91–100 of 189 posts
I think Tariq Fancy does a good job of breaking down why ESG and sustainable investing as a whole is bunk: https://medium.com/@sosofancy/the-secret-diary-of-a-sustaina... He also summarizes his thoughts on Doug Henwood's podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9zaG91dC5sYm8tdGF...
Does he actually have a point in amongst the rambling name dropping I gave up hope somewhere around the Swedish Souffle anecdote and abandoned the article.
ESG exists because there's a market for that form of equity. That market is willing to buy equity that might even underperform the rest of the market, because it explicitly does perform in the metric these buyers care about. There are already options if you strictly are focused on emissions, so I don't think this article is meaningful. The Economist is right-leaning and would certainly love to distract ESG equity buy…
Not to comment on the rest of the comment, but apparently the Economist is not right leaning? Do you have a source for that? https://www.allsides.com/news-source/economist
> As of August 2018, 608 AllSides readers agreed with this media bias rating, while 1,302 disagreed. Of those who disagreed, the average said The Economist has a Center media bias.
I think that differences in economic vs. social issues as well as The Economist's international perspective make it difficult to categorize on a simple left/right metric. They claim[0] to support lots of positions that seem socially left-leaning to me as an American (drug legalization, gay marriage in 2004, repealing the Second Amendment), but OC seems to be talking more about economically left-leaning positions ("scrutiny of their ballooning compensation").
[0] - https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/02/...
ESG is a political compliance score. Fall out of favor with certain groups and your score will plummet, publicly tout an agenda around diversity and sustainability and your score will rise. The fact that Exxon (edit: oops I mean shell) has a higher ESG score than Tesla should be all you need to know.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to comment on the rest of the comment, but apparently the Economist is not right leaning? Do you have a source for that? https://www.allsides.com/news-source/economist
The AllSides report you linked to cites a Pew survey that found that "the majority of The Economist readers hold political values to the left-of-center," which I think might reflect left-leaning social values more than economics. AllSides themselves even say that their readers disagree: > As of August 2018, 608 AllSides readers agreed with this media bias rating, while 1,302 disagreed. Of those who disagreed, the ave…
People need to get out of their bubbles and understand better the full range of political beliefs and how they fit into that range.
Depending on how you look at something, getting an electric car is a horrible thing to do. Even then, is that better or worse than charging it at night from a coal power plant?
The problem is, there is not simple solution, as pollution in general is not a simple problem. Reducing direct emissions is part of it... but shifting from fossil fuels with a high energy, low energy cost, to then use batteries, with their own environmental impact on material construction, refinement and recycle/destruction... and then getting that power (charging at night) from electricity that comes from a coal power plant with worse energy cost than the original material you were burning anyway... is it really a net positive?
That doesn't even count a corporation's indirect influence... are the bulk of the workers driving an hour each way each day? Where does the energy at play come from.
I'm a strong proponent of nuclear power in the near term... and getting water distribution to combine multiple sources of electricity and natural resources for hydrogen as a primary fuel source for ground vehicles.
I think a lot of the woke efforts in and of themselves are short sighted, and not very well thought out at all though.
Pay-walled, so only got the summary... but even "emissions" isn't a simple calculation... do you include the electricity generation you get your power from? What about emissions on what went into something you buy? The mining, processing, shipping, refining, manufacturing and distribution of the final product, and many component hierarchies in play? Depending on how you look at something, getting an electric car is a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A electric cars are mostly a luxury item for rich people to feel better. Not sure why you think Tesla should have a good rating. They are harmful in that they are actively distracting from the proper solution: that people shouldn't have private cars. The environmental cost to produce car, the space they take up in the cities, in the end private car ownership can not be made sustainable even if they run on electric. T…
Whenever I see an argument like this I'm confused by how hand-wavey "just achieve societal change" is. Like, sure, there's various issues with various technological approaches, but it's not as if the kind of broad social change that'd see private cars outlawed develops overnight. If anything, the last couple of decades demonstrate pretty convincingly and depressingly that putting together real momentum (read: won ref…
https://ecology.wa.gov/About-us/Who-we-are/News/2021/Aug-6-S...
also note that CSR (corporate social responsibility) is public relations, not a moral or ethical position, part and parcel to the term 'greenwashing'. in the same vein as the article, we should stop talking about climate change in favor of pollution. climate change is vague, pollution is not. we can see and feel the effects of pollution, which makes it more likely that we can create a coalition to address it rather t…
Doom spreaders sound like quacks in general. It doesn't matter if it's Satan or Climate change... it just breeds skepticism. Keep the message on message. This is why a lot of people stopped/don't support the EPA and the Green movements.
You can see, smell, taste and feel pollution. It's bad.. and even then, it's really bad in places that we frankly don't control. And we're shipping our waste overseas to be dealt with corruptly or worse, not at all.
In my lifetime, the Grand Canyon went from being able to see across well on any given day... to a haze the obscures the other side... rolling in from California.
ESG exists because there's a market for that form of equity. That market is willing to buy equity that might even underperform the rest of the market, because it explicitly does perform in the metric these buyers care about. There are already options if you strictly are focused on emissions, so I don't think this article is meaningful. The Economist is right-leaning and would certainly love to distract ESG equity buy…
Not to comment on the rest of the comment, but apparently the Economist is not right leaning? Do you have a source for that? https://www.allsides.com/news-source/economist
FWIW, they have endorsed the Democrat candidate in 6 of the last 8 US presidential elections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance...