Western Standard - June 29, 2023


ESG is finally going into the corporate dustbin where it belongs

Topics
ESG failures and consequences
Mentioned
Dylan Mulvaney Larry Fink Governance Trudeau
Cory Morgan Show. The age of ESG has finally ended Justin Trudeau’s contempt for individual

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

187.14

Word count

876

Sentence count

55

Harmful content

Toxicity

9

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the podcast, Alex Blumbergen and I talk about the failed concept of environmentalism, social activism, and good corporate citizenship (ESG) and why it s a complete waste of money.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 The whole concept of ESG, I mean, it was flawed from the beginning.
00:00:03.960 So ESG, if people aren't familiar with it, stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance.
00:00:08.220 And it's been pushed by extreme woke activists for years.
00:00:12.340 It's some of a catch-all term.
00:00:14.740 And they use it to try and pressure corporations into prioritizing social activism over actually pursuing a profit for shareholders.
00:00:21.940 The term ESG originated from a 2004 United Nations report.
00:00:25.360 Yeah, the UN. Shocking, isn't it?
00:00:26.700 But it was claiming companies should set aside a profit focus.
00:00:30.140 And if they just took on enough environmental and social justice work, it would be beneficial to the public and to the companies themselves.
00:00:37.200 Now, the concept is utter pie-in-the-sky bunk. 0.97
00:00:40.000 And despite nearly two decades of effort on this crap, it's finally failed. 0.94
00:00:44.840 I mean, corporations only exist for one thing, and that's to make a return for the shareholders. 0.98
00:00:49.400 They're not charities, nor should they be expected to be.
00:00:51.680 I mean, while good corporate citizenship can aid with a company's public reputation and help build brand loyalty, ESG goes well beyond that with its demands on corporations.
00:01:01.800 Profit is supposed to be considered a secondary goal to ESG.
00:01:05.860 Now, the ESG movement, I mean, is rather insidious and compelling.
00:01:08.660 It's really backdoor socialism.
00:01:10.080 Rather than trying to directly convince companies to embrace woke policies that run counters to the company's own objectives,
00:01:16.940 they would target instead things like large asset management companies and get them to push the ESG.
00:01:22.120 Basically saying, don't invest in it unless they have a high ESG score.
00:01:25.800 Now, BlackRock is a company you've probably heard of now and then, and it was a leader in pushing ESG upon companies.
00:01:31.700 It was kind of thought that even if consumers don't really care about ESG targets, the companies would embrace ESG policies if they were strangled from incoming investment by these management, you know, companies.
00:01:43.880 BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, the name sort of works, doesn't it, spearheaded such efforts.
00:01:49.440 Now, Fink now is distancing himself from the entire ESG movement.
00:01:52.060 He's, whoa, whoa, okay, okay, no, that's enough of that.
00:01:54.260 We're not going to do this anymore.
00:01:55.480 Yeah, but he did a lot of damage on the way up.
00:01:57.000 Because shareholders will only put up with so much.
00:01:59.800 They want a return on any investments they entrusted to these asset managers,
00:02:03.720 and they couldn't care less if the company has unisex washrooms or sets its emission targets above and beyond those required by legislation.
00:02:11.440 They're demanding investments in profitable companies rather than woke ones. 0.95
00:02:15.980 Most companies can't be both.
00:02:18.140 Retailers, I mean, they can't pay the insane living wages demands being made by woke people while maintaining competitive pricing, of course, 0.88
00:02:26.020 because then they scream about the inflation when the costs go up.
00:02:28.700 And then, of course, adding environmental regulations doesn't win any government love,
00:02:32.480 because the governments just keep piling on new regulations on top of the old ones.
00:02:36.440 Appeasing the woke in the name of ESG has only managed to make profits smaller. 0.94
00:02:40.900 Now, some ESG-inspired idiocy will go down in business history, 0.97
00:02:44.400 such as the Budweiser debacle with trans activist Dylan Mulvaney. 0.99
00:02:47.580 I mean, even a first-year marketing student should have seen the consequences coming
00:02:51.840 when Budweiser decided to take on the flamboyant Mulvaney as a brand ambassador.
00:02:57.180 Budweiser had over a century of carefully cultivated market development under its belt.
00:03:02.260 The brand loyalty for Budweiser was the envy of the very competitive beer industry,
00:03:07.040 and it was shattered by this bizarre choice to go down the trans activist rabbit hole.
00:03:11.280 How could somebody have thought for a moment that a market demographic made up
00:03:15.440 predominantly of cowboys and blue-collar workers would want their favorite beer
00:03:18.300 associated with a colorful trans activist?
00:03:21.120 It's not a question of tolerance. It's just knowing your market.
00:03:24.840 The thing is, the luminary who came up with this idea to bring Mulvaney on as a brand ambassador
00:03:28.820 wasn't thinking of reality.
00:03:30.360 She was wrapped up in the mythical world of ESG.
00:03:33.420 It might take a generation for Budweiser sales to recover to where they were only last year.
00:03:38.180 Nobody chooses their consumer products based on ESG scores.
00:03:42.700 Investors don't pick investment vehicles based on ESG scores either.
00:03:47.120 The reality is finally coming home to roost, and as the old saying goes,
00:03:51.160 go woke, go broke, and it's proving accurate.
00:03:53.700 Silicon Valley Bank, they went broke, and they went whole hog with ESG.
00:03:57.920 In his 2022 ESG report, yeah, an ESG report, the company said it seeks directors on its board
00:04:03.420 with knowledge of or experience with key risk oversight and risk management functions
00:04:07.460 to help oversee the dynamic risks we face.
00:04:10.260 Yeah, Trudeau-style word salad, ESG garbage, and it led to the collapse of the bank.
00:04:15.720 The list of ESG failures is growing, while ESG language, though, is finally disappearing
00:04:19.960 from corporate boardrooms. 0.57
00:04:21.880 One of the dumbest and most expensive social trends in human history is finally just coming 0.96
00:04:27.500 and gone. 0.91
00:04:28.540 Unfortunately, though, as with supporters of communism, the supporters of ESG just think,
00:04:32.060 it hasn't been done right yet.
00:04:33.220 They will rebrand the concept and try and push it through another way.
00:04:36.640 In the end, though, money talks, and ESG walks.