Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores are a mechanism by which ideologically aligned special interests represented by unelected supranational organizations are attempting to “reset” the global financial system to their advantage. This emerging design would circumvent national and individual sovereignty by altering traditional financial methods of assessing risk and debt/capital allocation. This attempted shift from “shareholder capitalism” to a “stakeholder collectivism” model hinges upon assigning companies, and soon individuals, arbitrarily determined ESG scores.
The essence of ESG is that the current order of society and the economy is discriminatory and destructive to the environment, minority ethnic and other groups, and more ‘fair’ outcomes to workers, consumers, and lower income citizens. It evades any responsibility that would more justifiably be that of local, provincial and federal governments to ensure that firms and all economic actors are behaving in ways that are honest, safe, clean, unabusive of market or the environment, and provide opportunities for all qualified employment and contractor or supplier applicants.
It presumes that, somehow, life, the economy and the world are being badly managed by currently dominant private sector players. The thesis is that more community- or social-oriented groups or organizations can better manage our lives, businesses and economic activities, including consumer and energy choices, than we can as individuals: in other words: socialism or fascism, depending on the mix of state or state-directed channelling of permitted actions.
ESG’s metrics have ostensibly been designed to combat systemic global problems such as climate change, racial inequality, and world hunger—in alignment with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. In reality, these measures will simply centralize power and control in the hands of unelected technocrats and private global institutions influenced solely by the wealthy elite that control monetary policy, capital, and credit through global central banks, where “baskets of currencies” make up the current global system. ESG is a major step toward consolidating a unitary global governance model utilizing digital identification and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) as micromanagement tools that can be isolated upon individual transactions. ESG would therefore be a major step towards the dissolution of free markets, national sovereignty, due process under the law, and individual liberty.
This issue has importance beyond financial markets and corporate management. ESG-influenced investment management has an orientation that sets itself against the principal focus and responsibility of all investment managers: to attempt to attain the highest possible risk-adjusted long-term rates of return on assets that they have a fiduciary obligation to protect. Confining investment to dubiously-determined highest or higher ESG scoring firms or industries create huge diversification and asset concentration risks, as has been shown by the poor returns of ESG oriented funds and managers in 2022, when favoured information technology companies plummeted in value and traditional energy companies such as oil and gas explorers and Liquified Natural Gas-related firms soared. ESG threatens many more industries than just energy, though: agriculture, mining, construction, basic industry and defense firms are in peril from this misguided doctrine. It is crucial that ESG be opposed and defeated.
The verdict is actually in, in a big way, on ESG itself, and it is a negative one. It is a formula for slower growth, lower living standards and smaller pensions.
The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has developed seven Policy Tip Sheets that introduce the public to the dangers of adherence to ESG doctrine, all available on the Centre’s website. The first one is an introduction to ESG basics; the second, the roles in ESG of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions and the Ontario Securities Commission; the third, the effects of ESG on free markets; the fourth, a look at the primary architects of ESG; the fifth, the negative effects of ESG on food supply and agriculture; the sixth, the privacy threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies; and the seventh, ESG’s effects on the banking industry.
These tip sheets are easy to read and understand. They are Canadianized versions of original materials kindly shared by a sister organization and think tank, the Heartland Institute, to whom the Centre is enormously grateful for providing a strong template and foundation. ESG is a threat to our way of life and the dynamic and innovative nature of the free market economy. Readers and citizens are encouraged to learn more about it, via these tip sheets and other materials available in the public sphere, and to make it clear to politicians, bankers and investment managers that coerced, involuntary adoption of ESG is entirely not acceptable. Future prosperity and opportunity for this and later generations is very much at stake.
- ESG: A simple breakdown of its components
- ESG: Roles of Federal Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions; OSC
- ESG: The Effects Upon Free Markets
- ESG: Primary Architects and Implementers
- ESG: Negative Effects on Food Supply and Agriculture
- ESG: Central Bank Digital Currencies
- ESG: The Banking Industry