The ESG divestment movement poses as a long-range, financially savvy, and moral movement. In reality it is a short-range, financially ruinous, and deeply immoral movement that perpetuates poverty in the poorest places and threatens the security of the free world.
Over the last 5-10 years, "ESG"--standing for Environmental Social Governance--has gone from an acronym that virtually no one knew or cared about, to a cultishly-embraced top priority of financial regulators, markets, and institutions around the world.
The preposterous financial pretense of "ESG investing" is that the promoters of it have so accurately identified universal norms of long-term value creation--Environmental norms, Social norms, and Governance norms--that imposing those norms on every company is justified.
In reality, ESG was a movement cooked up at the UN--not exactly a leading expert in profitable investment--to impose moral and political agendas, largely left-wing ones, on institutions that would not adopt them if left to their own devices.1
The number one practical meaning of ESG today is: divest from fossil fuels in every way possible, and associate yourself with "renewable" solar and wind in every way possible. That's why I call it the "ESG divestment movement."
Modern ESG's obsession with unreliable "renewable" solar and wind, reflects its political nature. Any serious concern about CO2 emissions means embracing the only proven, reliable, globally scalable source of non-carbon energy: nuclear. But most ESG does not embrace nuclear.
Divesting from fossil fuels is immoral because:
The world needs much more energy.
Fossil fuels are the only way to provide most of that energy for the foreseeable future.
Any problems associated with CO2 pale in comparison to problems of energy deprivation.
The world needs much more energy Low-cost, reliable energy enables billions of people to enjoy the miracle of modern machines that make us productive and prosperous. Yet 800M people have no electricity and 2.6B people are still using wood or dung for heating and cooking.2
Fossil fuels are indispensable Only fossil fuels provide low-cost, reliable, versatile, global-scale energy. Unreliable solar and wind can't come close. That's why fossil fuels continue to grow in the developing world; China and India have 100s of coal plants in development.3
Article is courtesy of Alex Epstein's Energy Talking Points. www.EnergyTalkingPoints.com
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