ESG Scores: The Problematic Grift
The Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement is being proactively challenged in the private sector, state legislatures, and in Congress.
What explains this? First, it won’t save the planet. Secondly, it’s political and hostile to conservative or independent views. And most troubling of all, its framework is antithetical to free market economics since it forces behaviors on the public.
ESG, unsurprisingly, has morphed into a pernicious ideology. Its reporting regime—specifically the scoring system— is similarly worthy of scrutiny since corporations reportedly pay upwards of $500,000 to attain good ESG scores.
The sustainability consultancy firm ERM issued a revealing report entitled Rate the Raters 2023: ESG Ratings at a Crossroads, exposing the industry’s controversial reporting practices.
As I noted on Independent Women’s Forum’s blog, publicly traded companies “spend an average of $220,000 and $480,000 annually to boost their ESG ratings compared to private companies (which pay between $220,000 and $480,000 annually). In contrast, investors spend an average of $175,00 to $360,000 annually to improve their standing.”
An August 2022 Stanford University study entitled “ESG Ratings: A Compass without Direction” found they are prone to vast shortcomings. The study concluded, “We find that while ESG rating providers may convey important insights into the nonfinancial impact of companies, significant shortcomings exist in their objectives, methodologies, and incentives which detract from the informativeness of their assessments.” The Wall Street Journal also stressed that ESG ratings, at best, are subjective opinions.
Are high ESG scores reflective of real-life behavior and practices? The evidence suggests the opposite is true. Before their respective collapses, both FTX and Silicon Valley Bank –coincidentally enough– boasted about high marks on sustainability and equity. The former even garnered a higher rating on factors like leadership and governance compared to oil giant Exxon Mobil. And three nations - Ghana, Sri Lanka, and the Netherlands - boasting near-perfect ESG scores collapsed or were on the verge of going under after adopting green bonds and banning fertilizer—policies aligned with the “E” prong.
Recently, ESG reporting has manifested in other ways, like monitoring biodiversity impact and even rating chocolate companies.
During the 15th annual United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal, Canada, last December, signatories agreed to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to advance a global, whole government policy to conserve 30% of “waters” and 30% of “lands” by 2030. (Biden’s “America the Beautiful” initiative mirrors the U.N.’s plan with its own 30-by-30 initiative.) Contained in the agreement is a call to action for corporations to start tracking biodiversity impact as they do carbon emissions.
Naturally, these guidelines were devised by the International Sustainability Standards Board and are aimed at supplementing existing climate disclosure frameworks already commonplace in ESG reporting.
Expanding disclosures to account for “ risks, dependencies and impacts” for biodiversity is arguably harder to track and extremely infeasible. Talk about an inconvenient truth.
ESG reporting is also coming for your favorite chocolate brands. An organization called Be Slavery Free is behind the hottest list out there, The Chocolate Scorecard, that rates “good eggs” and “rotten eggs” in the chocolate industry on sustainability. Their website says their team consists of “universities, consultants, and civil society groups engaging in transforming the chocolate industry.”
They score a company based on whether or not they align their business goals with the scorecard’s methodology. Metrics include “traceability and transparency,” “living income,” “deforestation and climate,” and “child and slave labor,” among those listed.
They deemed Walmart and General Mills their “cracked eggs” of 2023.
“We believe that all companies selling chocolate products should be able to provide the information requested in the survey,” the methodology paper said. “Consumers and investors have a right to be informed about the conditions under which chocolate is produced.”
Like other ESG scoring metrics, the report’s methodology is flawed and may ignore bad company behavior if they check the right boxes.
What’s the takeaway from ESG and its accompanying scores? These funds have a demonstrably low return on investment, while ESG reporting firms similarly suffer credibility problems. As the aforementioned Stanford study explains, “Unfortunately, it is rare for rating providers to offer concrete, systematic evidence to back up claims about their ratings.”
That isn’t stopping the Biden administration, however, from adopting its own policy on climate risk assessment by executive order.
Although the term has gotten so toxic, its proponents are urging people to use nice-sounding alternatives like “freedom to invest” and “responsible investing.” But as the Economist observed, it’s a deeply broken system steeped in sanctimoniousness.
ESG’s brand and scoring system is rightly being scrutinized by business people and a growing number of bipartisan lawmakers. Let’s hope more come out against it.
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Energy chinks in America's armor
In a rapidly changing world stage, America’s obsession with climate change, Net Zero emissions, and eradicating fossil fuel products, while transitioning to just electricity from renewables that manufacture nothing for humanity, are exposing chinks in our national security armor.
