ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions
economist.com
economist.com
He also summarizes his thoughts on Doug Henwood's podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9zaG91dC5sYm8tdGF...
We've actually seen this demonstrated, though not via BlackRock (because the idea that they were somehow responsible was another lie pushed by the media to give people someone to hate). ESG campaigners have successfully discouraged investment in new fossil fuel extraction in much of the world. The world's consumption of fossil fuels is now being strangled at the source, exactly as publications like the Guardian campaigned for them to be. The consequences? Fossil fuel corporation profits at record highs and ordinary people unable to afford food and heating - which is of course exactly what you'd expect to happen when there's insufficient supply, with prices being driven up until people are forced to reduce their use of fossil fuels and the profits going to those that chose to carry on produciung and not starve and freeze the poor further.
Obviously, the end consumer profits from cheap energy. However, the energy from fossil fuels is only cheaper because it massively destroys our planet, a cost which is not currently paid by those producing or using those fossil fuels. Also, renewable energy nowadays would be cheaper than fossil fuels even if you ignore the reparation costs, if there were enough of them built yet. However, some politicians (in cooperation with fossil fuel companies) do what they can to prolong this process because they want to profit from fossil fuels as long as possible.
So what's your game plan, then?
Continue to burn fossil fuels and guarantee +5Cº and up? This is death for our descendents and for a million non-human species.
---
Also, I note a large number of claims about the real world, claims which seem wildly false, yet none of them do you actually prove with facts, data, citations or anything.
Given that your basic argument is, "We can't afford not to kill our ecosystem," I think you are going to need more than that.
You can see how he quantifies carbon emissions. https://www.bridgewater.com/research-and-insights/sustainabl...
If he was only concerned with making money, you'd think he'd have jumped into digital currencies.
He stated here that he wouldn't put in more money than he's comfortable in losing 80% in: https://www.bridgewater.com/research-and-insights/our-though...
I do not read any clear recommendation for or against Bitcoin in the link you have given (maybe I did not read it carefully enough).
It might be my understanding of Bridgewater that is wrong, but I think of them as mainly targeting institutional investors and high net-worth clients. So when Mr. Dalio writes “Bitcoin looks like a long-duration option on a highly unknown future that I could put an amount of money in that I wouldn’t mind losing about 80% of.” I do not think of that as dissuading an allocation to bitcoin at all, he is merely warning about the size of the allocation, in contrast in the same letter he talks about Bitcoins gold like properties and he has generally been quite vocal about the benefits of an allocation to gold, so I take that as a positive overall impression.
Though I think the daily observations from 2022-01-14 is much clearer as a recommendation for bitcoin. In it they write about how Bitcoin and Ether are now large and liquid enough for them to be worth the time of institutional investors to look into. And they write that they think institutional adoption is likely to pick up in coming years.
I might be reading too much into it, but when I read the piece I got the clear impression that it was a recommendation to make a small allocation to bitcoin. After all who does not want to get in before the big institutional investors?
1: https://www.amazon.com/Woke-Inc-Corporate-Americas-Justice/d...
Any chance of a tldr for that? The linked blog is too purile for my taste.
in the same vein as the article, we should stop talking about climate change in favor of pollution. climate change is vague, pollution is not. we can see and feel the effects of pollution, which makes it more likely that we can create a coalition to address it rather than this unspecific notion of temperatures rising. pollution affected us yesterday, affects us today, and will continue to affect us into the foreseeable future. in the 80s this framing was used effectively against acid rain (sulfur dioxide) and CFC/HFCs.
coal plants are among the most impactful in terms of pollution, so if instead of arguing about 1 or 2 or however many degrees of temperature rise, we pour all that effort into getting rid of coal plants (principally with nuclear right now, some gas at the margin, and renewables gradually, as storage and transmission tech improve), we'd be able to make meaningful impact in the next few years, with a byproduct of also reducing carbon emissions.
Doom spreaders sound like quacks in general. It doesn't matter if it's Satan or Climate change... it just breeds skepticism. Keep the message on message. This is why a lot of people stopped/don't support the EPA and the Green movements.
You can see, smell, taste and feel pollution. It's bad.. and even then, it's really bad in places that we frankly don't control. And we're shipping our waste overseas to be dealt with corruptly or worse, not at all.
