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

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71–80 of 187 posts

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

#71
post #65

I think caring about ESG, and especially evaluating a company's governance, is important. But I don't know how much I really want BlackRock and Vanguard to be the ones doing the scoring...

Black Rock does NOT own the world, here is why: https://youtu.be/NzKOVVvDGhE?si=Xhog1L_VRtzMsaQ6

If you have to have YouTube explainers "proving" you're not evil, you're probably evil.

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

#73

Often companies with good ESG scores optimize for having good scores. Its like studying to the test and they may have particularly poor results outside of the test that they have studied for. Also, ESG is political and like all things that involve politics, many things that may be good for the score may be bad for the environment. Easiest example to see is in energy with things like nuclear power, and 'biomass' and c…

something something when a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric

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

#74
post #64
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specifically are you talking about?

Here’s Apple’s ESG report: https://s2.q4cdn.com/470004039/files/doc_downloads/2022/08/2... In it they say: “We’re making progress in increasing representation, and currently 50 percent of our workforce in the U.S. is made up of people from underrepresented communities.” “Please see the Appendix on page 81 for more data on representation” Then scroll to page 81. We see that 43% of the company is white (the US is 60% w…

> They report these numbers because they are used to calculate the company’s ESG score. More diversity = higher score, where diversity is defined as fewer white people.

Where do you see that? That's not part of the criteria for my Vanguard ESG fund.

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

#75

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…

ESG is a way for large firms to manipulate the stock prices of smaller firms and buy them out. That is all there is to it. Nobody should be fooled by this. None of these companies care about ESG or any of the propgandized ethics of ESG. Every one of these pro-ESG companies would lay off a large swath of their workforce if it meant higher profits. Pretty painful for the "S" social part of ESG.

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

#76
post #65

I think caring about ESG, and especially evaluating a company's governance, is important. But I don't know how much I really want BlackRock and Vanguard to be the ones doing the scoring...

Black Rock does NOT own the world, here is why: https://youtu.be/NzKOVVvDGhE?si=Xhog1L_VRtzMsaQ6

Correct. But they do get to vote the shares.

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

#78

I think caring about ESG, and especially evaluating a company's governance, is important. But I don't know how much I really want BlackRock and Vanguard to be the ones doing the scoring...

I find it hilarious the kind of conspiracy theories people lob at BlackRock and Vanguard. BlackRock maybe I can maybe understand, but Vanguard is like the most straightforward boring investment company in the world. It's literally a shareholder co-op for passive investment funds. People have no idea what they are talking about.

Tech workers (with their inflated view of their own intelligence) are almost always hilarious. It's half the reason I keep coming back to HN.

If they spent the same amount of time doing research as they do on concocting inane conspiracies and brainless explanations, they may actually be as smart as they think themselves to be.

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

#79

Often companies with good ESG scores optimize for having good scores. Its like studying to the test and they may have particularly poor results outside of the test that they have studied for. Also, ESG is political and like all things that involve politics, many things that may be good for the score may be bad for the environment. Easiest example to see is in energy with things like nuclear power, and 'biomass' and c…

A good description would be “over-fitting”.

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

#80
post #67
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear power if done safely is a much better alternative than say windmills which require extensive mining to make and kill thousands of birds a year.

You’ll hate cats then https://www.statista.com/chart/15195/wind-turbines-are-not-k...

You'll hate statistics even more: https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/02/03/170851048/do-we...
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