which fell in the bottom 25% of its global GICS® industry group peers.”¹⁹

Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk tweeted in response “@SPGlobalRatings has lost their integrity [sic],” considering Exxon Mobil is still listed in the S&P 500 ESG Index top 10.²⁰ Musk tweeted:²¹

“Exxon is rated top ten best in world for environment, social & governance (ESG) by S&P 500, while Tesla didn’t make the list! ESG is a scam. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”

What’s more, TIME reported, “According to Bloomberg, the world’s largest ESG-focused exchange-traded fund has almost invested 3.1% of its assets in the oil and gas sector …”²²

A New System of Control Via Allocation of Resources

ESG is one tactic being used to push the “green” agenda forward. While the notion of a pollution-free world is an attractive one, ultimately this isn’t about the environment — it’s all about creating a control system in which the world’s resources are owned by the richest of the rich, while the rest of the population can be controlled through the allocation of those resources, including energy. As explained in an anonymous Winter Oak article:²³

“Under such an economic construct, asset holding conglomerates can redirect the flow of global capital by aligning investments with the UN’s SDGs [sustainable development goals] and configuring them as Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) compliant so that new international markets can be built on the disaster and misery of potentially hundreds of millions of people reeling from the economic collapse caused by war.

Therefore, the war offers a huge impetus for the governments pushing the reset to actively pursue energy independence, shape markets towards ‘green and inclusive growth’ and eventually move populations towards a cap-and-trade system, otherwise known as a carbon credit economy.

This will centralize power in the hands of stakeholder capitalists under the benevolent guise of reinventing capitalism through fairer and greener means, using deceptive slogans like ‘Build Back Better’ without sacrificing the perpetual growth imperative of capitalism.”

The WEF also discusses ESG as part of its “sustainable” resource-based economic system:²⁴

“Digital finance refers to the integration of big data, artificial intelligence (AI), mobile platforms, blockchain and the Internet of things (IoT) in the provision of financial services. Sustainable finance refers to financial services integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria into the business or investment decisions.

When combined, sustainable digital finance can take advantage of emerging technologies to analyze data, power investment decisions and grow jobs in sectors supporting a transition to a low-carbon economy.”

But it’s important to be aware of the downside of reliance on suspect labels like ESG, which could ultimately tie large parts of the global population, including small farmers, to a new form of data slavery. According to one of Navdanya’s reports:²⁵

“A global ‘seal’ of approval based on fake science, fake economics of maximizing profits through extraction will create new data slavery for farmers. Instead of using their own heads and cocreating with the Earth, they will be forced to buy ‘Big Data.’ Instead of obeying the laws of Mother Earth, they will be forced to obey algorithms created by Big Tech and Big Ag.”

• ^1, 20, 22 TIME May 25, 2022
• ^2, 4 The Wall Street Journal December 16, 2019
• ^{3, 6, 7, 10} Quartz June 13, 2022
• ⁵ Quartz May 26, 2022
• ^{8, 9, 11, 12} The Wall Street Journal June 10, 2022
• ^13, 14 Twitter, Russ Greene June 10, 2022
• ^15, 18 WilliamEngdahl.com June 18, 2021
• ¹⁶ ZeroHedge June 22, 2021
• ¹⁷ Yahoo Finance June 22, 2017
• ¹⁹ S&P Dow Jones Indices May 17, 2022
• ²¹ Twitter, Elon Musk May 18, 2022
• ²³ Winter Oak March 9, 2022
• ²⁴ World Economic Forum, Sustainable Digital Finance Can Unlock a Low-Carbon Economy
• ²⁵ Navdanya