In my lifetime, the Grand Canyon went from being able to see across well on any given day... to a haze the obscures the other side... rolling in from California.
Tax it, and let the market sort it out.
[0]: cap-and-trade is another oft-mentioned approach, but suffers from the same gaming potential as carbon taxes. in the ideal, it should work, but practically they've been shown to become regulatorily captured, just like most bureaucratic measures.
[1]: you could even argue that carbon dioxide is not necessarily a pollutant because it's essential to the cycle of life on earth. it becomes a critical problem when we have something like an order of magnitude more of it than we do currently, but so can anything be poisonous in high enough doses.
It gets tricky when importing finished goods and with non-fuel sources of GHG, but it's way less complicated and more effective than any of the other proposals.
* note that consensus isn't how media or political careers are made.
Depending on how you look at something, getting an electric car is a horrible thing to do. Even then, is that better or worse than charging it at night from a coal power plant?
The problem is, there is not simple solution, as pollution in general is not a simple problem. Reducing direct emissions is part of it... but shifting from fossil fuels with a high energy, low energy cost, to then use batteries, with their own environmental impact on material construction, refinement and recycle/destruction... and then getting that power (charging at night) from electricity that comes from a coal power plant with worse energy cost than the original material you were burning anyway... is it really a net positive?
That doesn't even count a corporation's indirect influence... are the bulk of the workers driving an hour each way each day? Where does the energy at play come from.
I'm a strong proponent of nuclear power in the near term... and getting water distribution to combine multiple sources of electricity and natural resources for hydrogen as a primary fuel source for ground vehicles.
I think a lot of the woke efforts in and of themselves are short sighted, and not very well thought out at all though.
All the items you listed are covered within the scopes, include power generation, fuel processing (typically called well-to-tank), transmission loss, emissions embodied in purchased assets (e.g. construction emissions of a vehicle), employee commuting, waste, etc.
Depending on how you look at something, getting an electric car is a horrible thing to do. Even then, is that better or worse than charging it at night from a coal power plant? A common claim by climate-deniers that has been widely debunked for almost every power network in the rich world (where electric cars are most common). If I remember correctly, only two countries in all of Europe were found to have lower emissions with a petrol engine than plugging into a dirty grid.
I think a lot of the woke efforts in and of themselves are short sighted, and not very well thought out at all though. Woke? Not thought through? You wrote a long comment about carbon reporting when you clearly don't know the first thing about how carbon is reported or calculated...
Extending car lifetime and first-owner possession length can reduce overall emissions more than accelerating replacement according to new study[0]
> In this case, by keeping more cars in the hands of their original owners longer, the number of used cars on the road decreases. Accordingly, emissions from the driving of new, relatively fuel-efficient cars increase while those of used, relatively fuel-inefficient cars decrease.
That, makes no sense. They seem to believe that a years old car moving from one owner to another suddenly increases the emissions. It does not, the relative emmisions change with age, because new, more efficent cars are produced, like EVs.
But yes, making cars last longer is good. You know the best way to do that? Make them EVs.
Only makes them last longer if you leave the LTE modem and dmca and safety regulation backed repair countermeasures out.
It actually can be. A molecule of oil does not burn twice. If you tax all the fossil fuels at the source (i.e. when they are extracted), then you tax all the emissions. The companies that extract the fossil fuels will pass some of the tax to those who buy from them, who will pass some of their purchasing costs to some who buy for them, etc.
You can take that tax revenue and pay people who remove CO2 from the atmosphere. For example if you own forested land you should receive a tax rebate proportional to how much CO2 the forest absorbs. This way you incentivize people to buy land and plant forests.
In the US we have 30 million acres of land cultivated with corn used for ethanol production. The idea is that corn-derived ethanol is not a fossil fuel, and legislating a 10% ethanol fraction in our gasoline is somewhat similar to a 10% reduction in fossil fuel use reduction. Of course, we use a lot of fossil fuels to produce that corn, but the bigger problem is that in the end all the CO2 scrubbed from the atmosphere by the 30 million acres of corn is put right back in when it's burned in a vehicle.
If you start giving people a tax rebate if they plant trees on their land, then the farmers will immediately stop the whole ethanol charade and plant trees.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/electric-cars-sales-in-the-us-co...
