ESG isn’t about environmental solutions. It is a way for people to donate towards a religious vision they believe in.
If you oppose ESG, you do not have objections about how your money is invested, you are against saving the planet and for the oppression of minorities.
In Medieval Europe, people didn’t call it ESG, they called them indulgences.
It really seems like you come here solely for the purpose of being contrary. What a pathetic way to spend your time. But I guess if it floats your boat, go ahead. It's a lot more fulfilling having polite, reasonable discussions. But that's not important to your typical misfit, now, is it?
It's easier for me just to go back to ignoring you, skipping your comments like I have become wont to do. I was just sitting here on the toilet and had a spare minute for you.
It really seems like you come here to exist in an ideological echo chamber and group-think circle jerk while pretending to be some open-minded, deep thinker and intellectual who criticizes the "echo chambers" of others, yet continue to spout off boilerplate, right-wing MAGA talking points from Brietbart and Tucker Carlson all while talking about having polite conversations, yet refering to others as misfits, making allusions to sh-t with toilet comment, etc.
I am conflicted about a lot of this stuff, but I will say that “donate to this cause because the world is gonna end” is straight out of the religion playbook.
Y'know what....if as many people were into this religion as people on this comment board seem to think there are, again, we'd already have renewable energy, etc.
The world is not going to end. Which isn't really the argument. Human ability to survive on the Earth will end at some point. Just a matter of how soon. Everyone on this comment board, however, don't have to worry about that.
In European ESG 15-minute cities, the peasants will be confined to their hovels so they reduce their carbon emissions while their lords fly around in private jets. Bow to Greta, eat your bugs!
Professor Damodaran had another scathing takedown of the charade and the commissars who grift from it: “I find the purveyors of ESG to be among the most sanctimonious and arrogant twits (and you can quote me on that) on the face of the earth, convinced that they have the right definition of good, that they will thrust down the throats of everyone else. The ESG measurement services, in my view, are a charade, measuring neither goodness nor risk, but they have real effects, since companies take consequential actions to improve these scores.”
I read that Greta sailed to New York in a high tech sailboat a little while back - to receive an award or speak at some apocalypse convention or some such. It required a large crew (I think it said eight or ten). Big fanfare about her refusing to fly to this event with the boat trip donated by someone in the green elite class. But she flew back. So did the crew. They shipped the high tech sailboat back with commercial shipping. Think of the carbon footprint of all that nonsense.
Don´t blame poor Greta , I put her in with those religious jews that wear the black coats and big hats even in 100 degree heat , she is part of a cult one day she might wake up from her trance . Until then I pity the poor girl . Her parents are another story
The hull and mast were made of high-tech, resin-saturated carbon fiber, the keel was made of steel and lead, and the sails were made from heat-fused-laminated, petroleum-based synthetic fibers.
There was nothing "green" about the boat on which Greta sailed from the US to Europe.
Socialist agendas are always Utopian Dreams. ESG and DEI are implemented to achieve the Utopian Dream that will lead to something far more sinister and likely totalitarian.
Sure, they are exploiting the religious impulses of simpletons. But the real motivation behind it is the psychopathic craving of unproductive megalomaniacs to differentiate their quality of life from the average person.
They have read Proust and Hegel, after all. Why should you also have air conditioning? They are smart!! All you do is keep the lights on.
When the hypocritical, elitists who are perpetrating the GW hoax start leading by example and give up their private jets, their mega mansions and limos, I might start listening to them.
But I probably won't. The reality is industrialized nation run on energy and the GW left wants to cripple us and drive us into the ground. Three of the world's top five polluters will not stop polluting and they are Russia, China and India. If all of the western industrialized nations stopped carbon emissions today, it would not stop the mythical GW. The top polluters would still be polluting.
I hate to say this because it makes me sound like a conspiracy nut but I believe it is a worldwide Marxist plot designed to drive the world democracies into the dirt and from that dirt shoulder to should the workers will arise and form a worldwide workers' paradise like Cuba, China and North Korea.
If all of those socialist morons the Democrats have in congress would just look at the history of socialism and today's socialist countries, it should scare the shit out of them. It does me.
Only an idiot would be a socialist but then I repeat myself.
You have to admit it's clever. We bankrupted the former Soviet Union chasing the chimera of missile defense systems (when all one needs, it seems, is balloons). But then they learned this technique from us and are now bankrupting us in turn. Give the Devil his due.
Lonesome, you are not a conspiracy nut but a brave soul willing to state what would be obvious if we weren't living in a totalitarian nightmare. Their version of leftist totalitarianism is somewhat different in tone, but the results will be the same as all other totalitarian movements. The elites work in concert to enhance their lives by destroying our lives. It is technically not a conspiracy because they all went to the Ivies for their indoctrination, and now think almost completely harmoniously. This is truly remarkable.
Circle the wagons and protect your kin! Move to a saner state!
Investing for stupid people who don’t read and just like to get a Pat on the head and be told they are doing the right thing, as they watch their standard of living go down the tubes
What do you oppose when you oppose ESG? Can you be specific? I oppose some ideas that people propose under the ESG umbrella, but I support many of them and focus on how to deliver on them more productively. ESG is a lot of things. We do better when we are more specific. For example, ESG can include projects that help rehabilitate struggling rust belt economies. As an American who has seen some of those struggling communities, I appreciate when companies can profitably help rebuild our communities. But,I doubt the critics of ESG actually oppose something like that.
I don't oppose ESG investments per se. I oppose ESG investments whose returns are smaller than other investment choices.
I have no issue with fund managers putting money into ESG and other "socially responsible" investments IF the returns are on par with other sectors. But if fund managers are shortchanging their clients--pensioneers--by socking billions into an ESG that gets 4 percent instead of into tech that gets 8 percent, that is a serious issue to me.
Fund managers are fiduciaries, not just to the companies that hire them to handle the investments, but to the people whose pensions depend on total return. Pension funds are obligated morally--and by law--to seek the highest return possible considering the risk involved. If they don't, they can and should be sued.
Pension funds are not social service agencies, they are charged with making money. Individuals can choose to lose money with ESGs if they wish. Pension funds should be prohibited from doing so, whether the "socially responsible" investment is left-wing or -right.
Anti-competitive extortionate tactics? Naked racism and ethnic conflict theory? The part where the government seizes the means of production? Psychopathic manipulative language about sustaining vulnerable communities?
The Autobahn is cool though.
Don’t worry, ESG will only be marginally impeded and you will get exactly what you are asking for.
I won't pretend to know what all encompasses ESG funding and that's partly my point (as was laid out in this article). Not a lot of the funding is transparent.
I would say, however, that I oppose attempts to "combat climate change". I'm convinced that this is just a modern-day version of saying one is against "fascism" or opposed to "the anti-Christ". It's a very broad statement that is packed with assumptions that would lead one to be in the wrong merely for disagreeing.
The climate has been changing on its own for its entire history, long before the age of industrialization. There have been multiple ice ages, shifts in land masses, long periods of global warming and cooling, etc. To think that since we have been scientifically observing the Earth's environment long enough to accurately be able to tell which factors do or do not effect the environment on a planetary scale and to what degree is just... well... one struggles to quite find the right word.
Secondly, how is putting a "minority" on a company's board supposed to benefit the rest of said "minority"? What did the election of Barack Obama do for all Americans of African descent? If every single Fortune 500 company had a black person, an Asian person, an Hispanic person, a person of the "LGBTQIA+" community, and was composed of at least half women (or better yet, "trans-women"), what would that do for the betterment of any of those groups? Why not make sure that we have a member of each religious affiliation? Why not national origin? Why not hair color or blood type? Why are we looking at these particular factors and deciding that these (in this case, sexual orientation and racial groups) must be "represented"? The point I was trying to make was that this constitutes a religious vision of the world, where all "minorities" are free of "oppression", rather than a way of concentrating on real-world issues that could be solved with applicable solutions.
I haven't heard about ESG supporting rust belt economies. If there is funding towards that, then I'm on board with it... of course, that would depend what we mean by funding communities. Do we give money to the people of the community? Do we invest in companies opening factories in those communities?
Again, I'm not going to pretend to know all the details. Maybe there is some stuff in ESG funding that I would agree with... but I suppose that brings me back to the first objection I raised.
