Links tagged “esg”

The city of Bologna, Italy, has announced a pilot program to reward “virtuous” citizens for recycling, taking public transportation, and curbing energy usage. The program, which has been likened to China’s social credit system, is slated to go into effect in September, 2022, using a “smart citizen wallet” app for cell phones.

“In September, we will start with a pilot project for the city: at the center is the virtuous citizen, the one who, for example, separates waste well or does not waste energy, or uses public transport and does not receive fines, or actively uses the Bologna Welcome Card,” announced Massimo Bugani, councilor for the city’s digital agenda and civic use of data, at a press conference late last month. “The municipality will assign such citizens a score as part of a reward system with economic benefits to individual users,” Bugani explained.

Marlo Lewis, Jr.: In short, the Biden administration’s real goal is not to protect investors but to de-capitalize and de-bank fossil-fuel companies. Or, in President Biden’s words, the goal is “promoting the flow of capital toward climate-aligned investments and away from high-carbon investments.”

Beck & Haskins: ESG metrics are a kind of social credit scoring system, similar to the model now being used in China. Their purpose is to create a new framework for evaluating businesses, banks, investors, and governments, so that instead of just looking at profits, losses, debt, employee satisfaction, and other traditional economic metrics, an organization is evaluated for its commitment to battling climate change and devotion to social justice causes, including, for example, the racial composition of a company’s workforce. .. ESG systems are designed to force businesses and consumers to adopt the values, ideas, products, and services the wealthy elites imposing social credit scores are calling for, and those elites regularly work hand in hand with government and central banks to advance ESG goals.

The World Economic Forum and U.S. State Department entered into a special partnership in November at a COP26 climate change event. In 2020, the Federal Reserve hired BlackRock, the world’s wealthiest asset manager and a leading proponent of ESG, to help the Fed purchase corporate bonds — purchases that directly benefited BlackRock. The SEC proposed mandated ESG disclosure rules this month, and the European Union is now on the verge of mandating ESG metrics for many companies in the EU.

Democrats, banks, regulators and activists have increasingly set their sights on the financial sector and legal system, not Congress, for pushing their aggressive climate agenda. Employing so-called environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives, financial institutions and government agencies have quietly implemented policies prioritizing a focus on factors unrelated to a company’s bottom line, experts said. The ESG movement has swept across the corporate world, leading to individual pledges from companies promising to become more sustainable and improve internal diversity.

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Listen: Vivek Ramaswamy gives best explanation of ESG: ‘The defining scam of our time’ – ‘Agendas that would make the blood of those retirees boil if they knew’

Ramaswamy: "That is not the free market in action. It's even worse than a monopoly or an ideological cartel. They're working hand in glove with the party in power to be able to do their bidding through the private sector. If you couldn't get the Green New Deal through Congress, guess what? John Kerry is doing? He's getting every major banking CEO to sign the so-called Climate Pledge...but it is also a form of crony capitalism because I will tell you, you know, as well as I, banks are not charitable institutions.

Rupert Darwall: The dilemma for the West: you can’t win a geopolitical conflict lasting years or decades with an economy powered intermittently by wind turbines and solar panels. ... Thanks to inadequate infrastructure connecting New England to the rest of the country and the century-old Jones Act – requiring that all goods moving by water between American ports travel on ships built, owned, and manned by Americans – the winter of 2018 saw Russian liquefied natural gas being brought ashore in Boston Harbor. ...

Currently, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is mulling a climate disclosure rule. The intent is to strengthen the hand of Wall Street and woke institutional investors to impose, in effect, an embargo on investment in domestic oil and gas production. The logic appears to be that domestically produced oil and gas incurs climate risk, whereas imported energy from beyond Wall Street’s writ does not. ... The European Union is a paper empire. Its power is bureaucratic, deriving from rules and regulations. It is institutionally incapable of thinking and acting geopolitically because the EU is meant to be the exemplar of a post-geopolitical world, in which national sovereignty is dissolved in a supra-national, rules-based order. Net-zero and the UN climate process represent EU-style supranationalism at a global level. ... 

In late 2019, Boris Johnson banned commercial fracking. Earlier this month, the British government ordered that concrete be poured into the country’s two exploratory shale wells and for them to be abandoned. The move was blasted by Cuadrilla Resources CEO Francis Egan, who pointed out that the Bowland shale formation could supply 50 years of current U.K. gas demand. ... Germany’s and the EU’s net-zero policies will deepen their dependence on Putin’s goodwill as they increase their exposure to unreliable wind and solar, phase out coal, and – in the case of Germany and Belgium – prematurely close their nuclear power stations. Strategically, that’s a win for Putin.