> A faster shift to electric vehicles (EVs) in the US would avoid around 10% of the global cropland expansion expected over the next 30 years, according to a new study.
> Instead of growing maize (corn) to make biofuel for US cars, modelling in the Ecological Economics paper suggests large swathes of land could be left to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2).
> This land sparing would bring “substantial” emissions savings, in addition to the direct benefits of electrifying US road transport, the researchers say.
As per the latest USDA report [1]:
- total area planted with corn: 90.7 million acres
- total production 14.1 billion bushels
- out of which 5.0 billion bushels used for ethanol
Yes, it is. Tax the fuel on its carbon content at the point of sale of the fuel from the refinery.
Who gets to decide what counts as emissions?
With those emission outputs in hand, a table of carbon prices is referred to before the final tally is made.
Seems to be somewhat hardcore to reduce the entire debate down to (effectively) "any CO2 is bad CO2"
For example, the production of fossil fuels releases both carbon and methane. You want to tax those as well, to incentivise cleaner production methods.
If a single country taxes their production, then products made with carbon intense methods in other countries will be imported, so international co-operation is required.
And outside fossil fuels, which we already have great low-carbon replacements for 80% of the uses of, there's other stuff that matters, like not destroying forests and peat bogs.
We don't need to figure this out from first principles on a nerd forum, the entire planet has been figuring out the details for the last few decades and publicly published the best answers we have collectively found, and continually update them:
Not doing it because other countries won't is a completely defeatist point of view. It is not destructive to the US to do it, because the carbon tax can be offset by reductions in other taxes, making it a net zero effect on the economy.
Not sure how making the government profit from it is gonna solve anything.
Smoking could be completely phased out but it wont because it's just too profitable for the government.
Yes, they conflict, so you want to reward companies that effectively manage those conflicts, not casually trade one issue for another.
> ESG suffers from three fundamental problems. First, because it lumps together a dizzying array of objectives, it provides no coherent guide for investors and firms to make the trade-offs that are inevitable in any society. Elon Musk of Tesla is a corporate-governance nightmare, but by popularising electric cars he is helping tackle climate change. Closing down a coalmining firm is good for the climate but awful for its suppliers and workers. Is it really possible to build vast numbers of wind farms quickly without damaging local ecology? By suggesting that these conflicts do not exist or can be easily resolved, ESG fosters delusion.
There are already options if you strictly are focused on emissions, so I don't think this article is meaningful. The Economist is right-leaning and would certainly love to distract ESG equity buyers from their pesky concerns about social and corporate governance. My guess is that the target readership for The Economist is executives, and they would certainly love to make ESG scrutiny of their ballooning compensation go away.
> As of August 2018, 608 AllSides readers agreed with this media bias rating, while 1,302 disagreed. Of those who disagreed, the average said The Economist has a Center media bias.
I think that differences in economic vs. social issues as well as The Economist's international perspective make it difficult to categorize on a simple left/right metric. They claim[0] to support lots of positions that seem socially left-leaning to me as an American (drug legalization, gay marriage in 2004, repealing the Second Amendment), but OC seems to be talking more about economically left-leaning positions ("scrutiny of their ballooning compensation").
[0] - https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/02/...
People need to get out of their bubbles and understand better the full range of political beliefs and how they fit into that range.
FWIW, they have endorsed the Democrat candidate in 6 of the last 8 US presidential elections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance...
To most lefties that gives a slight right-wing bias, even if they aren't ranting demagogues going on about foreigners.
To less sane and educated right wing people, that makes them seem like "the liberal elite" and so they see them as left.
They do seem to have pivoted towards an American audience somewhat more recently, which means they're sucked into the whole anti-woke thing, which these articles veer worrying close to.
We have a little description of our approach at https://www.yourstake.org/info/noscore-esg and we're hiring engineers! If you don't see something that fits you can still send your resume/portfolio to hiring@yourstake.org
We at Evil Corp burned down half of the Amazon rain forest for a golf course, but we put a BLM banner on our website...so a B+?
> It is better to focus simply on the e. Yet even that is not precise enough. The environment is an all-encompassing term, including biodiversity, water scarcity and so on. By far the most significant danger is from emissions, particularly those generated by carbon-belching industries. Put simply, the e should stand not for environmental factors, but for emissions alone.