Voters, policy makers, and legislators need to focus on what that is doing to our military, and for our military preparedness, our national security, and our ability to prevent nuclear war.
From the shores of California’s 4th largest economy in the world these are a few chinks in its armor that expose obvious national security concerns for America:
China dominates the rare earths market used in advanced commercial and military technology, and net-zero emissions goals in wealthy developed countries.
The mining in China, Africa, and Brazil for the exotic minerals and metals required for wealthy countries to achieve their net-zero emission goals controls the earths most precious exotic minerals and metals. Those materials support wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries.
With in-state refinery closures, two of which occurring under Newsom’s watch, California can look toward Asia’s 88 new refineries for manufactured oil derivatives that are the basis of most every product being used by mankind, as well as the manufactured fuels used by every transportation infrastructure, and the military.
California is the only state in contiguous America that imports most of its crude oil demands for the state, from foreign countries. That dependence, via maritime transportation from foreign nations for the state’s crude oil energy demands, has increased imported crude oil from 5 percent in 1992 to almost 60 percent today of total consumption.
Total California imports from foreign countries were more than double that of exports from California ports, with China being the number one “trading partner”.
How is it possible that the Californian economy, and America, has allowed itself to become so dependent on authoritarian countries like China, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia over the 30 years since the end of the Cold War? The weaponization of energy by China and Russia have been extensively discussed in the three books co-authored by Ronald Stein and Todd Royal, including the 2022 Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations - Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy.
Today, the lion’s share of raw materials for wind turbines, solar panels, continue to come from China, and China-invested or China-run African, Asian and Latin American mines that are notorious for child labor, horrendous working conditions, and virtually no concern for the environment or human lives.
Even though America has bounteous oil, gas, and coal at home we have made most American mineralized and mining areas off limits – and the administration has rejected almost every proposed mining project it’s seen. America lacks the critical materials that go into wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and weapons only because the lack of environmental regulations and labor laws in foreign countries make these materials very cost effective to just import, rather than produce them at home.
Our government leaders believe that zero emissions at any cost is more important than the environmental and humanity abuses that support “clean” energy. Despite the Biden administration’s declaration that EV battery materials from China may be tainted by child labor, made with materials known to be produced with child or forced labor, America remains supportive of exploiting those in developing countries that support the “green” movement of wealthy countries.
President Joe Biden and California’s Governor Newsom continue to support subsidies to procure EV’s and build more wind and solar, when those subsidies are providing financial incentives to the developing countries mining for those “green” materials, that promotes further exploitations of poor people in developing countries.
I personally thought that Biden and Newsom had higher moral and ethical standards that would stop them from financially encouraging the exploitation of the poor in developing countries
Biden has done an excellent job of relinquishing “CONTROL” for the “green” materials to China and is actively relinquishing “CONTROL” of the crude oil supply to OPEC and Russia! Unbeknownst to President Joe Biden, is that China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are great War historians of WWI and WWII, and both know that the countries that controls the minerals, crude oil, and natural gas, controls the world!
California and Federal subsidy incentives and mandates to dismantle our proven energy and transportation infrastructures are unrealistic, and reckless as they bet our entire economic and national security on net-zero energy and transportation technologies that have no track record of working at the scale of a city, state or nation,.
Reliance on our adversaries, while the push for renewables for “just electricity”, that only generate electricity but cannot manufacture any products for the 8 billion on this planet, may be popular in politics, it is problematic in practice. That reliance on foreign sources is highly detrimental to our national security, economy and very existence.
American policies and practices that undermine hydrocarbons as a fuel source also destroy the production, availability and affordability of more than 6,000 fossil fuel derivative products essential to health, life and livelihood such as medicines, medical equipment, fertilizers, asphalt, wax, ink, clothing, recreation equipment, water pipes, antifreeze, dyes, paint, enamel, beauty products, contact lenses, telephones, sporting equipment, tires, rubbing alcohol, and nearly everything “synthetic”.
An absurd American government belief is that last year’s Inflation Reduction Act gave America’s renewable-energy industry a long, green signal.
Low carbon energy, i.e., renewables and fusion, only generate electricity, but wind, solar, and nuclear manufacture nothing for humanity.
Fossil fuels, on the other hand, manufacture everything for the 8 billion on this planet, i.e., products, and transportation fuels.
In fact, all the parts and components for wind, solar, and nuclear are made with the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil! Thus, ridding the world of oil will eliminate wind, solar, and nuclear!