It's a hypocrisy that is established as a standard. You want to slice carbon emmissions- a tax credit isn't going to do it.
You really want to slash carbon emissions, stop global transoceanic shipping. The source of the largest volume of carbon emissions, next to the country of China who is #1. Giving companies like Nike, Apple, Home Depot, Amazon, and Walmart a carbon emissions tax credit does nothing. The problem is making stuff half way around the world for slave labor rates and the profits they bring. They're all ESG darlings. If we stopped this business practice, and US foreign policy- we would slash carbon output overnight. FYI all of these companies lobby for this ESG crap and then get an ESG gold star.... but the cargo ships are set sailing each day belching raw diesel in the air. Then we follow it up with 50 or so John Kerry's going to the climate summit of the week.
The industrial revolution coincided with our ability to harness energy. My concern is that if move to less efficient or reliable forms of energy, which we are doing at a very fast pace in the US, the economy will slow or be less competitive with nations that do not make such transition (i.e. China and India which are not going in this direction). Also, energy is a major input cost for most items. Higher energy costs we are now seeing is a direct result of not investing in most effective energy and in my view leading to inflation.
Also I am concerned that equity is being used to discriminate against those that are most qualified. I think all can agree that no one should be judged by the color of their skin, but that is what ESG is doing. Just look at the DOW Chemical proxy filed with the SEC, where each director race, sex and if LGBTQ+ then their sexual orientation are listed. Why do we care? It used to be experience and diversity of thought were what Boards were looking for. Vast majority of DOW Board has less then 5 years of tenure. That's horrible as they can't know companies experience. Finally Dow shows it has white, black, Latino, LGBTQ+ board members. Last time I checked Asians have been outperforming all those groups for a long time. Oh, I forgot its ok to discriminate against whites and Asians. This results from the amazing messed up view of ESG.
David look no further than the treaty China did over the weekend with Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia. We are focused on the idiocy and prejudices of ESG and the eye was off the ball. There is no way in hell that China and India would do one thing to reduce greenhouse gases. Instead, they did a deal for oil for their national & economic security. Meanwhile Blinken, Biden and Kerry pushed us one step closer to global conflict or submission.
The scale of our problems is that we need to public identify Global Warming as a giant hoax and reject ALL efforts to pretend to do something about it; we need to end the FBI, end the CIA, radically restructure our whole government; and a host of other things.
Such changes require unusual men. If you can find one brassy enough to undertake all that, with the fire Trump would bring to a second term, please point them out to me. I like Ron DeSantis, but I am far from sure he would be as willing to do all that as Trump.
Or perhaps the situation is hopeless. That is always one of the options.
I think that another four years of a Trump administration would do a lot of good, but the problem is that he would need to win an election first. As far as I can see, the only person possibly capable of losing to Joe Biden (or whoever may be there in 2024) is Donald Trump. I wish it were otherwise.
I've read far too many reports of the demise of Donald Trump to give any of them credence. He won in 2020, and his candidates won in 2022.
Yes, if the same level of cheating happens again, the result will be the same, but why would that not apply to ANY GOP candidate? Absent courts with balls, the best we can do is win the actual votes, and Trump is quite equal to that. The rest he cannot control, and if it goes much farther, we will be fully in the Fascist regime the Democrats rightly continue to warn us about, as they work daily to create it.
I agree it may be dumb to count Trump out. As for why not any GOP candidate, well, because DeSantis appeals to more people and is capable of wins by margins that are insurmountable. Trump is not, and many of his candidates lost elections they should not have as well. AZ, PA, and NM to be specific.
Also, I have kids. Along with a lot of other people, I ended up on a mapped hitlist in 2020 for my financial support of Trump. Not his fault but should be evidence I don't hate him. I don't hate the guy, but he flopped on Covid. Yes, he was mislead, but I also read Scott Atlas's book, and several other accounts close to the response. Trump didn't fire Fauci for political reasons, he didn't push the federal government to reopen restriction free for political reasons, he didn't tie DOE money to in person school in fall 2020 for political reasons. He had access to the actual data which showed the models were wildly off and the at-risk group very identifiable. He caved on masks despite there was never one iota of genuine replicated data they worked. He even criticized DeSantis and Kemp for reopening. The Guy had great policies for 3 years, but he flopped on Covid. He was not ideologically strong enough to admit the government shouldn't suspend personal freedoms (it should have merely ensured personal freedom to choose). He didn't fight for kids. He didn't ensure vaccine mandates were patently illegal from Warp Speed (though I still think the fact no approved vials were available anywhere until mid 2022 technically meant the experimental shots were forced on people illegally - I am a proud pure blood). Trump wasn't by any means the worst villain, but he wasn't making decisions on objective facts and verbal pushback means nothing.
He was POTUS. He had the power to fight for freedom and instead he chose to coward from many decisions. It was wrong at the time, not just in hindsight. He is FAR better than Biden or any Democrat regime that will run in 2024. However, ignoring that parents who swung right did so because of Covid keep and many will not vote for Trump is a problem. Period.
Several governors showed far more concern for the actual data, and the wellbeing of children, and DeSantis was one of the best. Trump "wanted" schools to reopen in fall 2020, months after it was crystal clear they should and did in much of the world. That pressure allowed my kids' private school to open, but he did not make public schools open or risk losing DOE funds. He had a very unfair presidency, but I owe my vote to my kids, not some attempt to right some wrong I had nothing to do with. I think Trump is hysterical, he was a damn good president for 3 years, and I wish he had won in 2020, but I am not supporting him in the 2024 primary. I want better and I want a candidate that can actually win.
Agree. I don’t think ballot harvesting or 100% voting in WI nursing homes or pipe leaks that never actually happened or more votes than voters who voted in PA make for anything resembling a free and fair election, and that’s to say nothing of legacy media propaganda or big tech censorship of objective facts and inconvenient realities that harm Democrat propaganda (I have found FreeSpoke to be better than Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, whatever).
That said, we need to win with the rules as they actually are, and they changes happened on Trump’s watch and he did go against the advice of advisors to fight them early on which left him with no legal standing once it became clear these changes by executive edict rules were implemented. Also Trump isn’t going to win over parents who have swung right recently because they have very valid, unacknowledged) criticisms of Trump doing virtually nothing in terms of actual outcomes to protect kids during Covid and instead allowing them to be casualties of baseless woke hysterical fear of a virus. I think any win would need to be decisive and DeSantis is a far more likely candidate to achieve that with the backing of the huge overlooked voting block of middle class parents that aren’t especially keen on Trump.
I've been using Presearch for awhile now and like it a lot. Was using DDG and Google before that, but noticed that the search results were too similar - pages and pages of all the same thing on different sites. Presearch is an open source distributed search engine. No tracking, no hidden algorithms driving traffic for money. One or two ads at the top to pay for the infrastructure. I'm usually finding what I'm looking for very near the top of the first page.
Say what one will about Trump he has had a lifetime of dealing with the never-ending BS that is modern government. He knows how it works. Or doesn't as the case may be.
Capitalism leavened only by an occasional Statute and otherwise heedless of any moral principles and values except Perpetual Accumulation is also a Religion. Its God is Money Power, and its pursuit is Maximum Quarterly Profits. The reward of the Faithful.
Non Serviam, in that false Church.
I'm not sure whether the ESG capitalists are true Blasphemers of Capitalist Religion. or if they're merely Heretics- or worse, Pious Hypocrites. But at least there's some acknowledgement of the notion that there are other values than Perpetual Accumulation, all nice and legal-like.
It's interesting that in the Church you patently belong to, society always stratifies into Have's and Have-Not's, and the entire apparatus of the State becomes permanently subservient to the desires and whims of the Have's. China and Cuba and Venezuela would all be good examples.
Communism rejects "bourgeois" morality. Are you perhaps unaware of this? It's impossible to be a hypocrite when you believe and profess nothing, and impossible to sin if you reject the very idea. It's a great gig for those who can stay at the top, and abysmal--a human hell--for those reduced to starvation, imprisonment, torture, and arbitrary murder.
