On its surface, it would appear to be one of the easier arguments to counter. But there is a strong delusion keeping hold of too many hearts and minds in western society that prevents the masses from seeing the grim reaper they’re supporting. This is why I post commentaries like these that can hopefully be used to educate those who are trapped in the ESG delusion.

As the article below from Real Clear Energy notes, ESG policies are what made the Russian invasion of Ukraine possible. Vladimir Putin knew that woke Europe was trying to shift away from the fossil fuels that were largely provided by Russia, so he took advantage of the tactical error. If Russia ends up being driven from Ukraine with no spoils, they will still have scored a major victory in reminding Europeans they cannot power their lives with solar and wind alone. They need Russia’s resources, and ESG policies have made that crystal clear. Even a loss in Ukraine is a win for Russia in the long term.

China is also benefitting greatly. While we hamper our productivity and artificially inflate our own costs to stay in line with demands by the World Economic Forum, the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, and BlackRock, China continues to use cheap fossil fuels to push their advantages. We are fighting an economic war while willingly tying our hands behind our backs. Meanwhile, China and Russia have all of their financial weapons fully loaded with nothing but their own incompetence keeping them from finishing us off.

That incompetence won’t last. Eventually, they will weaponize our climate change stupidity as well as our false sense of social justice to make us even more beholden to them than we already are. This is why we MUST do whatever we can to abandon the tenets of ESG. On a national level, that means continuing to expose people to the truth so the masses can pressure more politicians, particularly governors, to abandon or even outlaw destructive ESG policies.

Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris regime has no intention of letting go of the obtuse policies because they WANT the United States weakened. This is why last month they started incentivizing financial advisors to push ESG to their investment and retirement clients even if doing so will lose their clients money. As I reported three weeks ago:

It’s no secret that the Biden-Harris regime and their puppetmasters among the globalist elite cabal absolutely hate us. They despise us as useless eaters who must be depopulated or controlled for them to achieve their nefarious goals of The Great Reset, the 4th Industrial Revolution, Build Back Better, the Green New Deal, the Liberal World Order, or whatever label they slap on their machinations in the future.

Now, they’re proudly declaring this hatred by prompting financial advisors and retirement institutions to move your money to ESG companies. Moreover, they lifted rules requiring them to try to make you money. In other words, they can lose money for YOU and still make money for themselves as long as they’re investing in wokeness. You can’t make this up, but apparently someone among the powers-that-be did anyway.

According to Jeff Murdoch at The Washington Times [emphasis added]:

The Biden administration has quietly finalized a rule allowing employers to funnel workers’ 401(k) funds into investments that support woke causes that address issues such as climate change and diversity.

The Labor Department recently approved the rule affecting roughly 150 million workers and $10 trillion in assets covered under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.

The rule says asset managers and retirement plan administrators should consider environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) factors when selecting investments. That would encourage money managers to balance financial returns with investments that support wind and solar energy or have diverse boards of directors.

The rules also remove a restriction blocking employers from using an ESG fund as a default option for workers automatically enrolled in 401(k) plans. That means workers could be supporting causes that don’t align with their political views.

It also rescinds Trump-era regulations that require retirement plan administrators and asset managers to choose investments based solely on participants’ financial interests.

As I did three weeks ago, I will again strongly recommend moving whatever wealth or retirement you currently have to a self-directed IRA acquired through an America First company. Both gold and silver rose dramatically from November 1 to December 1 and have been holding relatively steady this month. Since I’m NOT a financial advisor who is shilling for the Biden-Harris regime’s ESG policies, I can honestly say I’m very bullish about precious metals for 2023 and I’m not alone.

