Companies with good ESG scores pollute as much as low-rated rivals
ft.com
ft.com
Wife: Have you been cheating on me?
Husband: Lets check my APS score.
Wife: What?
Husband: Adultery, Pushups and Soccer Watching score. Looks like I'm in the 1% of husbands as calculated by the experts. So I don't think you have anything to worry about.
Brilliant!
How come Fossil fuel industry never thought of that?
https://www.investors.com/news/esg-companies-list-top-100-es...
ConocoPhillips and Exxon Mobil are one the list along with a trucking company at number 2 and various other oil companies.
I'm only halfway joking. A lot of people do try to address their guilt over bad behavior by doing nice things. And a lot of people who receive those nice things don't want to think about why they are being treated well. The easiest person to scam is the one who wants to believe the scam. And any kind of credit program will attract people who want to believe.
https://oilnow.gy/featured/exxonmobil-guyana-has-invested-ne...
The kicker is he literally just wanted to be nice to her. While the other men in the family were trying to convince him that it's a bad idea.
The same author has moved towards proposing 'matereality' assessments in a different way: https://www.blorrainesmith.com/single-post/when-materiality-...
There's also groups advocating for alternatives to ESG, such as https://www.r3-0.org/
The sad thing is they have scientifically captured and subverted mainstream activism, which for a while around 50-60 years ago emerged as what appeared to be their biggest threat. You can "resist" the state of things all you like, but you're not allowed to say anything about corporations that traffic arms to 3rd world countries because they tweet out BLM logos and rainbow flags now and again. And you have to resist by supporting mainstream political parties and politicians who have been around for decades and are definitely not complicit or responsible for what you are resisting.
Plenty of people believe that it is better to buy a gas powered Subaru instead of a Tesla because Elon doesn't support cluster bombing European farmland.
The Atlantic had a great article about it:
"When you invest in an ESG fund, you may think you’re buying into a highly curated selection of positive-outlier companies. In reality, it will often look similar to an ordinary market-wide index fund. The 10 biggest holdings in the S&P 500 ESG index include Big Tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet; big banks such as JPMorgan Chase; and, incredibly, ExxonMobil."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/esg-woke-i...
I agree, ESG is just a bunch of numbers but if we can't agree on what the right output is then it's political in nature. I wonder if society has a bigger issue with disagreements about the E and S rather than the G, maybe not?
E and S are where many draw their political divides so I would tend to agree that is where many of the problems lie within ESG.
You've identified what is going wrong with the company so as a large fund you can buy a lot of shares and push for shareholder votes to fix those aspects of the company and reap profits when the company improves?
Yes, that is the paradox of the ESG finance trend.
Using a quantitative approach, you can use the CAPM to show that at equal risk/return, increasing the cost of capital of some companies (by limiting their access to funding because of low ESG score) actually make these companies a comparatively more profitable investment (for those that disregard ESG).
If you like these kind of paradoxes based on investor ethics, have fun discovering the world of Islamic finance and how to get interests when you cannot get interests.
"ESG is tricky to talk about because it is inherently political."
There, I fixed it for you.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
Any ESG system that uses a calculated number composed of many areas will quickly fall prey to Goodhart's Law. With an E, an S and a G to work on, the areas for change are numerous enough that Goodhart's Law holds even in a non-cynical world.
When an edict that "We need to increase our X score this quarter" is handed down, the real, living people who have to improve the ESG rating are likely limited in what they can do. A combination of pre-existing contracts and commitments, difficulty in changing large systems and problems with multi-department co-ordination means that most changes will be small and isolated, i.e. things where one department or small team can implement the entire change.
When it comes to human rights in the supply chain and environmental impact, there was a complete lack of data in many cases. With the ESG, we see a major shift where companies are now scrambling to gather said data, analyse it and often also publish it.
If they aren't suffering under these rules, which will almost be a certainty.
https://www.icpmnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Count...