To a rigid dogmatist, all skeptics sound alike. Everyone must buy into the game uncritically, or else. Everyone on their side has angel wings, and the other side has devil horns.
move to Cuba , China or any other workers paradise , stay there live the dream , bet you don´t last 6 months before you board the sailboat back to the US
I will grant I regularly separate in my own mind nonsense from potential sense, and that I saw nothing that was not more appropriate for a comic book or Communist--both draw from essentially the same childishness, although the violence of the latter has ended more than 100 million lives--in your post.
Feel free to post whatever thoughts float into your head, and to do so at length. Just don't be surprised if the world--or at least a few people here and there--labels you a simple minded fool spouting language which has induced hell on Earth many times in many places.
That will be my last comment here, so defend yourself at length, using whatever words seem appropriate to you.
I get that all you can read in my words is "Commie." I'm content with leaving our exchange as it is, for future readers to evaluate. If you're done with it, so am I.
If I was Forced to choose I'd go with Pious Hypocrites, although I'm not sure about the word Pious. Cowardly Hypocrites might be better. Cowardly because those really pushing DEI, There aren't that many of them (no matter how much noise they make), and they are bullies, and their ideology, while a mile wide is (at best) 1/2 inch deep. Eve notice they never debate?
The root of the word "hypocrite" is performer, with the modern meaning intended to imply that the "performance" is just an act. The act being performed- if that's all it is, a form of Public Relations- is Piety.
"Most ESG rankings have a thing for Apple, even though it’s been accused of relying on slave labor to build its iPhones in China."
To say it's "been accused of" is just silly. It does... That's it. All these wokies walk around Tweeting about perceived injustice on their iPhone that some Chinese slave made. It's pretty wild.
If you actually poke around what's in these ESG funds it's garbage too. You'll find PayPal, Visa, Microsoft, whatever other crap. The only thing that's special about these funds is that by calling themselves "ESG" they can charge 3x or 5x the management fees. It's basically equivalent to 2017 when that iced tea company changed its name to blockchain iced tea and doubled its market cap. Pure nonsense.
I feel bad for people forced to invest in this stuff. I am very skeptical that any of it is actually changing the world for the better.
ESG is a demoralized social credit scoring system. DEI is but a small billion-dollar cottage industry within the S of ESG, which is a multi-trillion dollar grift. Both must be eradicated in order for our civilization to survive: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-raise-your-esg-score
And Nike? And all the other virtue signaling creeps who use off-shore slave labor to make their crappy products. Or route our calls to call centers in India or the Philippines, staffed with babbling nincompoops who can't answer a basic question, let alone intelligibly.
Nike's CEO, John Donahoe, donated $20 million to Dartmouth in 2021 "to increase minority representation in STEM." And in completely unrelated news, three of his children also went to Dartmouth.
The numbers will tell the tale. If state pension funds largely loaded with these ESG marketing fantasy firms actually continue to trail on S&P market valuations, it won't stay quiet for long. Pension funds will have to recalibrate, because recipients and legislators will demand it.
ESG might be a (woke) problem, but if it lags behind the returns of the broader markets, the problem will fix itself.
There are legal obligations and fiduciary responsibilities at play in companies selling investment schemes. Those taken by chicanery or fraud have the ability to sue in their private capacities, or to joint together to take class action.
Beyond those I have little sympathy for those who who lose or fall short of their objectives
Wisely investing your money breaks down to two key elements: 1) Investing; and 2) the wisdom of knowing what you are getting for your dollars. After all, investing in stocks or investment funds is little more than legal, regulated gambling.
The term "investing" is an ever moving/changing term. In reality, what most people are doing is "buying." They buy a piece of a dream, really a lie, of potential comfort. When mutual funds started to be vigorously marketed, it was sold as a buying a small "piece of America." And as a way to avoid risk. What could go wrong of owning America? And you can avoid the risk of actually investing in something, which might go up or might go broke. Buying stocks and bonds was the province of the wealthy. But, with mutual funds you could act just like the wealthy. Investments require risk. Pensions are able to mitigate risk by continually having more money coming to mitigate short term losses. As most financial planners know, in retirement the safe amount that can be pulled is 4%. Any payments that go above that 4% means that they are relying on incoming inputs from other employees to cover temporary shortages. That's great until over time you pay out more than the returns bring in. That is why municipal pension plans have been in so much trouble. And then there is the issue when the inputs stop. As Buffett says, when the tide goes out, we know who was swimming naked. ESG investing is indeed a scam that allows for more fees to be paid to these firms that sell them. That is the bottom line.
I worked for several decades for a company that was fully bought into the ESG bullshit from the top on down, and everything in this article is precisely correct.
One of the ways companies obscure the effect ESG is having is by lumping in those initiatives with other, larger and more profitable ones, then linking the growth of those overall portfolios to ESG...when in reality, the ESG pieces are optimistically a neutral contributor, but in many instances actually a drag on performance.
ESG also only cares about the simple, low-hanging fruit of the social change piece. BLM, female advancement in the western world, etc. But, you will never hear them, ever, talk about the Uighur Muslims in China (who constitute a critical part of nearly any company’s supply chain, which is involved in ESG), gay people in the Middle East, etc. They are completely silent about these things because it will cost them a dollar in revenue.
Principles, my ass...ESG can not die a more deserved, painful, and caterwauling death.
I wrote an article about the UN human rights report on the treatment of the Uighur Muslims here, called, The Woke Approved Genocide.
The biggest con people believe in is that this stuff and green energy is going to save the planet. The planet will outlive everyone. The only thing that gets saved is these grifter fund managers and bureaucrats jobs.
“Green energy” is absolutely an economic farce meant to reallocate taxpayer dollars to political cronies. Solar farms destroy either actual farms or wild habitat. Turbines are short-lived, inefficient, animal killers (on both land and sea). Instead of Belgians in the Congo, today it’s multinational corporations.
All these ESG funds have done for energy is block more efficient and cleaner processing of oil, planet friendly natural gas, liquid hydrogen, and nuclear. All so gullible dumb woke urbanites can feel happy about their faux virtue while reallocating taxpayer dollars to political cronies of the powerful and WEF backed billionaires who hope to ensure long debunked Malthusian cliffs become a reality.
Considering how long the planet has been along, it edges on the border of hubris to believe that the last couple hundred years (at the most) of human activity has somehow irreparably altered the environment. Human beings have been shaping/altering the environment for tens of thousands of years, but the flora and fauna of the planet's various ecosystems simply adapt.
What we are faced with when confronting the vast majority of people who want to combat "climate-change" is not a well-thought plan for accomplishing certain goals, it is a vision of the world that cannot be denied, lest you believe in the destruction of the planet.
I kid you not the news email I get from Yahoo had an article yesterday that the multi-billion dollar green energy grants (out of that last multi-trillion dollar infrastructure bill) will create energy billionaires. Like it was something to be proud of.
A Very timely article. I have all my retirement at Fidelity, about 20% of which is a Vanguard fund and another 30% in Apple stock. I see that Vanguard has dropped out of the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative. So far, so good, but I'll do more investigation today.
Apple, of course, has been an investment superstar for the past fifteen years, but I'll also do a deep dive into the dealings at AAPL today. It takes a two-minute phone call to sell any and all of my retirement portfolio it and transfer to another company - one that has my interests in mind instead of using my money without permission to fund some quixotic, unscientific Climate Hoax or racist Board of Directors agenda. Get Woke, Go Broke, and any company pursuing such nonsense I intend to help accomplish that goal. Thanks once again to The Free Press. We just may make it.™
Invest in the current thing company! We ship all items directly from our sustainable factory in Xinjiang, China. Nike and Apple use the same labor because it’s the cheapest on the planet, definitely not slavery. https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-build-a-killer-business-and
It seems a class action suit against a fund that relies heavily on ESG could go a long way to helping solve this problem. The fund managers have a fiduciary responsibility - not a moral responsibility - to the shareholders. Hold them to that.
I don't have a lot of faith in class action suits. They seem to just be vehicles for attorneys to make a lot of money, the plaintiffs get little money, and the defendants find ways to circumvent the system in other ways. The real impact will be felt when fund managers show some integrity and fortitude and base their investment strategies on fiscal policies rather than social policies.
