What Happened to ESG?

ESG replaced "sustainability" and will be replaced by a new word when the business need to pretend again to care about it after the last "fail" to implement

It's not profitable anymore.

Banks are still offering ESG products. EG "Cut your carbon emissions by x% and we'll shave a couple of basis points off your loan/swap."

Things like ESG if they don't add to the bottom line will get cut in business down-cycles.

The short term nature of our current economy and markets cause this.

what's esg?

In the US, I think companies were just riding the political tides, along with Black Lives Matter and DEI initiatives, Hong Kong, COVID restrictions, unionizations, etc.

A lot of that was during the Trump years, when activism saw a widespread resurgence that bled into the workplace. Then the conservative backlash was strong and persistent and many companies backed off. Then the general public got tired of boycotting everything and pretty much stopped caring and that was that. Back to profit as usual.

(i) you may not be looking in the right places, there is significant time and attention being paid by corporates to create or demonstrate progress on their ESG efforts (ii) there’s a recent “greenhushing” phenomenon whereby corporates and others rename their sustainability or equity initiatives to avoid being a target of groups who blast ESG as “woke” etc

I’ve been successful with my own ESG mandate - energy, sigarettes, and guns. Intentional misspelling.

ESG was a ZIRP phenomenon.