The oil, gas, and raw material suppliers from Russia and China could well become the globally dominant force in the world over a fossil fuel-disarming America and West. God help America!
https://www.cfact.org/2023/04/06/energy-chinks-in-americas-armor/
***********************************************National Science Teaching Assn rejects climate debate
As we reported in our last message to you, the CO2 Coalition was removed from our purchased booth at the NSTA's National Conference on Science Education. If you did not see our last newsletter and you are just learning of this, we were thrown out for publicizing their anti-science position on the teaching of climate change.
CO2 Coalition Director, and Education Committee Chair, Gordon Fulks, Ph.D., succinctly penned this letter to the National Science Teaching Association Leadership: Dr. Erika Shugart, Executive Director; Dr. Eric Pyle, Retiring President; Dr. Elizabeth Mulkerrin, President; and Dr. Julie Luft, President-elect National Science Teaching Association, Arlington, VA, USA
Dear Drs. Shugart, Pyle, Mulkerrin and Luft:
I am the author of most of the CO2 Coalition's publications that your Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Ryan Foley, demanded we cease distributing at your conference in Atlanta last month. My question is simple: WHY? We paid for the exhibitor space that we utilized and were welcomed by many of your members.
What was so egregious about "Once Upon a Time," "Simon: The Solar-Powered Cat," and "The Magic Mirror" to justify such an intolerant response?
These stories were written by a Ph.D. astrophysicist, namely someone with the credentials to tackle such tasks. They are beautifully illustrated by a world-class Brazilian artist who lives near the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere, Sao Paulo.
The stories were produced by a remarkable team of real scientists, most with Ph.D.s. Mr. Foley met some of our team, including Dr. Rafaella Nascimento, a Brazilian with a Ph.D. in Chemistry who runs her own business in Houston. And Mr. Foley talked with Dr. Sharon Camp, a Ph.D. Chemist who taught advanced chemistry in Atlanta high schools for many years. Both are volunteers.
Mr. Foley ordered the Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition, Gregory Wrightstone, a man with a Master of Science in geology, to leave the building. When Mr. Wrightstone tried to explain that we were merely supporting the Scientific Method by emphasizing evidence over doctrine, Mr. Foley was adamant that our people had to leave.
Perhaps Mr. Foley was unhappy that we were also distributing a detailed scientific explanation of why we disagree with the National Science Teaching Association's policy supporting climate hysteria. Science is never about policy statements from organizations. It is about dialogue between properly credentialed scientists who can critique the available evidence. Amateurs can play a role, but only if they are sufficiently knowledgeable.
I was surprised to learn that Mr. Ryan Foley has no academic background in the sciences or in education, meaning that he should not be involved in passing judgments on real scientists with strong credentials.
Does he have ANY understanding that the Scientific Method dates from the 1660s, when the newly formed British Royal Society took as its motto “Nullius in verba,” meaning “Take nobody's word for it?” That expressed the determination of the Fellows to avoid the domination of authority and to make decisions based on facts derived from experiments.
This is the very foundation of science that all school children should understand and appreciate.
I am the Chairman of our Education Committee that edits and approves all the materials that we publish for children. All of our committee members have backgrounds in science, except for one who is an emeritus professor of economics. Most have Ph.D.s, two are members of the US National Academy of Sciences, several are Fellows of multiple scientific societies. One has been nominated for a Nobel Prize. Most are volunteers, and some are even donors.
This is not to say that we are necessarily correct about everything. But it does say that we have far better qualifications to address scientific topics than someone without a scientific background.
If Mr. Foley had any legitimate reason to question the publications we were distributing, he should have called in real scientists with real expertise to engage us in a constructive dialogue that would have set a good example for the teachers at your conference. They were overwhelmingly supportive of our efforts to return the discussion of climate to something scientific.
Science thrives on constructive debate but dies when non-scientists try to impose their political beliefs.
At the very least, you owe us a public apology for the bad behavior of one of your executives. You should redirect your efforts toward teaching children how to think like a scientist, NOT what to think.
Children (and their teachers) need to learn how science really works. It is evidence-based, NOT politically or religiously based. It has everything to do with consensus, in the sense that every scientific advance has come from a real scientist challenging “the consensus.” Galileo challenged the religious notion that there were only seven wanderers in the sky from which we get the seven days of the week. He observed some of the moons of Jupiter through his telescope.
We need to teach children to challenge paradigms that simply do not stand up to scrutiny.
Thank you for giving this matter your attention.