Problem is if it’s in the prospectus it would be hard to bring a case. And every one of those stacks of paper ends with the statement “investments and any future gains are not guaranteed”
Individuals whose Pension Funds are invested by an Asset Management Firm have no say in where their money is invested. Perhaps, because the Asset Investors are NOT putting their fiduciary duty to earn money on those funds first, as they must, and are instead busy virtue signalling using other people”s money, it is the Fund Management Companies that should be sued by people like the man in Washington State. He doesn’t get to read the qualifier line “investment and any future gains are not guaranteed”.
True but I think if the author is correct that it is essentially a scam to generate larger fees there may be a viable consumer complaint - misrepresentation, false promises, failure to disclose, etc..
There are two kinds of people. One group wants to leave you alone, to let you live your life as you see fit. The other is never content to leave you alone. They incessantly meddle, hector, wheedle, command and dream up new schemes to bother you and be up your butt.
ESG is doing to finance what the left has done to our universities. A bunch of know-nothings with an agenda ride a wave of sanctimony to take over an institution while the people who know better roll over and let it happen.
NYU Professor Aswath Damodaran, known as the “Dean of Valuation”, had the most scathing takedown of the charade: “I find the purveyors of ESG to be among the most sanctimonious and arrogant twits (and you can quote me on that) on the face of the earth, convinced that they have the right definition of good, that they will thrust down the throats of everyone else. The ESG measurement services, in my view, are a charade, measuring neither goodness nor risk, but they have real effects, since companies take consequential actions to improve these scores.” https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-raise-your-esg-score
ESG is a cover for funneling money to friends. Recall bond rating companies during housing meltdown? It’s just another fraudulent means of money transfer on the backs of the common man.
Crony capitalism at its worst. ESG commissars can make $500K+ by flying around to conferences to pat each other on the back. Let's end their grifter parties.
And they punish companies like oil and gas by NOT investing a nickel in them. Investors are really losing out on that one because these companies are the true engines of our economies and are needed now and well into the future. So-called ‘renewables’ are another grift and Blackrock, State, Rockefeller, Gates, WEF are all heavily invested in them as are our idiot governments. The billions invested in solar and wind by our governments is OUR money...taxpayer money. Subsidies are a grift.
It is not a subsidy, oil companies are able to write off intangible drilling losses ie: drilling a dry hole, which has a huge cost, against other income. Saying oil companies get government subsidies is like saying homeowners get government subsidies because they can write off their mortgage interest expense. I am sure farms have huge losses ie: crop failure due to drought that they can also write off, but that is not a subsidy. What IS a subsidy is the taxpayer money handed over from government to solar and wind companies in the name of ‘green new deal’. I don’t believe in the climate scam so you can imagine how ticked off I am that my money goes to pay China to produce a product that can’t even be recycled to buy someone some solar panels for their home, or get $7000 towards an EV.
Government subsidies come in many different forms, and yes, that includes those to the oil and agriculture industries to this day. Just check out how much your favorite company gets using this tool: https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/
Years ago I decided to educate myself on investing. Not easy, I assure you, but worth it. I started living off my retirement savings in 2009 and have more savings now than I did then. Never invest in a cause. Look for long term trends and solid companies poorly valued and priced low by the market. Pick your targets and know when to buy, but more importantly when to sell. And as you age, the most important tactic is capital preservation. You can make more dollars with a large investment base than you can with a small investment base. ESG “criteria” should never enter into an investment decision. The activists who praise you for investing in their cause will turn their backs on you when you lose money and find yourself in a worse position.
During a trip to China in 1955, Milton Friedman saw many workers digging a canal using shovels instead of modern excavators. When he asked why they weren't using machinery, he was told that using shovels created more jobs. Friedman then asked why they didn't use spoons instead.
I had this same discussion with my chief X-ray technician, who wanted those she supervised to set X-ray exposure parameters manually "from experience" rather than using Automatic Exposure Control to actually measure the radiation and terminate the X-ray picture at the proper time. Her argument was that it "made the technicians lazy." Mine? "We are not here to build character; we are here to take care of patients with the least radiation possible. That same argument could be used to justify roadbuilding with shovels instead of bulldozers." We were not friends after that - or before, much, actually ....
Having people use the calculations isn't about character, its about ability. Take away the manual work, and they'll lose that ability. The automation route is best in the short term, but in the long term, you won't have any real technicians left, only button pushers ... maybe you only needed button pushers. One day you'll be looking for a technician, but you'll only have a gaggle of button pushers.
I'm familiar with that. We had a case of the "blue flu" - or "white flu," I guess it was - when I was a first-year resident. Since I already had considerable experience with high voltage devices, I approached the Chair, who let me organize the residents to take all the X-ray pictures. We cancelled all interventional procedures, the chief tech - who had NOT gone on strike - and I rotated around the twelve X-ray rooms, helping the residents take all the "pictures." I have to say, they got pretty good at it by the end of the day.
The next day everybody came back. We pretended not to notice. THAT stuff never happened again. (A perfect example of why lawyers never go on strike; it would take people about a day to realize that they didn't need them.)
We're getting there. Unfortunately, scanning software is proving just as accurate at diagnosis as radiologists with eight years of training. Oh well, can't fight progress I guess ....
I’m thankful to have taken control of my retirement account over 3 years ago. It took some education, but my money isn’t being controlled by bad actors (and fund managers who don’t give a shit about me). I’m sad for my fellow Americans who are stuck with retirements they can’t control.
“It’s not that she’s against the asset managers who handle her company’s pension fund investing in green energy. “I have no objection to saving the planet,””—————————————————
It does nothing to save or marginally improve the planet. It will result in catastrophe and a noticeably worse planet.
If these diabolical imbeciles are still effectively manipulating you with their satanic horseshit then you deserve to lose all of your money.
"Saving the planet?" So some halfwit can feel virtuous sucking on a paper straw the fails after two sucks? Or relying on "renewables" that are made in China, aren't really helping the environment and will fail spectacularly resulting in gruesome deaths, societal breakdown and the end of US energy independence?
Yes and this is why I will never buy an electric car until it is 100% Not Made in China
Because China uses the world's dirtiest coal (not petroleum, not natural gas which are better) and dumps garbage directly into the Pacific Ocean, when they make renewables. As long as it is made in China, it is much much better for the environment to use a non-Chinese made Internal Combustion Engine.
Excellent comment and spot on. Take a look at the air in the Chinese cities. You can actually see the filth and pollution circulating. And don't get me started on the plastic crap they dump into the oceans. Or how they treat their indigenous wildlife. There are many good reasons to boycott Chinese made goods, not least of which they declare us to be their enemy. But their destruction of the environment is another good reason.
When we were visiting Seoul ten years ago we noticed a frequent haze of pollution. Commenting on it to locals we discovered that it wasn't Korean in origin, but drifted west from China. Nothing they can do about it but endure it.
Love this quote: Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, said in an email: “ESG is a scam, an idea that was born in sanctimony, nurtured in hypocrisy and sold with sophistry.” ❤️
It perhaps needs to be said that Anthropogenic Climate Change is not real almost as many times as it needs to be said "Communism has failed miserably and violently every time it has been tried."
The Earth has been without ice, and covered in ice. Everything in between is natural variation.
And the DATA DOES NOT EXIST either to claim that our period is exceptional, or even that the Earth actually is warming. Most of the temperature sensors are placed in places like airports and cities which warm as obvious and very local human activity increases. We have almost none in the polar regions; and in any event the hypothesis, to the extent it is actual science (almost none, at this point), predicts differential warming about one mile up that IS NOT HAPPENING.
Humans in groups get progressively stupider. If that is progress, then Progressives are. I myself tend to call them Regressives, because that is what I see.
The "heat islands" you speak of where temperature sensors are located that purport to show global warming are bogus, but the worst part of the Climate Hoax concerns carbon dioxide. CO2 is a trace gas – 0.04%. 97% is from nature; only 3% is man-made, and of that 3%, the US accounts for 14%. You do the math: 0.000168 percent of the atmosphere is CO2 from the U.S. and theoretically available for “reduction.” Sheer lunacy. Add to that carbon dioxide's remarkable effect on plant growth - effectively greening the planet - and what are we even discussing this for?
Agree fully. We are demonizing the gas that makes beer bubble and bread rise. And for that matter, that makes us breathe. We don't respond to insufficient oxygen, but too much carbon dioxide. That triggers breathing.
This is just one of many things that are bat guano insane.
