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Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals

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Re: Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals

#141

Post by pie_flavor »

ke88y wrote: post #59
Aerroon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I first read about it I thought someone was playing an elaborate joke. It makes no sense why such ephemeral concepts should somehow lead to better investments. If anything, the entire ESG score thing seems like a scam to get people to make bad investments and to then bet against those investments.

> It makes no sense why such ephemeral concepts should somehow lead to better investments. Each component alone makes sense, if interpreted in a way that is consistent with shareholder capitalism. 1. Environmental. Interpreted in terms of shareholder capitalism, Environmental might mean something like "how well does this company work as a hedge against increasingly likely tail risks, and how resilient will it be to p…

Except

1. 'Environmental' covers being net-good for the environment, neither meaning not damaging the environment at all nor meaning resilient against environmental changes. So it doesn't hedge anything.

2. 'Social' covers increasing the percentage of employees that are of disadvantaged minority groups, not decreasing the percentage of employees that are anonymously observed to be overpaid/incompetent. It's fun to pretend the one leads to the other, but in reality the exact opposite happens, as minority preference almost perfectly supplants network preference doing exactly the same thing in the same way. This one may as well be the 'G' of ESG, for 'Goodhart'.

3. 'Governance' is the only one that is actually a shareholder value, instead of a progressive-social-club value, and basically is there to launder the other two.

Re: Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals

#143

Post by networkchad »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #110
yadaeno wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PepsiCo, a company that each year fills 50 billion disposable plastic bottles with sugar water is considered "low risk". https://www.sustainalytics.com/esg-rating/pepsico-inc/100791...

At least plastic is inert.. even then, it's still better than making batteries.

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Re: Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals

#144

Post by networkchad »

jquery wrote: post #118
zmgsabst wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree: - caring about your investments aligning with your values is good - investment firms violating civil rights laws and promoting fashionable bigotry using retirement funds to coerce companies into self-destructive behavior is bad

Why are you prefixing bigotry with "fashionable"? Seems like a shibboleth. The only "fashionable" bigotry I can think of right now is anti-trans bigotry, but I don't see how that links to the rest of your statement.

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Re: Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals

#145

Post by clarionbell »

btilly wrote: post #126
smfjaw wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

offset your cheating (emmissions) by buying adultery (carbon) credits

I think that those credits are called "flowers". I'm only halfway joking. A lot of people do try to address their guilt over bad behavior by doing nice things. And a lot of people who receive those nice things don't want to think about why they are being treated well. The easiest person to scam is the one who wants to believe the scam. And any kind of credit program will attract people who want to believe.

I've seen a comedy show about that. Husband buys flowers "just because" and the wife starts crying uncontrollably, convinced he's cheating on her. Because there is no way he's just nice.

The kicker is he literally just wanted to be nice to her. While the other men in the family were trying to convince him that it's a bad idea.

Re: Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals

#146

Post by iamflimflam1 »

Lots of the comments I’m reading really indicate how well the political campaign against ESG has worked.

Lots of knee jerk comments without much actual analysis and thinking.

Most of the commentators aren’t even aware what E, S and G stand for (environmental, social governance).

Re: Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals

#147

Post by Gareth321 »

jnsaff2 wrote: post #140
jnsaff2 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it looks at how well the company is prepared to do when the climate changes (mostly by having written some plans). It does not care much about what the company actions do to the world.

In short: ESG measures the worlds impact on the company NOT the company's impact on the world. Better ESG score means company is more resilient to change in those factors.

> In short: ESG measures the worlds impact on the company NOT the company's impact on the world.

This is not correct. ESG tracks, among others, the carbon output of a business. In other words, the impact of the business on the world.

You can read more here: https://www.pwc.com/ca/en/today-s-issues/environmental-socia...

Re: Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals

#148

Post by klipklop »

I’ll likely get downvoted, but ESG is a way for finance/banking to punish companies that don’t align with their politics.

My favorite part about the whole thing is how it went from “conspiracy theory that will never actually be implemented” to I have to do ESG training at work within a few years.

Re: Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals

#149

Post by archgoon »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #123
gitfan86 wrote: post #101

ESG is such a obvious scam. It would be like this: Wife: Have you been cheating on me? Husband: Lets check my APS score. Wife: What? Husband: Adultery, Pushups and Soccer Watching score. Looks like I'm in the 1% of husbands as calculated by the experts. So I don't think you have anything to worry about.

It's a thinly veiled signal that a corporation will not act out against the status quo, and in return they will have protection from their corporate media and regulatory attack dogs. The sad thing is they have scientifically captured and subverted mainstream activism, which for a while around 50-60 years ago emerged as what appeared to be their biggest threat. You can "resist" the state of things all you like, but yo…

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Re: Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals

#150

Post by bakuninsbart »

imperfectcats wrote: post #85
tfandango wrote: post #10

ESG is tricky to talk about thanks to the politization of it. I work on some projects that involve ESG data and I have some thoughts. First there's LOTS of factors. If you bunch them all up into one number, it becomes meaningless as the article describes. I would think wiser minds would use this data to make investment decisions based on some specific risk, like hedging against some environmental disaster which may a…

Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" Any ESG system that uses a calculated number composed of many areas will quickly fall prey to Goodhart's Law. With an E, an S and a G to work on, the areas for change are numerous enough that Goodhart's Law holds even in a non-cynical world. When an edict that "We need to increase our X sco…

I'm working adjacent to the sustainability space, and I think Goodhart's law applies to a good degree, however a bad measure is often still more useful than no measure at all. It at least enables us to show flaws, develop better indicators and metrics.

When it comes to human rights in the supply chain and environmental impact, there was a complete lack of data in many cases. With the ESG, we see a major shift where companies are now scrambling to gather said data, analyse it and often also publish it.

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