Failure to fulfill basic fiduciary obligations to investors is just the tip of the ESG scam iceberg
Paul Driessen
Warning: Your retirement fund may have been taken over by BlackRock or other Wall Street asset managers who unilaterally decided that tens of trillions of dollars in other people’s money they control should be spent. used to advance political goals they support – to “make the world a better place.”
As most people know, ESG stands for eenvironmental protection, Ssocial justice, and gmanagement of corporate and social affairs. All of these are noble-sounding causes. However, according to the ESG, they are focused on progressive, awakened agendas, with averting “man-made climate catastrophe” above all. Fund assets are used to advance “net zero” climate agendas and punish or cancel funding for fossil fuel companies.
That narrow focus creates serious problems. Those trillions of dollars are said to be passively invested in the index and other funds, according to trustee duty to ensure maximum returns in supporting state, local, corporate and individual investment and retirement accounts. However, according to ESG, high profits are often sacrificed in the service of politicized agendas, often colluded with governments, activists and other financial institutions, and thus also violate antitrust law and basic moral principles.
that’s why Vanguard Asset Manager recently left the UN-funded “Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero”. While, arizona, FloridaKentucky, Louisiana, MissouriNorth Carolina, Texas, West Virginia and other states are pulling tens of billions of dollars out of BlackRock, State Street and other Wall Street wealth management firms, for breaching fiduciary duties. That’s just the tip of the scam iceberg.
Waking ESG practitioners also use narrow ES&G definitions to signal virtue, papacy, and impose prescriptive agendas with little or no regard for consequences. When the “existential threat of anthropogenic climate change” is the arbiter, the enormous problems associated with replacing fossil fuels with “clean renewable energy” are simply ignored. through, suppressed and censored from analysis.
People and planetary realities absolutely must be included in any ethical ESG analysis.
Environmental protection. Instead of just looking at temperatures, storms, droughts, sea level rise and other environmental costs that climate models wrongly blame on fossil fuel emissions – any accurate and honest ESG scorecard must also assess the enormous ecological impacts of wind-solar cells (WSBs) energy systems that are expected to replace oil, gas, and coal.
WSB systems and related transmissions did not emerge spontaneously, through Materials Acquisition for Global Industrial Change (MAGIC). They require mining on an unprecedented scale. President Biden’s initial batch of offshore wind turbines alone will be needed 110,000 tons of copperrefined from 25,000,000 tons of ore, after removing 40,000,000 tons of excess waste – plus millions of tons of iron, manganese, aluminum, nickel, concrete, plastic and other materials… from billions of tons of ore .
Replacing all of the US coal and gas electricity generation with WSBs – plus gasoline cars, gas stoves and furnaces – would require tens of thousands of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, thousands of dollars. billions of vehicle battery modules and backup power storage, and thousands of miles of new transmission lines. Has BlackRock calculated the ore body and mining requirements for that? For a Global forward?
All turbines, panels, modules, transmission lines, mines, processing plants and factories must be located somewhere. Have the ESG powers determined whose backyard they will go? (Probably not by Larry Fink or John Kerry.) Have they assessed the impacts on the landscape, habitat and wildlife? air and water pollution from mines and other activities? the possibility that Whales must be endangered will be extinct by wind turbine installation off the Atlantic coast of the United States?
Do all of these WSB mines, foundries, factories and impacts receive ESG scores (obviously negative)?
Social balance. ESG theology argues that the poor and people of color suffer the most from climate change. In fact, they benefit most from having abundant, reliable, affordable electricity and fuel – for cars, jobs, modern housing, cooking, heating and air conditioning. In fact, the poor and people of color are not like that in the UK and Europe, where the “transition to green energy” is well underway.
More than seven million British households have fallen into disrepair.”poor fuel” this winter, and special “warm rooms” have been set up to help people survive the freezing weather. Recent headlines warn that Britain could experience nationwide blackouts, shutdowns of factories and layoffs this winter. In Germany, families reserve candlesso that they can at least read while shivering unemployed in the house.
everyone is dying – people who would have survived pre-existing diseases and health conditions if they were not so poor, cold and malnourished. In the United States, 14% of seniors have skip meals and 10% have medical procedures delayed or canceled by 2022 due to sharp increases in energy, food and other prices. An honest ESG score will also take all of these into account.
Developing countries desperately need affordable, reliable electricity to create jobs, lift families out of poverty, modernize homes, schools and hospitals, and provide clean, alternative water wood and animal manure for cooking and heating. Even today, millions of parents and children die from respiratory and intestinal diseases, which is unprecedented in rich countries because they do not have electricity.
The ESG scoring ignores all of this, actively hinders investment in fossil fuel-powered power plants in Africa and other countries, and tries to limit funding for wind energy. and the sun as well as any job and standard of living that this weather-dependent, limited energy can support. That is hardly ethical or socially responsible.
Management of corporate and social affairs. ESG activists and financial institutions collaborate and collude with corporate, federal, state, and local governments to serve the climate crisis agenda and drive investment out away from fossil fuel efforts and switch to “renewable” energy. In essence, this is Fascisman economic system in which the government does not own the means of production, but controls them through laws, policies, and agreements with financial institutions, corporations, activists, media and academy.
Equally troubling, ESG inevitably leads to the slow development of modern industrialized nations, as factories and their jobs migrate to China, India, and other countries that are not bound by the climate agreements to reduce coal and natural gas use soon, they do not intend to do so. so and burning record amount of coal to ensure reliable and affordable electricity.
It also raises national security concerns, as the United States and its allies become increasingly reliant on Chinese factories and Chinese-controlled supply chains for wind, solar, batteries, transformers, communications, computing, medical and even defense/weapons materials and technology. .
ESG proponents play down these concerns, even as they ignore how the skyrocketing demand for raw materials on Net Zero’s agenda will send prices of increasingly scarce commodities skyrocketing , and thereby endangering the energy infrastructure and economies of nations across the globe.
The words scam and fraud come to mind. But an even better term comes from China – Shanghaied: to use trickery, intimidation or violence to force someone to serve in the navy…or your company. In this case, ESG pressure is forcing investors, companies and countries to serve the interests of the Chinese government and the corporate sectors, which control supply chains and production for all kinds of companies. technology, especially in the energy sector. The ESG scorecard doesn’t pay attention to this either.
In fact, BlackRock, State Street, other ESG advocates, their governments and environmental allies seem intent on destroying our planet with “green” energy, to save it. fossil fuel disasters exist in climate models and feverish imaginations (as in “Earth with fever”)… but not in the Real World.
This Christmas or Hanukkah, let us all give our friends, loved ones and financial institutions the gift of wise, honest, accurate and insightful Environmental, Social and Governance principles.
Paul Driessen is a senior policy adviser to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.www.CFACT.org) and author of numerous books and articles on energy, environmental and human rights issues.
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