Last week, State Sen. Dan Roberts (R-Mountain Brook) introduced a bill to keep Alabama’s tax dollars away from companies that discriminate according to ESG criteria. That’s great news for Alabama; the bill deserves broad support and speedy passage.
Alabama Political Reporter editor-in-chief Bill Britt responded, claiming the bill “entangles businesses” in unnecessary “red tape.” ESG is just good people doing the right thing for everyone, he claimed.
That’s absurd.
For his characterization of ESG, Britt relies on PwC, a company that’s 100% ESG-captured. That’s very like me using my mom to show that I’m a very, very good boy indeed.
What is ESG really? It’s a massive effort to clamp the whole woke agenda on American businesses, and then use those businesses to force this agenda on you by ending supply of reliable goods and services, and denying you credit, insurance, and other necessities unless you conform.
ESG stands for “environmental, social and governance.” While there are many secondary ESG concerns—such as forcing you to get your protein from bugs, or forcing states to allow abortion until birth —the primary goals are decarbonization on political schedules and equity-based discrimination against leftist-disfavored groups, particularly men, white, and straight people.
Decarbonization means forcing the U.S. to end its use of reliable, fossil-fuel energy and switch to “green” energy on political schedules, established primarily through UN agencies, without regard to technological, financial, or geopolitical realities. In practice, this decarbonization means unaffordable and unreliable energy that will constrain our lives and our comforts greatly. Air conditioning and heating will be limited, travel will be curtailed, gas-powered cars outlawed, and all for nothing.
China, India and the rest of the developing world have no interest in decarbonizing. China added more coal-powered plants in the first quarter of 2023 than in all of 2022, and more in recent years than the whole West has left. India has flat out said it will get rich before it decarbonizes, just as the West did.
Nothing American companies can do can affect the climate. Decarbonization will just make normal Americans’ lives miserable. Meanwhile, the chief government and business ESG proponents continue to travel from their mansions in mid-winter via limousines and private jets to Davos, Switzerland, to enjoy well-heated palatial hotels to decide how to constrain us further.
Equity, the key ESG “social” concern, means active, aggressive discrimination on the basis of race, sex and orientation in the present to make up for other discrimination in the past. All such discrimination is illegal, because all Americans have the same civil rights, including the right not to face race, sex, or orientation bias. But the ESG crowd constantly — and proudly — pushes corporations to hire, promote, and retain “diverse” employees, while leaving the “non-diverse” behind.
Again, this is the height of hypocrisy. Old, straight, white guys like Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America, and Larry Fink, the CEO of giant investment house BlackRock, are pushing this equity-based discrimination for the rest of us. They’re making sure that other white or straight people or men can’t achieve according to their merit, efforts, and the content of their character, but instead must enthusiastically agree to settle into the back of the bus. But Moynihan and Fink sure haven’t given up their immense wealth and power to the deserving diverse or constrained their descendants to live without hope of accomplishment.
It's funny. ESG’s two primary priorities are the Biden administration’s chief “whole of government” initiatives. Not the non-partisan do-gooderism it’s portrayed as, eh?
What Sen. Roberts’ bill does, and all that it does, is to keep Alabama’s assets — your taxpayer money — from being spent with financial-industry and related companies that are trying to force other companies to force the rest of us to live miserable, constrained lives in societies riven by discrimination, hopelessness and criminality. (ESG loves “defund the police.”)
Roberts is right. Britt is absolutely full of it.
Scott Shepard is a fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research and Director of its Free Enterprise Project.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information to Commentary@1819news.com.
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