What is this thing called ESG?  It stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance. Sounds great, doesn’t it? What could possibly be the harm of seeking to promote these virtues in our corporations? I mean, seriously, who doesn’t want companies that seek to emulate these values? I will be the first to admit that when I first heard of it, it sounded like a good idea. How can it be bad?

The main problem lies in their root: they are all completely subjective measures. There is no empirical methodology for applying these value scores to a company. It begins with a failed investment banking analyst who is tasked with scoring companies on these values. Why ‘failed’? Because if they were any good at evaluating industries and companies, they would still be doing it.

And since ESG is subjective by its nature, the movement has been hijacked by the left and its subjective values. A company that mines coal with US labor gets a poor score, while a solar panel manufacturer in China that uses slave labor and is owned by a dictatorship gets a high score. How does that make any sense?

Let’s begin by looking at the energy industry. By their own admission, almost every ESG analyst will state that an energy company is ‘bad’ because they employ fossil fuels for the bulk of their energy creation. Thus, all of the major banks in this country will no longer offer credit and financial services to these firms (they want to preserve their own ESG scores). Almost all oil drilling and exploration on public land have been terminated because using fossil fuels will destroy the environment. By starving the industry of capital and reducing production on public lands, ESG will create its own energy crisis.

The new definition of ESG is this:  Energy Shortages Guaranteed.

In the world of the ‘woke’ ideologues who promote this line of thought believe it is better to have places like Venezuela and the Middle East supply our oil than it is to get it here. This is in spite of the fact that the USA has greater oil reserves than almost any other nation on earth. We also are much cleaner producers.

Moreover, if fossil fuels are such a danger to the earth, why does Venezuelan or Saudi oil get a pass? Does the earth know the difference? Are these countries not part of the global ecosystem?

The solution to this self-inflicted energy crisis is to encourage the use of electric vehicles (EVs). It may come as a surprise to learn that EVs are not all that ‘green’. The most obvious example is fueling these EVs. Charging your Tesla overnight is the energy equivalent of having 15 refrigerators running in your kitchen overnight. There are other, less obvious, reasons for promoting the use of EVs: the most practical is that it reduces your ability to travel independently – you can only travel to places that will make charging stations available (currently limited to the most populous areas). And, by the way, where will the additional power to fuel these vehicles come from?  Our energy grid is currently at capacity and has trouble maintaining current demand and it is mostly derived from fossil fuels.

Bear in mind also that the very people who decry the use of fossil fuels almost all fly on private jets for their travel needs. When do you suppose President Obama or Leonardo De Caprio last took a Southwest flight? Remember that flying on a private plane pollutes 5 to 14 times more than commercial jet travel per passenger. Yet these ‘woke’ proponents of ‘green’ policies still preach to us about reducing our energy footprint while they ignore it completely. And by the way, if global warming, the ice caps melting and climate change are going to flood the world’s shorelines, why do they all live on oceanfront properties? But I digress…

Back to ESG. At its core, it is simply another way for our leaders to control things. If it were an honest measure of ‘goodness’ it would excoriate any firm doing business with the nation of China – one of the worst human rights violators on the planet.

While it is only in its nascent stages, ESG is still nothing more than a social credit score applied to businesses. Who makes up these scores? What are the criteria? And how long will it be before employees of companies are scored on their ESG evaluations? How long will it be before we all are tagged with a social credit score?