Here’s the article from Real Clear Energy that explains the destructive nature of ESG in more detail…

2022: The Year ESG Fell to Earth

The year 2022 brings an end to an era of illusions: a year that saw the end of the post–Cold War era and the return of geopolitics; the first energy crisis of the enforced energy transition to net zero; and the year that brought environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing down to earth with a thump—for the year to date, BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF lost 22.2% of its value, and the S&P 500 Energy Sector Index rose 54.0%. The three are linked. By restricting investment in production of oil and gas by Western producers, ESG increases the market power of non-Western producers, thereby enabling Putin’s weaponization of energy supplies. Net zero—the holy grail of ESG—has turned out to be Russia’s most potent ally.

It wasn’t only a bad year for ESG on the stock market. Earlier this month, Vanguard announced that it was quitting Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (NZAM), set up by former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney a little over a year ago. “We have decided to withdraw from NZAM so that we can provide the clarity our investors desire about the role of index funds and about how we think about material risks, including climate-related risks,” the world’s second-largest asset manager said.

Two months ago, Alex Edmans, coauthor of the latest edition of the standard textbook on the principles of corporate finance and professor of finance at the London Business School, published a paper titled “The End of ESG”—without a question mark. Edmans criticizes what has become the primary justification for ESG: the claim that business can generate higher returns for investors by tackling climate change. Since governments are democratically elected by a country’s citizens, they are best placed to address externalities, whereas investors disproportionately represent the elites. “If ESG is pursued for its externalities, companies and investors should be very clear that it may be at the expense of value,” Edmans says.

October also saw the publication of Terrence Keeley’s Sustainable, where the former BlackRock senior executive penned what amounts to a requiem for ESG. Rather than “doing well by doing good,” the logic of Keeley’s case, as I reviewed for RealClear Books, is that investors in conventional ESG investment products are likely to end up not doing very well and leave investors feeling good, not doing good.

It has not all been going one way. In May, HSBC terminated Stuart Kirk, its global head of research at HSBC’s asset-management arm, for voicing some hard truths about ESG. Earlier this month, HSBC announced that it will stop financing new oil and gas fields, putting the West’s third-largest bank on Putin’s side in Russia’s energy war on the West.

What is now a negative factor disadvantaging the West in a world increasingly characterized by East–West geopolitical tensions originated after a period when the United Nations had been fostering a horizontal global division between a rich North and an exploited South. As University of Pennsylvania’s professor Elizabeth Pollman records in her June 2022 paper “The Origins and Consequences of the ESG Moniker,” through the 1970s and early 1980s, the UN promoted the New International Economic Order that called for the regulation of transnational corporations on the alleged grounds that they were widening the gap between developed and developing countries.

After Kofi Annan became secretary-general in 1997, the UN shifted from a strategy of confrontation to co-optation. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 1999, Annan launched a Global Compact between business and the UN. In 2004, the Global Compact’s financial-sector initiative published a report titled “Who Cares Wins”—a rip-off of the British special-forces SAS motto “Who Dares Wins”—arguing for “better consideration of environmental, social and governance factors” in investment appraisals, claiming that this would both improve outcomes for investors and help the UN achieve its sustainable development goals.

ESG means different things, depending on whom you’re talking to. Is it about risk disclosure? Or about factors driving long-term shareholder value? Or is it about society holding business to account? One thing is clear: ESG’s unsustainable dual mandate of boosting shareholder returns and at the same time making the world a better place— “doing well by doing good”—was present at the creation of ESG. It was a masterstroke by ESG’s designers to incorporate “G” for governance. No investor can be against improved governance, and it helped mainstream ESG, whereas previous iterations, such as Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), remained niche.

The 2008 financial crisis subsequently turbocharged the uptake of ESG. Having caused the financial crisis, Wall Street was going to redeem itself by saving the world from a planetary catastrophe. Without climate change, ESG would have vastly less salience. Although marketed as a climate risk analysis tool, ESG is no such thing. In reality, it’s about investors and debt providers driving the decarbonization of Western companies and sunsetting its oil and gas companies.