I've never understood this. Anyone who's ever taken a Historical Geology class knows that CO2 levels have been several orders of magnitude higher in the past. Photosynthesis (mostly photoplankton in the oceans) ate it up as fuel and brought it down slightly lower than it is now, starving themselves into a mass die-off and setting off the biggest of the ice ages. It was only the evolution of lignin consuming bacteria and fungi that began to partially reverse this process and enable levels to rise above this floor a bit. We're not far above it. Plants love CO2. We can easily stand more of it. Sea levels will rise a bit, but they are still pretty low now, historically, and this can easily be adapted to as it will be slow. For most of earth history there were no polar ice caps. The myopia of these people is truly epic.
I was reading that sequestration by coral (shells are CaCO3) and other sea life threatens to drop CO2 levels even further. Any insight on that? (addendum) re: sea levels. The climate hoaxers need to remove the arctic from their sea level rise computations. That ice is floating, and just like the ice in your tea, when it melts it doesn't change the water leval.
I've read that also - and that contrary to Green Belief those coral atoll islands are actually growing faster than the sea level is rising (I think the current rate is about 1 cm a decade but this is from memory). Satellite imagery shows net gain of land area. It's a natural process.
What will be comical is watching things thrown hard the other way when the next ice age comes along (roughly 5-15k years) should humans still be around to see it. Then they'll be trying to figure out how to generate more CO2, or trying to blow up the central American isthmus to let the Pacific Ocean flow into the Atlantic that route like it used to before South America Crashed into North America (plate tectonics). Before that happened there weren't any ice ages except for that first big lack of CO2-induced one. Seems to have re-routed the flow of major warm and cold water currents in some complicated way that causes these ice age oscillations.
The current climate models are so comically crude an inaccurate. There's a great article on Judith Curry's site from several months ago that has proposed one of the big missing link pieces in heat transport theory, involving the fact that more heat radiates away from earth at the poles than elsewhere. It apparently reconciles several of the hugely ignored inaccuracies in modeling. But I notice that nobody in the Climate Change Community has paid any attention to it. The problem is that it would show that CO2 is a minor player in global climate and they don't like that. Can't keep beating their heads with boards if they go that route. (Monty Python)
In case anyone is interested, I tracked down a couple links. It's actually tricky - there is a lot of deceptive stuff out there; mostly truncating graphs to eliminate the inconvenient stuff. One of the best graphs I've run across compares O2 with CO2 back almost a billion years - it's in Steve Drury's book "Stepping Stones". But I can't find a stable link to this graph. I have a copy of it on my (private) website, but if I link it from here someone will probably DDS me out of existence. But these links make the point:
Precisely. Climate alarmism is merely the strategy of enemies of capitalism to subjugate the world to an authoritarian regime. It’s astonishing that so many wealthy individuals ascribe to this nonsense, believing they will somehow be exempted as the guillotines of the “woke” are strategically located in financial centers worldwide.
it is just old time religion wrapped in a new package instead of witches and blasphemers it is carbon burners and capitalists . I am all for a clean water and air supply , but don´t sell me cars are the culprit . Hit big industries dumping tons of crap in the water and air . Ever notice how there are strange weather patterns in areas of those big hydro projects ? China and India have had much bigger rain seasons and heat waves since the new hydro projects cut down all those trees to make room for huge heat sink waterways
ESG isn’t about environmental solutions. It is a way for people to donate towards a religious vision they believe in.
If you oppose ESG, you do not have objections about how your money is invested, you are against saving the planet and for the oppression of minorities.
In Medieval Europe, people didn’t call it ESG, they called them indulgences.
Around and around we go.
Spot on sir, spot on. We got rid of organized religion and replaced it with something a lot worse.
Still organized religion. Different name different gods
Lol. If it were an organized religion, we'd all have renewable energy by now.
It really seems like you come here solely for the purpose of being contrary. What a pathetic way to spend your time. But I guess if it floats your boat, go ahead. It's a lot more fulfilling having polite, reasonable discussions. But that's not important to your typical misfit, now, is it?
It's easier for me just to go back to ignoring you, skipping your comments like I have become wont to do. I was just sitting here on the toilet and had a spare minute for you.
Don’t talk to it.
If everyone ignores it, eventually it dies
unfortunately not like a fungus or mold it grows back
Very unlikely, Pat.
his name says all CON-prof
Ho can't read/spell.
It really seems like you come here to exist in an ideological echo chamber and group-think circle jerk while pretending to be some open-minded, deep thinker and intellectual who criticizes the "echo chambers" of others, yet continue to spout off boilerplate, right-wing MAGA talking points from Brietbart and Tucker Carlson all while talking about having polite conversations, yet refering to others as misfits, making allusions to sh-t with toilet comment, etc.
What s pathetic way to spend your time.
I am conflicted about a lot of this stuff, but I will say that “donate to this cause because the world is gonna end” is straight out of the religion playbook.
Y'know what....if as many people were into this religion as people on this comment board seem to think there are, again, we'd already have renewable energy, etc.
The world is not going to end. Which isn't really the argument. Human ability to survive on the Earth will end at some point. Just a matter of how soon. Everyone on this comment board, however, don't have to worry about that.
We do ,grow food eat shit on and on.
In European ESG 15-minute cities, the peasants will be confined to their hovels so they reduce their carbon emissions while their lords fly around in private jets. Bow to Greta, eat your bugs!
Professor Damodaran had another scathing takedown of the charade and the commissars who grift from it: “I find the purveyors of ESG to be among the most sanctimonious and arrogant twits (and you can quote me on that) on the face of the earth, convinced that they have the right definition of good, that they will thrust down the throats of everyone else. The ESG measurement services, in my view, are a charade, measuring neither goodness nor risk, but they have real effects, since companies take consequential actions to improve these scores.”
Here's my satirical advice on boosting your ESG score: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-raise-your-esg-score
I read that Greta sailed to New York in a high tech sailboat a little while back - to receive an award or speak at some apocalypse convention or some such. It required a large crew (I think it said eight or ten). Big fanfare about her refusing to fly to this event with the boat trip donated by someone in the green elite class. But she flew back. So did the crew. They shipped the high tech sailboat back with commercial shipping. Think of the carbon footprint of all that nonsense.
GOSH! One might almost say she's a hypocrite!
Don´t blame poor Greta , I put her in with those religious jews that wear the black coats and big hats even in 100 degree heat , she is part of a cult one day she might wake up from her trance . Until then I pity the poor girl . Her parents are another story
The hull and mast were made of high-tech, resin-saturated carbon fiber, the keel was made of steel and lead, and the sails were made from heat-fused-laminated, petroleum-based synthetic fibers.
There was nothing "green" about the boat on which Greta sailed from the US to Europe.
The flag was probably green?
she was green after a few hours at sea
Meanwhile The Dutch Farmers are At It Again.
They are? I haven't heard anything about what happened there since last summer.
Farmers block Brussels streets with tractors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeLn7Oz_siY&t=4s
The Ingraham Angle on Dutch Farmers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usFJrWlK-j4
That’s Belgium, this time
At what? Farming or protesting?
Dutch government wants to prevent them from doing the former without realizing all they are going to be able to do at that point is the latter.
Protesting.
Socialist agendas are always Utopian Dreams. ESG and DEI are implemented to achieve the Utopian Dream that will lead to something far more sinister and likely totalitarian.
Sure, they are exploiting the religious impulses of simpletons. But the real motivation behind it is the psychopathic craving of unproductive megalomaniacs to differentiate their quality of life from the average person.
They have read Proust and Hegel, after all. Why should you also have air conditioning? They are smart!! All you do is keep the lights on.
When the hypocritical, elitists who are perpetrating the GW hoax start leading by example and give up their private jets, their mega mansions and limos, I might start listening to them.
But I probably won't. The reality is industrialized nation run on energy and the GW left wants to cripple us and drive us into the ground. Three of the world's top five polluters will not stop polluting and they are Russia, China and India. If all of the western industrialized nations stopped carbon emissions today, it would not stop the mythical GW. The top polluters would still be polluting.
I hate to say this because it makes me sound like a conspiracy nut but I believe it is a worldwide Marxist plot designed to drive the world democracies into the dirt and from that dirt shoulder to should the workers will arise and form a worldwide workers' paradise like Cuba, China and North Korea.