The point of ESG isn't to save the planet, it's to make the world a better place to live/work in. Union busting is bad for workers and therefore society at large. What's the article's point? That point shouldn't care about social issues? Agree to disagree I guess.
The thesis is "because [ESG] lumps together a dizzying array of objectives, it provides no coherent guide for investors and firms to make the trade-offs that are inevitable in any society," that industry "is not being straight about incentives" and that "the various scoring systems have gaping inconsistencies and are easily gamed."
Co-mingling E, S and G winds up focussing on nothing except making consultants rich.
Focusing just on emissions isn't sustainable! This just doesn't make any sense. If we take goal #1: No Poverty or goal #4: Quality Education #8: Decent Work and Economic Growth as examples, how does one reduce everything to emissions? Emissions is probably one thing related to goal #13: Climate Action, but somehow handwaving it as the only one of import sounds dubious.
If the UN claims it can’t see that, it is because it is bought off.
Unfortunately, there is no long-run without considering the short-run.
Tesla: A
https://www.msci.com/our-solutions/esg-investing/esg-ratings...
Exxon: BBB
https://www.msci.com/our-solutions/esg-investing/esg-ratings...
https://www.msci.com/our-solutions/esg-investing/esg-ratings...
Higher than TSLA
There's bits of their plan that seem dubious to me, like mentions of carbon capture but overall, since I believe that the problem of climate change wasn't "oh no, we can't do this, because it's impossible" but rather "we're not going to do this", that commitment and plan is all I'm really looking for.
It would be like the USA implementing a carbon tax. Is it instantly going to solve all the problems tomorrow? Will it magically fix all the previous carbon they've emitted. No, but it would be a really smart thing to do and just based on their size, would have a massive impact over time accelerating the transition.
How is this remotely possible in any real sense? It doesn’t hold up to any form of scrutiny. They would literally have to remove thousands of tonnes of carbon from the air every year and put it back in the ground. That is not possible.
No, they’ve built a few wind farms and intend to trade carbon credits. Pure greenwashing.
They don't need to remove it from the air, that's kind of the last resort, though some people do think that'll be part of the answer eventually and are investigating ways to do it. The simplest and cheapest option to reach their goal will generally be to avoid emitting carbon in the first place.
So yes, building wind farms is a good thing, as is running an EV charging network. Lots of things they can do to make money as a business that don't involve greenhouse gas emissions. Lots of ways they can save money as a business, which as a side effect reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Carbon credits are a boring, sensible answer that economist like, it's basically equivalent to a carbon tax. It literally pays people to do the right thing, and charges them if they don't. It's one of the policies that enabled Tesla and EVs generally to succeed and get to the point where they are better than what we had before.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/18/tesla-electric-vehicle-regul...
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/gettin...
They also keep raising the ambitions of their goals over time. Basically, big corporations don't want to be the only one doing this, because their competitors would screw them. But if they all do it, then it's in everyone's benefit, you just need some system to make sure that the other corporations aren't cheating.
Do you think that BP deserves the same rating as an EV company?
Do you really think that Tesla deserves an average rating in the automobile industry?
The same score or lower than the automobile companies who were cheating on emissions tests!
Turns out you can just say you have a plan 30 years in the future and be good.
Besides, shell is apparently so green that activists investors are asking it to split out the green energy part from the oil part. The idea of activists is that oil lovers undervalue shell because of the green stuff, whilst green lovers undervalue shell because of the oil. Hence if you split it the parts have a higher combined valuation. Point being, shell has a very significant green energy investment.
> 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium
> 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt
> 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, 25,000 pounds of ore for copper
> Digging up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust
> For just - one - battery.
https://twitter.com/brianroemmele/status/1503176565974216710
Would appreciate a fact check if this is anyone's business here
Petrol is fuel. You dig it up and burn it into the atmosphere again and again and again for every mile you drive.
Meanwhile, I see numbers like this a lot and they always seem to trend high. You're talking 250 tons of ores to make perhaps 250-1000kg of the car; an efficiency of between 0.1 and 0.4 percent over some pretty straightforward, widely available ores. That doesn't really stack up with the numbers you get if you look at the efficiency of commercial ores for those minerals.
So I think the mining is comparable between battery and petrol, but as others point out, you can recycle the battery; the petrol had become problematic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
If nothing else, you could grind up the batteries and treat them as ore for any single one of the minerals used, and by your numbers you'd be way better off.
My calculation shows ~50,000 pounds. 200,000 mile lifetime at 25 MPG = 8000 gallons * 6.30 pounds/gallon fuel density[0] = 50,400
Also keep in mind that gasoline is a refined product.
Proper comparisons look at both sides.
> washbrain
Ha, nice try.
We judge companies on their actions now, not on what they might do, or might be possible in the future.
isn't that criticism political in nature?
They are harmful in that they are actively distracting from the proper solution: that people shouldn't have private cars.
The environmental cost to produce car, the space they take up in the cities, in the end private car ownership can not be made sustainable even if they run on electric. Tech wont solve the climate crisis, only societal change will.
If anything, the last couple of decades demonstrate pretty convincingly and depressingly that putting together real momentum (read: won referendums on things like carbon taxes, _not_ push polls) is capital-H Hard. It's absolutely true that various bad actors play a factor in that level of difficulty, but they're not going to shut up and go away if we clap our hands and wish really hard either. Consider [1]: this is in a constituency electorally dominated by one of the most avowedly socially-liberal cities in the US and year after year it goes down by similar margins, and that's incredibly anodyne compared to straight-up getting rid of private cars.
Conversely, supply-side energy mix changes have, over the same timeframe, made drastic improvements in emissions-per-capita without requiring much/any self-sacrifice. Martyrdom doesn't really scale in the same way.
So: what's your plan for gaining the power required to implement your scenario, taking into account the apparent ineffectiveness of decades of messaging? "just ban the cars" would be sensical if you were emperor for a day, but failing any miracles it seems to me that the real distraction is this sort of utopianism.
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[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1631,_Carbon_E...
https://ecology.wa.gov/About-us/Who-we-are/News/2021/Aug-6-S...
Carbon taxes etc., are fairly subtle and boring technocratic method to achieve a goal. The reaction to them is almost entirely based on false impressions, a nested series of false impressions actually. There is no problem, there is no solution, this solution would make things worse, this solution would hurt me personally. this solution is just a scam and so on.
"I don't want to do the thing that economists say is most efficient, because it would be painful" as a democratic opinion doesn't really make any sense. If it's efficient then you can use the efficiency gains to compensate anyone who loses out.
And then that deliberately misinformed reaction is somehow raised as yet another reason for not doing the most sensible thing, and to talk about how "painful" it would be to stop polluting and incentivize efficiency.
And the only reason we appear to need to talk about what people want in this weird, third-hand, circular way, is that if you actually ask people what they want, then they say they want to address climate change. And since that answer isn't acceptable to some people, they need to come up with elaborate ways to prove that people don't actually want what they say they want, and that economists say is the best thing to do.
I guess I should have said "popularly perceived to be personally painful" - which I think you'd agree with? Carbon taxes are fantastic measures that are one of our best shots at success, and I think it's a shame the referendums didn't pass. The actual harm to voters would objectively be pretty low, but again, perception is what matters. Fact can obviously feed into perception, but in a case like this where we're explicitly dealing with misinformation campaigns correctness is necessary but, alone, insufficient.
And yeah, of course that reaction is deliberately misinformed - I tried to catch that in my original comment:
> It's absolutely true that various bad actors play a factor in that level of difficulty, but they're not going to shut up and go away if we clap our hands and wish really hard either.
The proponents of these bills had their shot. So did the deceptive oil majors. So far, hasn't worked out. What's the new plan - cede the fight for public opinion and try to do everything via administrative rearguard actions? I'm sticking to this point because the implicit response usually seems to be either that or "wait for a utopian mass moral awakening" - and neither is much of a strategy.
> is that if you actually ask people what they want, then they say they want to address climate change.
Well, kinda, and that's what I was getting at by mentioning push polling. If you position addressing climate change as a common-sense positive-balance deal requiring zero self-sacrifice, then sure. However, the gap between what people say they want and what they actually do is well-documented. If you drill down a little into what that willingness to incur change actually looks like, you get results like [1]. This is why referendum results are interesting as indicators of revealed preference. What I'm trying to avoid here is taking the push-poll cheap idealism as deep commitment, and using that to inform commitment to dead-end policy choices.
The core of my argument here is
1) real climate action is essential, and carbon taxes are one of the best means of implementing this from a technical perspective
2) voting outcomes and polling suggest that public support for changes that are popularly perceived as personally painful is limited, even in cases of subtle and boring technocratic methods like (1)
3) given (2), attaining the popular support necessary to wholesale ban private cars appears wildly unlikely
4) therefore, maybe focus on the stuff that we're actually somewhat close to (2016 vs 2018 referendums gained ~4%) instead of utopian pipe dreams that inspire fierce opposition
I may have been unclear because I feel like a lot of your point is addressing arguments I didn't make - I agree that carbon taxes are great and that opposition to them is largely not substantive. The problem I'm trying to point out is that if _even in this case_ things are ropey, talking about banning cars is beyond pie-in-the-sky. There's a strong need to focus on interventions that are minimally disruptive to lifestyles in order to maintain the degree of popular support necessary for long-term change. Convincing someone of the (true facts!) that a supply-side intervention like carbon pricing will have a minimally negative or positive impact on their day-to-day is way easier than talking that hypothetical person out of their car.
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[1] https://apnews.com/article/8e6baa6c2d3badeb4e91b6e6d078a5c0
Having finding trouble an apartment? Without all the wasted space for cars we could have much denser cities. Problem solved!
Want to have a place where children can actually play outside safely? Again, ban cars and you don't have to move to the country or suburbia.
Tired of how loud cities are? Oh boy, do I have a solution for that.
I am not preaching sacrifice, I am saying if we change some things we can achieve much better living conditions for everyone, a plus in living standard.
So it is more of a matter of getting people to be conscious about how things actually work.
So no, I am not Utopian. The point still stands that Tech wont solve the issues. It is sink or swim for humanity.
Most of the noise in cities comes from cars, that is a fact. Even dense cities can be fairly quiet. I suggest watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
Plus China has probably not the best building codes, the problem can be further improved by having proper sound isolation in homes.
Dense cities mean you will have everything in walking distance. There will be much more space for parks and other areas of recreation.
It's not like your average American isn't aware of these arguments; they're just not broadly convincing (even if, from your or my perspective, they are). If they were, population flows would be headed in the other direction.
I'm pushing back here because your solution appears to be to continue to make the same arguments that have, so far, failed to convince enough people to deflect us from our current trajectory. More of the same, but louder? And given the urgency of the position, it's not like waiting on natural generational shift is much of an answer.
That's more or less why I take the exact opposite position and am bullish on anything that involves supply-side efficiency and bearish on anything that involves people having spontaneous moral awakenings.
Don't you see any problems with that plan?
It is really not a big deal.
IMHO, big cities are dying, they're a relic of the past. The Internet had already killed physical retail. The pandemic killed off more businesses while WFH workers fled the cities. Soft-on-crime policy trends seem to be hastening the decline.
And in a digitally connected world there's simply fewer reasons to physically pack ever more people into small spaces.
It is just a matter for human instead of car-centric city planning. This will also help with poverty and crime.
And yeah every rule needs exceptions, of course there should be ways to rent cars for special occasion, I am just against general private car ownership for most people.
Edit: General private car ownership of people living in the cities that is
The no-cars world requires a huge amount of political buy-in and you’d be going through the most politically annoying group in the US – homeowners. The transition to electric cars can be done through simple laws that change the incentives (like by implementing a federal gas tax so it’s cheaper to drive electric, or heavily subsidizing electric cars)
delivery here is unreliable and expensive. if I'm picking out wood I have to go through dozens of boards to find ones that aren't fucked up. I need to find ones that are suitable for the job that I'm trying to use them for. A delivery guy would just grab whatever and throw it in the truck. It's not like I'm ordering an iPod off of Amazon. no mileage savings would be had because it is unlikely that anybody else would be having something delivered in the middle of nowhere.
The thing is most people live in urban areas (and the general trend is for that to increase) and don't work in woodworking. So this caused me to be a bit dismissive as it doesn't really effect the main point that much.
As I said, there will always be exceptions. I think the more productive discussion is to find what would work for most people, that is people in an urban setting. Then we can figure out how to make it work for people farther out.