According to ESG doctrine, there are two types of climate financial risk—physical risk and transition risk—and it’s straightforward to demonstrate that both are spurious. Take the Bank of England. For its climate stress tests, the Bank of England uses a scenario derived from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) extreme and physically implausible RCP8.5 climate scenario. Roger Pielke, Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado–Boulder, and Justin Ritchie have documented how use of the RCP8.5 scenario represents “a stubborn commitment to error,” with its absurd projection of a sixfold growth in per-capita coal consumption to 2100, based on erroneous reports in the late 1980s of virtually unlimited coal deposits in Siberia and China. The Bank of England compounds implausibility with impossibility by taking the RCP8.5 pathway of 4 degrees by the turn of the century and telescoping it into a 3.3-degree Celsius rise by 2050. Central banks resorting to these types of games constitutes strong evidence that climate physical risk is a nonissue for financial stability.

When he was governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney gave an agenda-setting speech alleging a tragedy of the horizon as the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors. Climate catastrophes are presumed to be triggered by tipping points, one of the earliest being the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. In its sixth assessment report, the IPCC declared that with sustained warming, there was limited evidence that the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would disappear “over multiple millennia.” That is some time horizon. Despite the best efforts of central bankers, geologic timescales of millennia and human timescales of decades are completely out of whack.

Similarly, climate transition risk and the stranded assets trope defy economic and financial logic. If you restrict the flow of capital into a sector producing stuff that people want and are willing to pay for, the price of the output of a capital-embargoed sector will rise, as will the value of its invested capital. This, in essence, is what has been happening in energy and capital markets over the past year and explains why ESG as an investment strategy does not work. In the absence of draconian government policies to suppress demand for oil and natural gas, ESG policies strangling the supply of capital to Western oil and gas producers have two effects: they push up the price of hydrocarbons; and they displace supply from Western producers to neutral or hostile ones, with major detriment to the economies and security interests of the West.

Although the disintegration of ESG as an investment strategy became unmistakable in 2022, its existence as a political doctrine will continue until it is challenged and defeated politically. This is already happening in Red states such as Florida, Texas, West Virginia, and Utah. It also requires concerted leadership at a national level to get central bankers and financial regulators to quit playing covert climate policy and to shame banks such as HSBC into switching their support from Russia in the energy wars by dropping their anti–oil and gas financing policies. Defeating ESG not a case of “who cares wins” but “who fights wins.”

About the Author

Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of Climate-Risk Disclosure: A Flimsy Pretext for a Green Power Grab.

The Democratic Congress has imposed taxes on the American people to subsidize electric vehicle purchases by wealthy, politically correct institutions, including rental car agencies, government bureaucracies, and other entities buying in bulk. Meanwhile, auto manufacturers are planning to virtually eliminate auto dealerships, ethanol producers, and auto parts dealers and vastly diminish the number of auto mechanics.

Insulting the vast majority of its member automobile owners, the American Automobile Association hypocritically reports that “vehicle ownership, whether electric or gas-powered, is a personal choice.” But does AAA forget(?) that our “choice” is rapidly being taken away by government in collusion with lenders and the auto industry itself?

The recently enacted (and ridiculously named) Inflation Reduction Act is a monstrous bribe to wealthy, mostly urban Americans with its $7,500 tax credit for purchasers of electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles ($4,000 for used vehicles) from January 2023 through December 2032. There are apparently no tax credits for battery replacement.

These credits are limited to vehicles “assembled” in the United States, and there are income and cost restrictions. But this abominable skewering of the marketplace cedes power to those who control access to electricity and away from individual choice. It also destroys ethanol manufacturing and sales, a major industry in the rural Midwest. There are no tax credits for farmers who will be losing a major source of their annual income.

Meanwhile, Ford Motor Co. has told its dealers that they will no longer be allowed to sell electric vehicles unless they agree to invest in regular training, install charging infrastructure, improve their physical and digital sales experiences, and publish non-negotiable pricing online. Ford would like to eliminate dealerships entirely but must wait until their lobbyists can overturn state laws that require vehicle sales to be through dealers.