If all of those socialist morons the Democrats have in congress would just look at the history of socialism and today's socialist countries, it should scare the shit out of them. It does me.
Only an idiot would be a socialist but then I repeat myself.
You have to admit it's clever. We bankrupted the former Soviet Union chasing the chimera of missile defense systems (when all one needs, it seems, is balloons). But then they learned this technique from us and are now bankrupting us in turn. Give the Devil his due.
Yes and the Dem/Soc are not just willing but enthusiastic accomplices.
They are the Trojan horse.
"Useful idiots"
DEI Destructive Educated Idiots or Delusional ¨ Educated " Indoctrinated take your pick
Don't believe what they say, don't believe what they do. Look at the results of their actions. That is what they want.
Lonesome, you are not a conspiracy nut but a brave soul willing to state what would be obvious if we weren't living in a totalitarian nightmare. Their version of leftist totalitarianism is somewhat different in tone, but the results will be the same as all other totalitarian movements. The elites work in concert to enhance their lives by destroying our lives. It is technically not a conspiracy because they all went to the Ivies for their indoctrination, and now think almost completely harmoniously. This is truly remarkable.
Circle the wagons and protect your kin! Move to a saner state!
Do the know how to read ? And if they do it woud depend on which history books they read
George Carlin put it best about "Saving The Planet."
Thank you for recalling that. Carlin was a prophet.
“We will never know what acts of cowardice have been committed for fear of not looking sufficiently progressive “,
Charles Peguy, Notre Patrie, 1905.
I'm stealing that from you...and Chuck.
Investing for stupid people who don’t read and just like to get a Pat on the head and be told they are doing the right thing, as they watch their standard of living go down the tubes
That is a great comment. ⬆️
Thanks!
What do you oppose when you oppose ESG? Can you be specific? I oppose some ideas that people propose under the ESG umbrella, but I support many of them and focus on how to deliver on them more productively. ESG is a lot of things. We do better when we are more specific. For example, ESG can include projects that help rehabilitate struggling rust belt economies. As an American who has seen some of those struggling communities, I appreciate when companies can profitably help rebuild our communities. But,I doubt the critics of ESG actually oppose something like that.
I don't oppose ESG investments per se. I oppose ESG investments whose returns are smaller than other investment choices.
I have no issue with fund managers putting money into ESG and other "socially responsible" investments IF the returns are on par with other sectors. But if fund managers are shortchanging their clients--pensioneers--by socking billions into an ESG that gets 4 percent instead of into tech that gets 8 percent, that is a serious issue to me.
Fund managers are fiduciaries, not just to the companies that hire them to handle the investments, but to the people whose pensions depend on total return. Pension funds are obligated morally--and by law--to seek the highest return possible considering the risk involved. If they don't, they can and should be sued.
Pension funds are not social service agencies, they are charged with making money. Individuals can choose to lose money with ESGs if they wish. Pension funds should be prohibited from doing so, whether the "socially responsible" investment is left-wing or -right.
Good point.
“What do you oppose when you oppose ESG?”
—————————————————
Anti-competitive extortionate tactics? Naked racism and ethnic conflict theory? The part where the government seizes the means of production? Psychopathic manipulative language about sustaining vulnerable communities?
The Autobahn is cool though.
Don’t worry, ESG will only be marginally impeded and you will get exactly what you are asking for.
Good question.
I won't pretend to know what all encompasses ESG funding and that's partly my point (as was laid out in this article). Not a lot of the funding is transparent.
I would say, however, that I oppose attempts to "combat climate change". I'm convinced that this is just a modern-day version of saying one is against "fascism" or opposed to "the anti-Christ". It's a very broad statement that is packed with assumptions that would lead one to be in the wrong merely for disagreeing.
The climate has been changing on its own for its entire history, long before the age of industrialization. There have been multiple ice ages, shifts in land masses, long periods of global warming and cooling, etc. To think that since we have been scientifically observing the Earth's environment long enough to accurately be able to tell which factors do or do not effect the environment on a planetary scale and to what degree is just... well... one struggles to quite find the right word.
Secondly, how is putting a "minority" on a company's board supposed to benefit the rest of said "minority"? What did the election of Barack Obama do for all Americans of African descent? If every single Fortune 500 company had a black person, an Asian person, an Hispanic person, a person of the "LGBTQIA+" community, and was composed of at least half women (or better yet, "trans-women"), what would that do for the betterment of any of those groups? Why not make sure that we have a member of each religious affiliation? Why not national origin? Why not hair color or blood type? Why are we looking at these particular factors and deciding that these (in this case, sexual orientation and racial groups) must be "represented"? The point I was trying to make was that this constitutes a religious vision of the world, where all "minorities" are free of "oppression", rather than a way of concentrating on real-world issues that could be solved with applicable solutions.
I haven't heard about ESG supporting rust belt economies. If there is funding towards that, then I'm on board with it... of course, that would depend what we mean by funding communities. Do we give money to the people of the community? Do we invest in companies opening factories in those communities?
Again, I'm not going to pretend to know all the details. Maybe there is some stuff in ESG funding that I would agree with... but I suppose that brings me back to the first objection I raised.
ESG Everything Stupid Goes That is how the US is run now under Bi-det
It's a hypocrisy that is established as a standard. You want to slice carbon emmissions- a tax credit isn't going to do it.
You really want to slash carbon emissions, stop global transoceanic shipping. The source of the largest volume of carbon emissions, next to the country of China who is #1. Giving companies like Nike, Apple, Home Depot, Amazon, and Walmart a carbon emissions tax credit does nothing. The problem is making stuff half way around the world for slave labor rates and the profits they bring. They're all ESG darlings. If we stopped this business practice, and US foreign policy- we would slash carbon output overnight. FYI all of these companies lobby for this ESG crap and then get an ESG gold star.... but the cargo ships are set sailing each day belching raw diesel in the air. Then we follow it up with 50 or so John Kerry's going to the climate summit of the week.
The credits do something. They make people like Al Gore extremely wealthy.
The industrial revolution coincided with our ability to harness energy. My concern is that if move to less efficient or reliable forms of energy, which we are doing at a very fast pace in the US, the economy will slow or be less competitive with nations that do not make such transition (i.e. China and India which are not going in this direction). Also, energy is a major input cost for most items. Higher energy costs we are now seeing is a direct result of not investing in most effective energy and in my view leading to inflation.
Also I am concerned that equity is being used to discriminate against those that are most qualified. I think all can agree that no one should be judged by the color of their skin, but that is what ESG is doing. Just look at the DOW Chemical proxy filed with the SEC, where each director race, sex and if LGBTQ+ then their sexual orientation are listed. Why do we care? It used to be experience and diversity of thought were what Boards were looking for. Vast majority of DOW Board has less then 5 years of tenure. That's horrible as they can't know companies experience. Finally Dow shows it has white, black, Latino, LGBTQ+ board members. Last time I checked Asians have been outperforming all those groups for a long time. Oh, I forgot its ok to discriminate against whites and Asians. This results from the amazing messed up view of ESG.
David look no further than the treaty China did over the weekend with Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia. We are focused on the idiocy and prejudices of ESG and the eye was off the ball. There is no way in hell that China and India would do one thing to reduce greenhouse gases. Instead, they did a deal for oil for their national & economic security. Meanwhile Blinken, Biden and Kerry pushed us one step closer to global conflict or submission.
ESG is an excuse for dodging fiduciary responsibility.
Where is Luther? Is his first name perhaps Donald?
I don't think so. As much as I like the Donald, he's just a politician. He's not going to solve all our problems.
The scale of our problems is that we need to public identify Global Warming as a giant hoax and reject ALL efforts to pretend to do something about it; we need to end the FBI, end the CIA, radically restructure our whole government; and a host of other things.
Such changes require unusual men. If you can find one brassy enough to undertake all that, with the fire Trump would bring to a second term, please point them out to me. I like Ron DeSantis, but I am far from sure he would be as willing to do all that as Trump.
Or perhaps the situation is hopeless. That is always one of the options.
I think that another four years of a Trump administration would do a lot of good, but the problem is that he would need to win an election first. As far as I can see, the only person possibly capable of losing to Joe Biden (or whoever may be there in 2024) is Donald Trump. I wish it were otherwise.
