The ESG scam

ESG should stand for “Energy Stops Growing” – and it is creating another energy crisis.

Unfortunately in the modern world, the so-called best and brightest in business, academia and the media believe “virtue-signalling” is far more important than actually doing good.

Worse, most of this virtue-signalling is based on fantasy rather than facts.

There is no greater example of this phenomenon than the ever-increasing Environmental, Social and Governance (or ESG) agenda, which is sweeping through the business world and creating havoc in its wake.

What makes the ESG agenda so appealing is that most people on both side of politics would agree with its goals. The vast majority of people would agree with trying to protect the environment and with the idea that a business should treat its “stakeholders” – whether employees, customers, suppliers, regulators, and so on – in a good way.

Finally, who would argue that management shouldn’t run its business in an ethical fashion, complying with all applicable laws and regulations?

However, like so much in modern western society, the real goals of the ESG movement are far more sinister.

The real goals…

To understand this, we need to go back three decades to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

After their beloved Soviet Union died, the communists returned to their caves and sanctuaries in academia (but I repeat myself) to cry themselves to sleep and lament their lost socialist dystopia.

Unfortunately for liberty-loving people like you and me, communism wasn’t defeated. Once the communists stopped crying, they realised there was another way to victory.

As capitalism had proven far superior to communism is improving the lot of the common man, the communists had to find some other way to destroy it, which is why so many communists became greenies.

They realised they could use the supposed threat to the environment to destroy capitalism by other means.

Of course, as anyone who has studied the former Soviet Union or modern China understands, communism is infinitely worse for the environment that capitalism but the far left doesn’t care about facts!

One result of all this has been the ESG moment. As I noted above, the beauty of this movement from the far left’s perspective is that it is a convenient front: most people on either side of politics wouldn’t disagree with the supposed goals of ESG.

But that is not how ESG actually works in practice.

Like the goals of the “climate emergency” (formerly known as climate change, and before that global warming, and before that global cooling), the ultimately goal of ESG is to destroy or at the very least, severely limit capitalism and give the far left control of the economy like the communist party has in China.

And in many aspects they are succeeding, with no more obvious example than in the energy space.

Watermelons

Whether it is activist hedge funds, large asset managers such as Blackrock or former Governors of the Bank of England, to name a few, supposed capitalists have been co-opted by the ESG movement and are pressuring companies they invest in to divest from or stop lending to fossil fuel companies in the name of fighting “climate change”.

As a result, we have the ridiculous situation whereby oil majors such as Exxon-Mobil, Shell and BP aren’t actually investing to replace their depleting oil and gas reserves but instead wasting money on the renewables boondoggle.

In Australia, ESG is making it harder and harder to build new coal mines or develop new oil and gas fields.

These people think renewables are the answer, but the problem with renewables such as solar and wind is that they are unreliable: when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, they are useless.

And battery technology is nowhere near advanced enough to store enough energy for long enough to satisfy the peaks in energy demand, which occur in the evening after the sun has set or in the morning when the sun’s power is low.

Another oil crisis on the way

Meanwhile, as the world economy reopens, demand for oil, gas, LNG and thermal coal is booming, right at the time that supply of these critical fossil fuels is being restricted by ESG proponents.

Thermal coal prices are now in the order of US$175 per tonne, while the oil price is above US$70 per barrel and on its way to US$100.

Unless supply is allowed to react, this has all the markings of another oil crisis like we saw in the 1970s.

I doubt many western governments are going to stick to the ESG scam when petrol prices and other energy costs are sky high and their population is incensed.

As one wag on Twitter said, ESG should really stand for “Energy Stops Growing”.

And it has been created by the so-called best and brightest on both sides of politics and within big business.

I hope you remember that, dear readers, the next time you go to fill up your tank.

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