“ESG is not a regulation or a set of rules, and it does not require any real action from a corporation. It’s mostly used as a catch-all term for any investment that considers social and environmental responsibility. In fact, what counts as ESG is so ill-defined and malleable it has been criticized as a way to “greenwash” corporate actions.
One of the defining ideas of ESG is that a company is better off accounting and reporting environmental and social risks to investors and clients, rather than being willfully blind to the world around it. This can include a broad swath of issues, such as a company’s reliance on oil, gas, and coal, or exposure to sea-level rise in coastal operations, human rights violations of the countries it operates in, and lack of board diversity and CEO transparency. A big part of the ESG movement, at least right now, is largely about disclosure of these potential bottom-line risks in the future, not necessarily doing anything differently in the present.
But Republican officials in West Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, and now Florida have withdrawn billions of dollars from BlackRock’s management. Proponents are planning to introduce a slew of bills in at least 15 states next year to divest pensions and boycott companies for considering sustainability as an aim. At the federal level, House GOP lawmakers are preparing antitrust investigations.
To get to the bottom of what is driving this, I spoke to one of the state officials leading the attack on ESG, Riley Moore, state treasurer of West Virginia. The way he sees it, “banks are coercing capital away” from coal, gas, and oil industries. He explains he doesn’t want the coal- and gas-reliant state to contract its financial services with a company that is “trying to diminish those dollars. They want less coal mining, they want less fracking.”
This is getting much bigger than BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, companies that used to be solidly at the right of corporate America. There are real stakes for pensioners, red-state taxpayers, and the wider economy if the GOP succeeds in scaring off financial institutions from pursuing climate targets.”
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“On the left, ESG has for years come under criticism as a form of greenwashing, and ESG disclosure isn’t the same thing as corporate behavior. As Harvard Business Review noted, the funding in ESG is “dedicated to assuring returns for shareholders, not delivering positive planetary impact.” Many environmentalists think ESG is a distraction from the main issue they’d like to see traction on: companies disclosing the impact their products and investments have on the world around them, and accounting for that in decisions.
ESG doesn’t go this far. In no way will disclosure be enough to save the planet from climate change. There are no binding requirements, either. But what Republican critics of ESG really fear is that the financial world will realign with climate science and no longer see new coal plants and offshore drilling as viable projects to finance.”
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“Many of the Republican attacks on ESG stem from a misrepresentation of what it actually means. It’s not always motivated by an altruistic climate or socialagenda. ESG also helps banks and public companies meet their one goal by screening investments for various risks. “They’ve got a fiduciary duty to generate returns. So they’re not going to impose some agenda, whether it’s climate or social agenda, that’s going to get in the way of returns,” said University of Oxford business expert Robert Eccles.
As baseless as the attacks have been, the pressure could still work. Vanguard on Wednesday announced it is withdrawing from the Net Zero Asset Managers coalition, in which companies voluntarily committed to reaching net-zero emissions in their portfolios by 2050.”