The only way to stop pollution is to consume green. That’s it. The Saudis and the Russians don’t care about ESG
Anyway ESG never was big in Europe and is now entirely dead. The EU mandates far better reporting in the CSRD and the texts linked to the european green taxonomy with actually meaningful KPIs and financial data having to be disclosed.
A quick look at the gap between ESG scores and EU Green taxonomy alignment results will tell you all you need to know about ESG scores by the way. They are meaningless.
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
Ex, Tesla has a terrible ESG scores, and Philip Morris has great ones. Is that because PM's diverse board actually outweighs giving people cancer? No, it's just that ESG was designed explicitly to allow companies to hand-wave away the core issue that they are selling bad things.
That, however, is the easy part. It's obvious BP is Big Oil. Or that cigarette companies sell poison. Or that gun makers' lobbyists have made the US a needlessly dangerous place. A gun made out of recycled materials is still, obviously, a gun. An ESG score just tells you whether they aren't racist sexist scum, too.
Or that the direction of their sexism and racism goes in the scorer’s approved direction.
So a non-union mega corp that exploits labor in third world countries gets a decent overall ESG score by making a big show of support of gay/trans or “diversity” goals.
It’s math .. and the bottom line and honestly nonsense.
> We don't quarrel with the conclusion that the impact is big, but the numbers are informed guesswork.
Meanwhile the author outright says they're writing this opinion piece because they don't want to see cats banned as pets or people going out and killing a bunch of cats.
I think these companies are simply, explicitly, optimizing directly for ESG, for maximum gain, without regards to the "spirit" of ESG. They're rational actors. Why wouldn't they? Just like with taxes, it would be silly to not use the loopholes.
From two years ago: https://www.bloomberg.com/professional/blog/bp-esg-outlook-s...
> BP’s ESG performance and outlook are bolstered by an ambitious net-zero emissions target from its operated upstream production by 2050, complemented by a tenfold surge in green spending, 50 gigawatts of renewable-power generation by 2030 and a 40% decline in oil and gas volume. Ecological metrics are favorable, with significant improvement in the 10 years since the Deepwater Horizon disaster, as BP’s safety and spill records are in-line with or above peer averages. BP’s board is among the most gender-diverse, and it has an investor-friendly governance structure and best-in-class ESG disclosures.
So BP, noted exploder of oil rigs in the ocean, gets a boost to their ESG rating by, among other things, promising to do some shit 30 years from now (a promise doubtlessly worth less than the paper it was written on), and hiring more women. What do either of those have to do with BP's actual emissions impact?
ESG exists to rehabilitate the reputations of companies like this.
This point is actually reasonable - a poorly governed company is a risk. Like if a single, unreadonable owner is prone to throwing hissy fits, ridking money in poorly thoigh out schemes and firing people because he woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Then thats a riskier investment.
Each component alone makes sense, if interpreted in a way that is consistent with shareholder capitalism.
1. Environmental. Interpreted in terms of shareholder capitalism, Environmental might mean something like "how well does this company work as a hedge against increasingly likely tail risks, and how resilient will it be to policy changes should those increasingly common tail risks result in secular or policy shifts".
E.g., a re-insurance company that is well-positioned WRT coastal flooding risk but which runs all of its offices on artisanal coal-fired powerplants -- that are a cheap and easy to replace with solar if and when needed -- should have a higher "Environmental" score than a "net zero" re-insurance company that is highly exposed to coastal flooding risk.
2. Social. Interpreted in terms of shareholder capitalism, Social should mean that middle management is not eg over-paying for labor from the Good Old Boys network instead of taking advantage of the cheapest available labor that meets quality requirements.
3. Governance. Interpreted in terms of shareholder capitalism, Governance might mean that you don't give a single founder or board member the ability to over-ride the preferences of the majority holders of equity. Also things like decisions being transparent to shareholders and so on.
The joke isn't ESG per se. The joke is that ESG as implemented makes the completely idiotic assumption that shareholder capitalism can do anything at all to solve political fissures or account for externalized costs.
But if ESG did follow the points as you listed them, then it would probably receive a lot less political flak.
The point is simply that markets are designed for maximizing incentives, and "ESG" as commonly defined isn't -- at least definitionally -- aligned with those incentives.
That point is pretty value neutral with respect to ESG goals; ie, believe what you want about how the world ought to be, but don't fool yourself into thinking that throwing you slogans at markets with different incentives will result in outcomes consistent with your sloganeering.
At least in the US, there isn't enough regulation to force companies to provide the data needed for an accurate ESG score. The scoring agencies are essentially just guesstimating based on what the companies are willing to expose. So, they're easily manipulated.
1. 'Environmental' covers being net-good for the environment, neither meaning not damaging the environment at all nor meaning resilient against environmental changes. So it doesn't hedge anything.
2. 'Social' covers increasing the percentage of employees that are of disadvantaged minority groups, not decreasing the percentage of employees that are anonymously observed to be overpaid/incompetent. It's fun to pretend the one leads to the other, but in reality the exact opposite happens, as minority preference almost perfectly supplants network preference doing exactly the same thing in the same way. This one may as well be the 'G' of ESG, for 'Goodhart'.
3. 'Governance' is the only one that is actually a shareholder value, instead of a progressive-social-club value, and basically is there to launder the other two.
What specifically do you find ephemeral about ESG?
Social responsibility is a nice phrase to use when you want to justify anything you want politically, but the only meaning it carries is "you should do what my politics thinks is best".
It's ephemeral because if you give those criteria to a country whose politics you don't like, then you're going to get results that you don't agree with.
I appreciate the response.
In practice it's just another financial product that first and foremost makes money for the sellers through higher fees. Some ESG funds cheat their customers by failing to perform the specific ESG vetting they promised in writing to do!
Overall, I think trying to improve those things in a systematic way is the only real way to improve them. I want to know how well each company is doing in various areas. We are currently mostly blind to that.
And we should be mindful not to let the ones trying to game and undermine the systems win, and sincerely look at impact in all areas.
[1] Ideally, I think a metric would be able to measure something like a 'meaning of life difference' from different choices (and assign a corresponding metric for say an organization based on certain counterfactuals). Of course that's too difficult in general, but we can strive for example to keep the planet healthy and establish some standard "unit" for a healthy society (could be translated to money, but there could be some issues with that), establishing a trade-off say between say saving someone's life now (through a health intervention), and saving lives in the future by improving planetary conditions (with less pollution). Those things are perhaps surprisingly comparable (and surprisingly linear/additive as well).
There are mentions of Goodhart's Law and it certainly applies somewhat (if we tried simple, naive metrics): but Goodhart's Law doesn't apply when there are real, smart people doing the evaluation, in a dynamic way, using quantitative tools sensibly. And finally there are choices perhaps no such evaluation could capture, questions about what future do we want for ourselves in a broader cultural and artistic sense (which is why in the end freedom to support what you want as an individual is important).
I really think this is going to play a significant part in how we address many large scale issues!
> It can very well be that a high-emitting firm is very good at governance or employee satisfaction. There is no strong relationship between employee satisfaction or any of these things and carbon intensity,” Goltz argued.
> “Even the environmental pillar is pretty unrelated to carbon emissions,” he added, with this rating partly determined by factors such as a company’s use of water resources and waste management practices.
It's amazing how something so utterly unremarkable has already inspired 4 unhinged comments.
They stand for Social and (corporate) Governance. I just looked it up myself. I wish these articles would explain that. Even the link on the word ESG is unhelpful.
Kiss that ring, companies, and maybe they'll throw a few crumbs at you.
My favorite part about the whole thing is how it went from “conspiracy theory that will never actually be implemented” to I have to do ESG training at work within a few years.
But it is primarily a racket. You don't need an ideology or a program for societal control to have a good racket -- in fact, it's best not to have one, so you can cynically jump onto the latest thing for this business cycle.
So I disagree with you completely, despite being strongly critical of the ESG phenomenon. This is a pretty popular position BTW. Many ESG critics (probably such as yourself) are in a bubble, as they think people such as myself are supportive of ESGs just because they are left-wing, when to most left-wingers, it's yet another example in a long history of greenwashing.
Only people in on the racket are for it: McKinsey types, CEOs, fund managers that are worried about activist investors such as Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund, etc.
Different ESG scores mean different things depending on what scoring you’re looking at. So, for example, an environmentally focused organization may rate a company high in ESG because they have low emissions and/or push for green legislation.
However, the more well known ESG scores that we see in the news are often from the financial press and are intended for investors, and often reflect the ESG risk exposure for the companies in question.
This tends to have the ironic effect of making environmentally friendly companies have low ESG scores, and less environmentally friendly companies high scores.
So, for example, Elon Musk complained about getting a low ESG risk score from S&P, but that made complete sense because Tesla was heavily exposed to governmental green policies. Remove CA’s CARB credits, or various green credits and tax benefits, etc and Tesla’s business would suffer.
Exxon, OTOH, was unlikely to see any such impact leading to a lower ESG risk score.
The key thing to understand is that there is no single ESG score. Every company creates different scores based on different factors and intended for different purposes, and their customers decide which ones are effective for their intended purposes and those scores tend to last and do well.
The political backlash against ESG scores is so misplaced.
It’s the equivalent of a personal wealth guru who believes that credit cards are not good for most poor people because they perpetuate their poverty deciding that therefore credit ratings for companies are bad, because both have something to do with the borrowing and lending of money.
Rating agencies should rate the financial risk of stuff (mostly bonds they should try and do it well given that whole mess they created in 08)
They should not be involved in politics. When a rating agency goes beyond number crunching and they start looking at other stuff they are already out of their role. When they start looking at the number of women on the board that is preposterous.
Same is true for Fitch, Moodys, Bloomberg etc.
Everybody wants to be a politician and a virtue signaler these days...too bad that in a country full of politicians and virtue signalers nobody does any actual work.
"Should we bail out the banks" was politics. BP has a massive oil spill, how much will they be fined, are they going to be fined more because they are a British and not American company? How much will fcrashes of Boeing Max cost Boeing? Imagine these crashing planes were from a Chinese company, what would the consequences for the company be ?
The big economic projections are inseperable from politics. Only a naive person will believe otherwise
https://www.sustainalytics.com/esg-rating/pepsico-inc/100791...
Sadly, I can already hear the right-wing rebuttal: "the market isn't truly free because of the (bankers) running blackrock! we need govt intervention to ban ESG, then the market will be truly free!"
BlackRock is a different story - look into their actions around SFH. They're not great.
It probably will. It will just take many years for this bubble to pop.
And really I think whole market is not in sensible shape in general and has not been for a while. Not that crash is imminent or can't be kicked down the road a few more times.
First thought:
Just bid up the price of oil. Make it too expensive for the refiners. Drive gasoline up to $50/gallon. Every drop on the market, just buy up and do not burn.
There is an issue with this, of course, which is that it still (hugely) incentivises extraction. You don't want to have to physically store the stuff.
But you also can't pay for notional oil left underground: "Yeah, trust us, we didn't sell that barrel to somebody else for additional money."
Second thought:
You could subsidize the hell out of a substitute though, thereby killing demand. Investors poured money into Uber at a loss just so it could eat up market share, right? Why can't you do that with solar panels and electrification? (Where's my electric car paid for by the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fu... oh.) You can even create network/lockin effects: Electric cars cost half the price, so everybody buys one, so gas stations go out of business.
These are very expensive strategies, but they seem to directly use the price mechanism to try to achieve your goals. Is something cheaper and more efficient possible? Something about efficient markets would seem to imply that that isn't possible, to the extent that efficient markets exist...
Idea 3:
Continuing brainstorming --
- Naked-short futures for beachfront lots in Florida and Bangladesh?
- Buy (underpriced) insurance (basically PUTs) on same?
I feel a creative finance person could come up with lots of things.
ESG is nice, but it doesn't cure everything, at best it helps empower some people trying to do good. You should not expect it to "work" on a large, statistically significant scale. It was never going to.
The Paris accord is another example: it was an agreement to all just do our own thing and only what we want. So obviously nothing has been achieved.
People really struggle with the idea that something small is not everything...
The survivability of everything around it is not to say irrelevant but at least a few steps removed.
So it tries to assess whether your money is still there, not the planet.
Obviously the marketing tries to make you believe that it’s about the planet.
It does not care much about what the company actions do to the world.
Better ESG score means company is more resilient to change in those factors.
This is not correct. ESG tracks, among others, the carbon output of a business. In other words, the impact of the business on the world.
You can read more here: https://www.pwc.com/ca/en/today-s-issues/environmental-socia...
It's very high level and sparse .. even then the only references to emissions reductions (including carbon) were pretty much: "company must adhere to laws and regulations and must take into account the future emissions reductions that are governmental targets" (paraphrasing).'
I don't see how this is different from what I said. It does not rate how environmentally friendly the company is, it rates whether the company is in compliance with current and it has plans future regulations.
Edit: there is carbon emissions section that is helpfully labelled as one of the things that "CAN be tracked". So this seems to be optional and also the benchmark seems to be self determined by the company rated.
MSCI ESG Ratings aim to measure a company’s resilience to long-term, financially relevant ESG risks.
- Of the negative externalities that companies in an industry generate, which issues may turn into unanticipated costs for companies in the medium to long term?
- Conversely, which ESG issues affecting an industry may turn into opportunities for companies in the medium to long term?
Unbundling the acronyms is the obvious first concern. They smack of a kitchen sink approach to everything the corporate thinks is a reputation risk. As factors they have no internal coherence.
Then, for each of the underlying issues one must clarify and distinguish whether it is an assessment of current state of the world or future risks (and to whom, what? earnings, value, reputation, clients, mother earth etc).
Finally, even in the most tractable case (accounting for current co2 emissions, which is a tiny fraction of environmental footprint and says nothing about the future) there is a mountain of methodological challenges to climb: Who is emitting, who is enabling it, who is demanding it, who benefits most etc. The modern economy is a giant hairball of dependencies yet we like to ignore all that.
The "ESG period" of the sustainability transition is the financial system taking a first peek at the actual state of the world as opposed to "the number goes up". Its no surprise that many just want to close the lid and pretend they never saw anything. But its not possible unless we accept we are an amoral last generation that devolves into a madhouse.
It took credit ratings a century to mature and they are still heavily gamed / leading to systemic crises. What makes you think this existential question for the unhinged corporate profit-focused entities that dominate modern economic life will get resolved any sooner?
There is a long, long road ahead. But if you look for purpose look no further.
But I don't know how much I really want BlackRock and Vanguard to be the ones doing the scoring...
- caring about your investments aligning with your values is good
- investment firms violating civil rights laws and promoting fashionable bigotry using retirement funds to coerce companies into self-destructive behavior is bad
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.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Vanguard/@40.0513614,-75.5...
BlackRock? Different story, but Vanguard? Comeon.
For a fund to be passive, all you are saying is that you are following pre-set rules for that fund. And there are any number of investment products these companies make and offer that use any sort of pre-set criteria.
You can take a look at one of Vanguards (few) ESG index funds and their criteria are very clearly presented at the bottom of the page: https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun...
Eg, the components of the S&P 500 are selected by committee, but obviously SPY is passively managed.
You can have a passively managed fund that is designed to to track an index of companies with a certain ESG score, or to track an index as well as possible while excluding non-ESG components, for example.
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.
> Keeran Beeharee, vice-president for ESG outreach and research at Moody’s, agreed that ESG investment does not necessarily help an investor create a low-carbon portfolio, or any other specific goal.
> “[There is a] perception that ESG assessments do something that they do not. ESG assessments are an aggregate product, their nature is that they are looking at a range of material factors, so drawing a correlation to one factor is always going to be difficult,” Beeharee said.
> “In 2015-16, post the SDGs [UN sustainable development goals] and COP21 [Paris Agreement], when people began to really focus on the issue of climate, they quickly realised that an ESG assessment is not going to be much use there and that they need the right tool for the right task. There are now more targeted tools available that look at just carbon intensity, for example,” he added.
Emission intensity includes CO2 (Carbon Intensity) and also Methane and other emissions.
Emission intensity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_intensity
UN SDG Indicators 2023 revision (Goals, Targets, Indicators) https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/indicators/Global%20Indicator%20... ctrl-f "carbon", "emission", "methane"
> Goal 9. Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation
> 9.4.1 CO2 emission per unit of value added
> Goal 13. Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts
> 13.2.2 Total greenhouse gas emissions per year
SDG9 > "Target 9.4: Upgrade all industries and infrastructures for sustainability": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goal_9...
SDG13 > "Target 13.2: Integrate climate change measures into policy and planning": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goal_1...
How should ESG composite scores be updated to reflect Emission intensity (to include CO2, and CH4,) as a weighted factor?
Lots of knee jerk comments without much actual analysis and thinking.
Most of the commentators aren’t even aware what E, S and G stand for (environmental, social governance).
You can also buy whatever stocks and shares you want. ESG does not prevent companies from listing.
If you don't want to invest based on ESG then don't.
If these concerns people have about ESG are so important, they should be passed at the democratic level via legislation. At least that way, people could debate and change the system as needed. You didn't need ESG to get rid of lead plumbing - just an interested government.
Of course these days, we can only have private power, not public power.
What’s remarkable is that apparently none of these hiring managers and executives saw this coming. The stuff they’ve put into writing is wild. Some of the stuff, like aspirational racial quotas, wasn’t even legal under pre-SFFA law. I don’t know who was advising these people.
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% white as of the last census, so white people are in fact underrepresented at Apple)
27.9% of the company is Asian
9.4% black
14.8% Hispanic
So they have stated that they are working on “increasing representation” (hiring) all categories of people except white.
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.
A higher ESG score means that ESG funds are more likely to invest in this company, pushing up the company’s value.
This is a literal economic incentive to discriminate against white people.
Where do you see that? That's not part of the criteria for my Vanguard ESG fund.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/whats-esg-score-how-calculate....
“There are several organizations and rating agencies that calculate ESG score”
“Corporate Knights: Corporate Knights is a media and research company that publishes an annual ranking of the world's most sustainable corporations. Their methodology evaluates companies based on a range of ESG factors, including carbon productivity, diversity and inclusion, and clean revenue.”
From the Corporate Knights website itself:
“All publicly-traded companies with over US$1 billion in revenue are assessed across 25 key performance indicators, including % sustainable revenue, % sustainable investment, % taxes paid, carbon productivity, and racial and gender diversity.”
In any event they’re talking about board member diversity, not company employees.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing the site guidelines and taking their intended spirit more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I really don’t feel like it was a harmful comment, it has net upvotes, the majority here seem to agree with the sentiment.
It's important to understand the concept of "generic tangent" - when a thread moves away from the specifics of a given story toward more familiar/bigger/hotter/divisive/sensational things, the discussion is guaranteed to get more repetitive, less interesting, and more likely to turn into a flamewar.
You can't judge these things by upvotes—sensational comments and flamewar comments frequently get heavily upvoted. This is a weakness of the upvoting system. Past explanations here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
This is the entire point of DEI. As Kendi says, the only way to undo past racism and become an equal society is a period of short term discrimination against the privileged. Not saying I agree, but a Nobel is basically a career achievement and dei has been around for what, a decade? Would be surprising if it already lead to a Nobel.