Monday, 27 September 2021

‘The ESG investing industry is dangerous’

Tariq Fancy – previously chief investment officer for sustainable investing at BlackRock – has written an essay on environmental, social and corporate governance: The Secret Diary of a ‘Sustainable Investor’ — Part 1:
This is the first of a three-part essay that shares how my thinking evolved from evangelizing ‘sustainable investing’ for the world’s largest investment firm to decrying it as a dangerous placebo that harms the public interest. It’s not short. But this topic is critically important: it lies at the heart of how we reform capitalism to address important environmental and social challenges with concrete action. I challenge business leaders who have advocated the ideas I question below to offer a serious rebuttal. 
The essay has been picked up by the FT. 


Tariq Fancy is quoted as saying: 
In my role at BlackRock, I was helping to popularise an idea that the answer to a sustainable future runs through ESG and sustainability and green products, or in other words, that the answer to the market’s failure to serve the long-term public interest is, of course, more market. A bit like the NRA’s traditional answer to mass shootings and related concerns around public safety — the answer is more guns. 
He says senior executives at Blackrock are too smart to believe their own claims about ESG: 
They must know that they’re exaggerating the degree of overlap between purpose and profit . . . These leaders must know that there is no way the set of ideas they’ve proposed are even close to being up to the challenge of solving the runaway long-term problems . . . And right now all of the other stuff they’re saying — the marketing gobbledegook — is actively misleading people. 
Tariq Fancy lays out a number of arguments. Here, quoted from the FT article, are three: 
Argument five. Giving people the dumb idea that shifting their savings from one investment fund to another is going to help materially with, say, climate change creates a dangerous distraction from solutions that fit the scale of the problem, all of which involve changing the rules of capitalism through regulation. 
Argument eight. Corporations, and the whole legal and social apparatus in which they sit, were built around the idea that companies exist to maximise shareholder wealth. That’s what they are designed to do and are required to do. Thinking that fiddling around in the financial markets is going to make companies fit for a radically different purpose — helping with broad social problems driven by economic externalities and tricky collective action problems — is simply bonkers.  
Argument nine. Do you really want financial industry bigwigs making choices about how to solve our biggest social problems? Fancy quotes one of the signatories to the hilariously empty and meaningless 2019 Business Roundtable statement on the purpose of the corporation: “There were times that I felt like Thomas Jefferson.” So said Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky, who led the drafting of the BRT’s groundbreaking statement on stakeholder value. It’s easy to understand why he felt that way, given the weight of such lofty words about the future direction of not just business, but indeed society in general. But not enough people have asked a simple question: does it make sense that a CEO should feel like a famous US president? Only one of them is elected by the people.   
The author of the FT article finishes by saying: 
I myself find argument five particularly important. From what I understand, it’s clear we need, for example, a whopping big carbon tax, and soon, or we’re cooked. But we have some of the smartest, most powerful people in the corporate world rattling on about this sustainable investing drivel instead. It scares me.
 It should scare us all. Holcim – parent of Aggregate Industries – emits more CO2 than many countries:

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