I've read far too many reports of the demise of Donald Trump to give any of them credence. He won in 2020, and his candidates won in 2022.
Yes, if the same level of cheating happens again, the result will be the same, but why would that not apply to ANY GOP candidate? Absent courts with balls, the best we can do is win the actual votes, and Trump is quite equal to that. The rest he cannot control, and if it goes much farther, we will be fully in the Fascist regime the Democrats rightly continue to warn us about, as they work daily to create it.
One of the very best things he accomplished INO is all those court appointments.
I agree it may be dumb to count Trump out. As for why not any GOP candidate, well, because DeSantis appeals to more people and is capable of wins by margins that are insurmountable. Trump is not, and many of his candidates lost elections they should not have as well. AZ, PA, and NM to be specific.
Also, I have kids. Along with a lot of other people, I ended up on a mapped hitlist in 2020 for my financial support of Trump. Not his fault but should be evidence I don't hate him. I don't hate the guy, but he flopped on Covid. Yes, he was mislead, but I also read Scott Atlas's book, and several other accounts close to the response. Trump didn't fire Fauci for political reasons, he didn't push the federal government to reopen restriction free for political reasons, he didn't tie DOE money to in person school in fall 2020 for political reasons. He had access to the actual data which showed the models were wildly off and the at-risk group very identifiable. He caved on masks despite there was never one iota of genuine replicated data they worked. He even criticized DeSantis and Kemp for reopening. The Guy had great policies for 3 years, but he flopped on Covid. He was not ideologically strong enough to admit the government shouldn't suspend personal freedoms (it should have merely ensured personal freedom to choose). He didn't fight for kids. He didn't ensure vaccine mandates were patently illegal from Warp Speed (though I still think the fact no approved vials were available anywhere until mid 2022 technically meant the experimental shots were forced on people illegally - I am a proud pure blood). Trump wasn't by any means the worst villain, but he wasn't making decisions on objective facts and verbal pushback means nothing.
He was POTUS. He had the power to fight for freedom and instead he chose to coward from many decisions. It was wrong at the time, not just in hindsight. He is FAR better than Biden or any Democrat regime that will run in 2024. However, ignoring that parents who swung right did so because of Covid keep and many will not vote for Trump is a problem. Period.
Several governors showed far more concern for the actual data, and the wellbeing of children, and DeSantis was one of the best. Trump "wanted" schools to reopen in fall 2020, months after it was crystal clear they should and did in much of the world. That pressure allowed my kids' private school to open, but he did not make public schools open or risk losing DOE funds. He had a very unfair presidency, but I owe my vote to my kids, not some attempt to right some wrong I had nothing to do with. I think Trump is hysterical, he was a damn good president for 3 years, and I wish he had won in 2020, but I am not supporting him in the 2024 primary. I want better and I want a candidate that can actually win.
I don't think the 2020 election was fair at all, but Donald Trump lost in 2020.
Rigged, yes. Stolen? I haven't seen enough evidence for it.
Agree. I don’t think ballot harvesting or 100% voting in WI nursing homes or pipe leaks that never actually happened or more votes than voters who voted in PA make for anything resembling a free and fair election, and that’s to say nothing of legacy media propaganda or big tech censorship of objective facts and inconvenient realities that harm Democrat propaganda (I have found FreeSpoke to be better than Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, whatever).
That said, we need to win with the rules as they actually are, and they changes happened on Trump’s watch and he did go against the advice of advisors to fight them early on which left him with no legal standing once it became clear these changes by executive edict rules were implemented. Also Trump isn’t going to win over parents who have swung right recently because they have very valid, unacknowledged) criticisms of Trump doing virtually nothing in terms of actual outcomes to protect kids during Covid and instead allowing them to be casualties of baseless woke hysterical fear of a virus. I think any win would need to be decisive and DeSantis is a far more likely candidate to achieve that with the backing of the huge overlooked voting block of middle class parents that aren’t especially keen on Trump.
I've been using Presearch for awhile now and like it a lot. Was using DDG and Google before that, but noticed that the search results were too similar - pages and pages of all the same thing on different sites. Presearch is an open source distributed search engine. No tracking, no hidden algorithms driving traffic for money. One or two ads at the top to pay for the infrastructure. I'm usually finding what I'm looking for very near the top of the first page.
As well, Ben - I'm afraid that if Trump were to win he wouldn't understand that he only had four years..
Why?
Say what one will about Trump he has had a lifetime of dealing with the never-ending BS that is modern government. He knows how it works. Or doesn't as the case may be.
He did warn us though, how many times I have lost count.
Ben - Correction. He is a self made man. A billionaire. He is new to the political world.
I wouldn't call him self made. He inherited daddy's money. When you inherit millions, it isn't exactly like you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps.
But he turned that millions into billions.
He had a head start.
Lol!!
Did you just call Trump a "self-made man?"
True... but I still think it's better not to put our faith in princes, so to speak.
Capitalism leavened only by an occasional Statute and otherwise heedless of any moral principles and values except Perpetual Accumulation is also a Religion. Its God is Money Power, and its pursuit is Maximum Quarterly Profits. The reward of the Faithful.
Non Serviam, in that false Church.
I'm not sure whether the ESG capitalists are true Blasphemers of Capitalist Religion. or if they're merely Heretics- or worse, Pious Hypocrites. But at least there's some acknowledgement of the notion that there are other values than Perpetual Accumulation, all nice and legal-like.
It's interesting that in the Church you patently belong to, society always stratifies into Have's and Have-Not's, and the entire apparatus of the State becomes permanently subservient to the desires and whims of the Have's. China and Cuba and Venezuela would all be good examples.
Communism rejects "bourgeois" morality. Are you perhaps unaware of this? It's impossible to be a hypocrite when you believe and profess nothing, and impossible to sin if you reject the very idea. It's a great gig for those who can stay at the top, and abysmal--a human hell--for those reduced to starvation, imprisonment, torture, and arbitrary murder.
You don't know me, man.
To a rigid dogmatist, all skeptics sound alike. Everyone must buy into the game uncritically, or else. Everyone on their side has angel wings, and the other side has devil horns.
Spare me your false two-valued narrative.
move to Cuba , China or any other workers paradise , stay there live the dream , bet you don´t last 6 months before you board the sailboat back to the US
I will grant I regularly separate in my own mind nonsense from potential sense, and that I saw nothing that was not more appropriate for a comic book or Communist--both draw from essentially the same childishness, although the violence of the latter has ended more than 100 million lives--in your post.
Feel free to post whatever thoughts float into your head, and to do so at length. Just don't be surprised if the world--or at least a few people here and there--labels you a simple minded fool spouting language which has induced hell on Earth many times in many places.
That will be my last comment here, so defend yourself at length, using whatever words seem appropriate to you.
I get that all you can read in my words is "Commie." I'm content with leaving our exchange as it is, for future readers to evaluate. If you're done with it, so am I.
ESG capitalists, may be many things capitalists is NOT one of them.
You seem like just the guy to answer my question:
are they Blasphemers, Heretics, or Pious Hypocrites?
If I was Forced to choose I'd go with Pious Hypocrites, although I'm not sure about the word Pious. Cowardly Hypocrites might be better. Cowardly because those really pushing DEI, There aren't that many of them (no matter how much noise they make), and they are bullies, and their ideology, while a mile wide is (at best) 1/2 inch deep. Eve notice they never debate?
The root of the word "hypocrite" is performer, with the modern meaning intended to imply that the "performance" is just an act. The act being performed- if that's all it is, a form of Public Relations- is Piety.
DEI is not the same thing as ESG.
Closely related.
"Most ESG rankings have a thing for Apple, even though it’s been accused of relying on slave labor to build its iPhones in China."
To say it's "been accused of" is just silly. It does... That's it. All these wokies walk around Tweeting about perceived injustice on their iPhone that some Chinese slave made. It's pretty wild.
If you actually poke around what's in these ESG funds it's garbage too. You'll find PayPal, Visa, Microsoft, whatever other crap. The only thing that's special about these funds is that by calling themselves "ESG" they can charge 3x or 5x the management fees. It's basically equivalent to 2017 when that iced tea company changed its name to blockchain iced tea and doubled its market cap. Pure nonsense.
I feel bad for people forced to invest in this stuff. I am very skeptical that any of it is actually changing the world for the better.
