Financial Giants Are Suddenly Realizing The Left’s ESG Movement Has Serious Downsides

Advocates for aggressive environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards have tried to achieve social and political objectives through anti-democratic and unrepresentative means. 

Whether it is Michael Bloomberg and Larry Fink opining on how we ought to rapidly move away from fossil fuel energy, or heads of state and diplomats like John Kerry who love the word “existential,” it is everywhere. 

ESG advocates and climate catastrophists alike have learned from Machiavelli, who wrote that there is “nothing more important than appearing to be religious.”

Their fundamental mistake has been to concentrate more and more resources and reputational value on achieving social change through non-democratic and unrepresentative means. That choice has now begun to catch up to them. What these advocates haven’t earned at the ballot box they have been trying to take through other, more coercive, means. More specifically, the decision to weaponize the financial industry to direct investment flows toward favored green and renewable projects has begun to backfire.

They have argued that we must decarbonize the economy. Their objective is nothing short of a radical reformation of the global economy reliant on zero-emission energy sources.  

Take, for example, a 2020 letter from BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. Two years ago, he announced that ESG, and specifically climate change, would be a “defining factor” in how BlackRock would assess the companies in which they invested. 

Genuflecting at the altar of radical environmentalism, investments within BlackRock’s nearly $10 trillion portfolio would have to satisfy two criteria — progress toward a low-carbon economy and their core fiduciary obligations to their investors.

Last year the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) announced with great fanfare at the U.N. climate meetings that members would “work to accelerate the world’s transition to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.” Like Fink and BlackRock, members of the GFANZ appear religious. 

The organization is populated by big financial institutions happy to take credit for aligning a crucial link in the economy — banking and finance — to pursue social goals that are necessarily political in nature.

Read the full article at Daily Caller.