Sincerely yours,
Gordon J. Fulks, (Ph.D. Physics, University of Chicago)
https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Children-should-be-taught-how-to-think--NOT-what-to-think.html
********************************************The world’s flattest batteries
The sheer stupidity of thinking that batteries can replace electricity generators
Kites are thought to have originated in China over two thousand years ago. Since the original incarnations, kites have evolved into a low-cost fun activity enjoyed by kids and adults alike. The link between ancient kites and modern batteries is tenuous but tangible – kites and renewables are equally useless on calm nights, but batteries are meant to change that for renewables.
In order to dissect the ideological policies forcing renewables and their batteries into the grid, it is necessary to test whether batteries are adequate for the task of ‘firming’. With a relatively small network occasionally isolated from the rest of the grid and plenty of hype around large batteries, South Australia is a good place to start.
Could batteries meet the electricity demands of South Australia’s slumbering 1.5 million population overnight?
Despite the lamentations of the renewable lobby and its enablers, we must consider specific periods for a simple reason – electricity is not consumed or generated in averages.
We could take the demand over a twelve-month period, find the average per day, and crow about the small amount of storage required to keep the lights on, but that would be dishonest. No design – be it bridges, boats, pipes or electricity – ever considers averages except in the most cursory terms. The extremes are the only parameters that matter. Will it fall down, will it sink, will it rupture, will it meet demand?
OpenNEM’s excellent visualisation provides near real-time visibility of supply and demand on the grid. One can select the entire NEM, or a preferred state, and analyse the types of generators that are meeting electricity demand.
Accordingly, it can be shown that South Australia’s peak summer electrical demand is around 3,000 MW, while in the comfortable shoulder months, peak demand barely nudges above 1,500 MW.
Sun and wind were absent from South Australia during the 8 hours of midnight to 8am on Tuesday March 28, 2023. Electricity demand was entirely supplied by local gas-fired generators and imports from neighbouring Victoria – itself mostly powered by three large lignite burning power stations.
In this particular 8-hour period, the state consumed 11,000 MWh of electricity with a peak of 1,553 MW. Imports from Victoria totalled 4,600 MWh, with local gas power contributing 6,300 MWh, meaning 99 per cent of electricity demand could not be met by renewables.
Could batteries have replaced 10,900 MWh of gas and imports in this period?
Batteries require a minimum of two numbers to enable basic comparisons. The first is peak instantaneous output (MW), a measure of how fast the battery can discharge. The second is the energy stored (MWh), a measure of how long it can discharge. The world’s largest battery can be found in Moss Landing, California at 400 MW / 1,600 MWh.
To calculate how many batteries are required to meet the instantaneous grid demand, we divide 1,553 MW by the peak output of the world’s biggest 400 MW battery.
1,553 / 400 = 3.88 of the world’s biggest batteries
You can’t have a portion of a big battery. Well you sort of can, but this is a quick model so we will round up to an even four batteries with 1,600 MW combined output – about 50 MW above our peak demand.
Ok, now let’s check the other number, the storage capacity in MWh.
Multiply the number of batteries by their individual MWh number to get the total MWh available from all four batteries.
4 x 1,600 MWh = 6,400 MWh
That’s significantly less than the 10,900 MWh needed.
We need to add more batteries to exceed the storage threshold, or the batteries will run out of juice before the 8 hours are up. This takes us up to six batteries. Six batteries will only supply 9,600 MWh at their combined peak output of 2,400 MW. However, a battery lasts longer if its output is below maximum, so six batteries will do the trick here.
We have established that six of the world’s biggest batteries can get sleeping South Australians through 8-hours of no wind and no sun.
Now let’s extend our thinking to the periods just outside the 8 hours. Calculations show that for those batteries to last the full 8 hours, they needed to be at least 70 per cent charged beforehand.
In the hours from 8am to 10am six of the world’s flattest batteries aren’t looking so great to morning commuters. Commuters who may take for granted that the biggest and most complex machine in the state will provide electricity for their barista-made coffees, elevators up to open plan offices, computers and lights, servers and zip boilers, printers and air-conditioning, coffee makers and fire detection systems.
It took local gas and imported coal to meet almost 90 per cent of electricity demand from 8am to 10am. There was no spare power to charge the flat batteries. In fact, across the entire day the ‘spare’ power available to charge batteries (identified as exports to Victoria) totalled just 2,000 MWh.
There is one last sting in the battery tail. One might be tempted to assume all the 2,000 MWh applied to the battery gets stored in the battery, but that’s not how these things work. Energy losses means a battery only stores about 90 per cent of the energy applied, which brings us down to 1,800 MWh. Less than 20 per cent of a full charge, lasting about 1 hour at the original conditions.
Better hope for some wind the next night, or the world’s flattest batteries won’t be much help.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/the-worlds-flattest-batteries/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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