I am not sure what the best solution for your situation would be. I guess the biggest quick win would be just to get private cars out of the cities. It doesn't really matter if a few people farther out own cars as long as they are a minority. Maybe that is where electric cars would come in handy but then again they lack the range.
Again, most people live in urban areas and prefer to live in urban areas and once cities become more green they will become even more attractive furthering urbanization. Whether the few people living outside own a car or not will hardly matter.
Removing peoples autonomy might start with “why can’t they take the bus” but where it ends is something very different.
(I'm not weighing in on their validity, but it's absolutely truthful the allegations and lawsuits are there.)
I want to make sure I understand you. You don't know if people's accusations are true, but you do know that they are making accusations. Is that correct?
There's absolutely no evidence Tesla is more racist or unsafe place to work than Shell. If anything, Shell should be, in theory, more risky, safety-wise - they are much bigger, so more opportunity to screw up, and they do some things that are inherently risky, like mining and extraction. But I have a serious suspicion that the score has much less to do with safety statistics than with politics and donating to certain people and NGOs, somehow.
https://esgreview.net/2022/07/06/is-exxonmobil-really-more-e...
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4516270-tesla-exxon-mobil-s...
Shell: A++
https://www.msci.com/our-solutions/esg-investing/esg-ratings...
BP: A
https://www.msci.com/our-solutions/esg-investing/esg-ratings...
Marathon Oil: A
(If that wasn't the case, it would be irrational for any company _not_ to be ESG compliant, right?)
But such an obvious arbitrage opportunity would hardly last long. So I suspect for every dollar someone shifts out of the general market into ESG only funds, someone else shifts a dollar in the opposite direction, creating no net effect except a wealth transfer from more ethically concerned to less ethically concerned investors.
See, extending the "Consumers will vote with their feet!" paradigm to the stock market is moronic. It just means "Be a sucker and give away your returns to anyone with less qualms." If a rule is worth wanting companies to follow, it needs to be made a law so it will apply equally to all competitors, else you get a classic race to the bottom.
There are also companies (don't ask) I've encountered who appear to offer nothing but 3rd party branded kubernetes combined with a whole truckload of bullshit about how their product reduces your carbon footprint in the cloud. They reach out and attempt to partner with successful disadvantaged education programs for cheap interns and to add badges to their website.
for the life of me I looked into what exactly they were doing and I couldn't figure out what they actually offered. It appeared to be nothing except a collection of bullshit to extract funding under the guise of ESG.
That's not extortion, that's the opposite - bribery
> They reach out and attempt to partner with successful disadvantaged education programs for cheap interns and to add badges to their website
I did see this kind of shit once
I think that depends on your perspective. From the company's perspective, they're bribing the ratings agency by donating money.
From the agency's perspective, they're using their rating as a way of coercing a company into making donations. That could be considered extortion, though not in the legal sense.
If you are the one that was doing something illegal to begin with, and bribe an official to keep it under wraps, then it's on you.
I would question which direction the initiative is with respect to ESG ratings. If an ESG rating agency is publicly or privately showing exactly how certain factors are weighted, I would argue that the initiative is with the agency.
Executives and financiers took actions which harmed shareholders, retirement investors, etc to advance their personal political interests — and then smirked, saying “we lost your money for your own good!”
How much money have 401Ks lost on this nonsense?
I’m pretty sure the number is “trillions”.
As I understand it ESG rankings are generally done relative to other companies in a market segment. They aren't saying "this airline has a high ESG score, they must be less environmentally damaging than this farming company with a lower ESG score". They're ranking which airlines do the "good" things (for some value of good).
If you weren't so deeply into Musk intimate parts and repeat word for word his tweet you'd realize that it makes perfect sense.
Exxon only extracts the thing, it doesn't burn it. Tesla burns a lot of energy to build cars.
That's not to say ESG is a perfect system, perfection would be assigning an ESG score at the atomic level, meaning for every single human. At that point it wouldn't matter if you are the CEO of an oil company or the CEO of a coal car company which sells itself as a solar car company...when you board the G650ER you'd get the automatic Z-rating which puts you at the very bottom enabling peers to shame and attack you.
Of course it will never happen because the elites love to protect their CO2 intensive lifestyle while pontificating the rest of us to drive electric and eat bugs.