Ford wants to move toward 100 percent online sales as they dismiss the direct sales partners that built the company brand over the past century. The goal is “no inventory … and 100 percent remote pickup and delivery.” Long-time dealers will be forced into repairs only. It is likely that the dwindling number of repair shops will not be allowed to have parts inventories, either.

If so, any repairs will have to wait for parts to arrive, increasing the downtime for vehicle owners and increasing the total cost (including rental cars) for repairs. Owners of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles are likely facing similar problems with parts and repairs. And it is not inconceivable that some new federal (or global) mandate will force all ICE vehicles off the road.

Ford is not the only culprit in this compulsory, undemocratic march toward utopia. While General Motors’ Cadillac and Buick divisions will be offering buyouts to dealers unwilling or unable to spend the money necessary to fully service electric vehicles, those dealers will do take the buyouts will only be allowed to sell Chevrolets. [We still miss Pontiac and Oldsmobile.]

Chevy committed to transition to an all-electric fleet back in 2017, though they recently announced they will continue selling some ICE vehicles for the time being. Similarly, Chrysler plans to be all-electric by 2028. Japan’s big automakers, too, are now looking to go electric within the next decade (except for Toyota, which must still believe buyers should have a choice).

None of this march away from reliable, proven ICE engines makes any sense to rural Americans, those who live in hurricane-prone areas, and anyone who drives cross-country. Farmers today can run their tractors off biodiesel made right down the road and drive to distant towns for groceries and supplies in their 20-year-old pickups. Hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural and human-caused disruptive events can shut down electric power for days in large areas.

These decisions make even less sense to citizens of developing nations whose electric grids are spotty (if existent at all) and decades away from current First-World standards. How do you charge an EV is there is no electric power? Or if the power is on just a few hours a day? Or if there are only a few public outlets? Or if there are no EV-capable tow trucks or expensive, risky (due to fires and theft, for starters) repair facilities? Or maybe Africans should not have cars?

Is there no one alive who remembers the 1979 Arab oil embargo that exposed the weakness of relying on a sole source of energy to operate a major nation? After President Nixon’s price controls proved counterproductive, President Ford to little avail promoted expanding the use of coal and nuclear power and development of synfuels and oil shale.

The goal then was to reduce our national reliance on imported energy, but not until the Trump Administration did the U.S. achieve effective energy independence. And with a single stroke of a pen, President Biden began the process of forcing dependence on Chinese-made EV batteries, solar arrays, and even wind turbines while systematically working to destroy our nation’s oil and gas industry (following up on President Obama’s war on coal).

To date, there has been no national  – or international — debate on the eagerness of the driving public (or those who long for a vehicle to drive) to submit to this expedited, forced transition (sic) to electric-only transportation. There is no discussion on the logistics of accomplishing this likely unwise mandatory restriction on human freedoms. It is not allowed, not in the Congress, the media, or even corporate boardrooms. It is all being done behind closed doors by fiat.

There are far too many questions that have yet to be asked, let alone answered, at the decision-making levels of government and industry for these globalists to force upon the entire world an unproven, uncertain technology the supply chains for which are already overextended and which rely on slave labor for many of its raw materials. There are no answers at all as to why – if EVs are so wonderful – there is any need for mandates and prohibitions at all.

It was not that long ago that truckers in Canada were attacked by the Trudeau government for daring to protest against draconian COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates. The mere relocation of 50 border crossers from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard via Florida has caused major meltdowns by formerly “sanctuary city” leaders.

Imagine if 200 million internal combustion engine vehicle owners (or even 2 million) decided to work together to fight against the outrageous, unworkable, antidemocratic, and bankrupting mandates to force everyone into electric vehicles most cannot afford and do not want and to effectively exclude billions from being allowed to drive at all!

But where to start?