ESG supposed to provide a holistic measure of impact. Exxon and Tesla's ESG score would include the impact of using their product (ie burning Exxon's gas, driving and eventually disposing Tesla's cars)
The enemy of the environment are the CEO of Exxon, Shell and Tesla. Just one individual like that emits more CO2 than a small town during their whole lifetime of traveling in private jets and yachts to their big mansions all over the globe
But which are the letters that will?!
That the planet needs saving is baked into whatever answer is about to be provided...
I get the principal behind it but its clearly just been gamed at the best and used as a weapon at worst.
Sectors I'd include: Oil, gas, coal, tobacco, pharmaceuticals (but only makers of opiates), payday loans, gambling, etc.
It's a bit sociopathic, sure. But if enough people sleep on these tickers, I might as well get 'em cheap and earn those dividends.
ESG Orphans https://etfdb.com/etf/ORFN/
TL;DR: You're one of today's lucky 10,000 -> https://www.xkcd.com/1053/
> The industry’s second problem is that it is not being straight about incentives. It claims that good behaviour is more lucrative for firms and investors. In fact, if you can stand the stigma, it is often very profitable for a business to externalise costs, such as pollution, onto society rather than bear them directly. As a result the link between virtue and financial outperformance is suspect.
I say this because, you say youre just toying with the idea. So something is holding you back. I think you know it's not something worth doing, and I think you're right.
Not saying we can ever be 100% free of moral impurity in our investment decisions. After all, there are unsavory things about most big companies. But it's another thing to go out of your way to support things repulsive to your own values. I hope you don't go that way. The little money youd make from it isn't worth the guilt you'd feel.
> 2) The secondary market is a bad place to enact change. The intelligent defense of ESG is “by reducing the demand for a stock we can increase its cost of capital and impact its operating performance.” This is true to some degree, but I think this is dramatically overstated. For instance, the firms in the S&P 500 are all large established firms that have more than enough capital to finance their operations. They aren’t using the secondary equity markets to fund their operations. In fact, most firms have so much capital that they’ve been net buyers of stock in the last 50 years. So, this puts the cart before the horse. The better way to think of public companies is to think of them like horse betting. We can bet on the horses, but secondary market purchases are just private exchanges, not cash issuance to firms. As a result, betting on the horses doesn’t change the outcome of the race. Similarly, our secondary market purchases and sales have a far smaller impact on the firm’s operations than we might think.¹
* https://www.pragcap.com/my-view-on-esg-investing/
> Look, I completely understand. I want to invest my money, beat the market AND do what I feel like is right. But be really careful buying into the narrative about how ESG funds outperform. In most cases they aren’t being benchmarked properly and you’re just paying higher fees to chase performance that isn’t even as good as it’s advertised as.
* https://www.pragcap.com/sorry-but-your-esg-funds-probably-su...
A good interview I found on the topic:
> Alex’s book, “Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit”, was featured in the Financial Times list of Business Books of the Year for 2020, and he is a co-author of “Principles of Corporate Finance” (with Brealey, Myers, and Allen) for the 14th edition to be published in April 2022. He was named Professor of the Year by Poets & Quants in 2021.
* https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/192
It may be better to do non-ESG investing and use the "excess" returns to fund advocacy groups that will push for political change in the area that you wish. All the oil and coal barons are funding climate change denial messaging for example.
Further, if you're a stockholder of a "bad" company, you can vote for motions that the company to change its policies to become a "good" company. If you only own "good" companies, they're already doing the "right" thing. You want to 'reform' the ones doing the "wrong" thing.
> The Economist supports government action on global warming. In 1987 the paper called for a price on carbon emissions. In 1997 it wrote that the United States showed 'dangerous signs' of using the developing world as an excuse to do nothing about global warming. In 1998, The Economist expressed its view that global warming may be a catastrophe that warrants much spending to reduce fossil fuels, but before this, climatologists need a stream of reliable data. In a December editorial before the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, The Economist declared its view that the risk of catastrophic climate change and its effect on the economy outweighs the economic consequences of insuring against global warming now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_editorial_stance...
It's like saying hey look at us being carbon neutral, but we're one step out of 10, the product will run on carbon based power for years, and the steps to be carbon neutral aren't really our steps but we pay someone to offset them.