ESG is a demoralized social credit scoring system. DEI is but a small billion-dollar cottage industry within the S of ESG, which is a multi-trillion dollar grift. Both must be eradicated in order for our civilization to survive: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-raise-your-esg-score
And Nike? And all the other virtue signaling creeps who use off-shore slave labor to make their crappy products. Or route our calls to call centers in India or the Philippines, staffed with babbling nincompoops who can't answer a basic question, let alone intelligibly.
Nike's CEO, John Donahoe, donated $20 million to Dartmouth in 2021 "to increase minority representation in STEM." And in completely unrelated news, three of his children also went to Dartmouth.
There are many angles to this grift.
Companies like Nike and Apple disgust me. They are run by far left hypocrites, nincompoops.
Yeah I avoid Nike. I buy Psudo Shoes, which are 100% made in USA & amazing quality. My husband buys them too.
😂😂😂
“Things left-wing people like” is a synonym for “saving the planet” in the left-wing mind.
they should go into the reclaiming booth do the world a favour
The numbers will tell the tale. If state pension funds largely loaded with these ESG marketing fantasy firms actually continue to trail on S&P market valuations, it won't stay quiet for long. Pension funds will have to recalibrate, because recipients and legislators will demand it.
ESG might be a (woke) problem, but if it lags behind the returns of the broader markets, the problem will fix itself.
I think this is more of a nuisance than a trend..
There are legal obligations and fiduciary responsibilities at play in companies selling investment schemes. Those taken by chicanery or fraud have the ability to sue in their private capacities, or to joint together to take class action.
Beyond those I have little sympathy for those who who lose or fall short of their objectives
Wisely investing your money breaks down to two key elements: 1) Investing; and 2) the wisdom of knowing what you are getting for your dollars. After all, investing in stocks or investment funds is little more than legal, regulated gambling.
The term "investing" is an ever moving/changing term. In reality, what most people are doing is "buying." They buy a piece of a dream, really a lie, of potential comfort. When mutual funds started to be vigorously marketed, it was sold as a buying a small "piece of America." And as a way to avoid risk. What could go wrong of owning America? And you can avoid the risk of actually investing in something, which might go up or might go broke. Buying stocks and bonds was the province of the wealthy. But, with mutual funds you could act just like the wealthy. Investments require risk. Pensions are able to mitigate risk by continually having more money coming to mitigate short term losses. As most financial planners know, in retirement the safe amount that can be pulled is 4%. Any payments that go above that 4% means that they are relying on incoming inputs from other employees to cover temporary shortages. That's great until over time you pay out more than the returns bring in. That is why municipal pension plans have been in so much trouble. And then there is the issue when the inputs stop. As Buffett says, when the tide goes out, we know who was swimming naked. ESG investing is indeed a scam that allows for more fees to be paid to these firms that sell them. That is the bottom line.
E S G Extra Slimy Grifters , a new wayvto steal money from the m-asses
I worked for several decades for a company that was fully bought into the ESG bullshit from the top on down, and everything in this article is precisely correct.
One of the ways companies obscure the effect ESG is having is by lumping in those initiatives with other, larger and more profitable ones, then linking the growth of those overall portfolios to ESG...when in reality, the ESG pieces are optimistically a neutral contributor, but in many instances actually a drag on performance.
ESG also only cares about the simple, low-hanging fruit of the social change piece. BLM, female advancement in the western world, etc. But, you will never hear them, ever, talk about the Uighur Muslims in China (who constitute a critical part of nearly any company’s supply chain, which is involved in ESG), gay people in the Middle East, etc. They are completely silent about these things because it will cost them a dollar in revenue.
Principles, my ass...ESG can not die a more deserved, painful, and caterwauling death.
I wrote an article about the UN human rights report on the treatment of the Uighur Muslims here, called, The Woke Approved Genocide.
https://www.gordoncomstock.com/p/the-woke-approved-genocide
Did your company measure your ESG score, comrade? Here are ways you can boost your score and become an ESG/DEI commissar: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-raise-your-esg-score
Yes, they did (and do) have an ESG scorecard
Spot-f’ing-on!
The biggest con people believe in is that this stuff and green energy is going to save the planet. The planet will outlive everyone. The only thing that gets saved is these grifter fund managers and bureaucrats jobs.
“Green energy” is absolutely an economic farce meant to reallocate taxpayer dollars to political cronies. Solar farms destroy either actual farms or wild habitat. Turbines are short-lived, inefficient, animal killers (on both land and sea). Instead of Belgians in the Congo, today it’s multinational corporations.
All these ESG funds have done for energy is block more efficient and cleaner processing of oil, planet friendly natural gas, liquid hydrogen, and nuclear. All so gullible dumb woke urbanites can feel happy about their faux virtue while reallocating taxpayer dollars to political cronies of the powerful and WEF backed billionaires who hope to ensure long debunked Malthusian cliffs become a reality.
Considering how long the planet has been along, it edges on the border of hubris to believe that the last couple hundred years (at the most) of human activity has somehow irreparably altered the environment. Human beings have been shaping/altering the environment for tens of thousands of years, but the flora and fauna of the planet's various ecosystems simply adapt.
What we are faced with when confronting the vast majority of people who want to combat "climate-change" is not a well-thought plan for accomplishing certain goals, it is a vision of the world that cannot be denied, lest you believe in the destruction of the planet.
Plus, who’s to say that we’re living in the correct climate? Maybe the planet was meant to covered in ice.
I kid you not the news email I get from Yahoo had an article yesterday that the multi-billion dollar green energy grants (out of that last multi-trillion dollar infrastructure bill) will create energy billionaires. Like it was something to be proud of.
A Very timely article. I have all my retirement at Fidelity, about 20% of which is a Vanguard fund and another 30% in Apple stock. I see that Vanguard has dropped out of the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative. So far, so good, but I'll do more investigation today.
Apple, of course, has been an investment superstar for the past fifteen years, but I'll also do a deep dive into the dealings at AAPL today. It takes a two-minute phone call to sell any and all of my retirement portfolio it and transfer to another company - one that has my interests in mind instead of using my money without permission to fund some quixotic, unscientific Climate Hoax or racist Board of Directors agenda. Get Woke, Go Broke, and any company pursuing such nonsense I intend to help accomplish that goal. Thanks once again to The Free Press. We just may make it.™
followup: Just spoke with the Fidelity man. All clear. Interestingly, he said he is getting this question "all the time now."
Keep up the pressure! Vanguard has turned the tide against ESG. Fidelity, Blackrock, and State Street need to respond to customer demand as well.
"Get Woke, Go Broke." - This must be repeated everywhere at every opportunity!
Atta boy, Jim!
Invest in the current thing company! We ship all items directly from our sustainable factory in Xinjiang, China. Nike and Apple use the same labor because it’s the cheapest on the planet, definitely not slavery. https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-build-a-killer-business-and
There is slavery and then there is slavery:
https://www.forbes.com/2010/05/28/foxconn-apple-suicides-china-opinions-columnists-gordon-g-chang.html?sh=31b6211d4e4b
It seems a class action suit against a fund that relies heavily on ESG could go a long way to helping solve this problem. The fund managers have a fiduciary responsibility - not a moral responsibility - to the shareholders. Hold them to that.
I don't have a lot of faith in class action suits. They seem to just be vehicles for attorneys to make a lot of money, the plaintiffs get little money, and the defendants find ways to circumvent the system in other ways. The real impact will be felt when fund managers show some integrity and fortitude and base their investment strategies on fiscal policies rather than social policies.
Problem is if it’s in the prospectus it would be hard to bring a case. And every one of those stacks of paper ends with the statement “investments and any future gains are not guaranteed”
Individuals whose Pension Funds are invested by an Asset Management Firm have no say in where their money is invested. Perhaps, because the Asset Investors are NOT putting their fiduciary duty to earn money on those funds first, as they must, and are instead busy virtue signalling using other people”s money, it is the Fund Management Companies that should be sued by people like the man in Washington State. He doesn’t get to read the qualifier line “investment and any future gains are not guaranteed”.
True but I think if the author is correct that it is essentially a scam to generate larger fees there may be a viable consumer complaint - misrepresentation, false promises, failure to disclose, etc..
I was thinking the same thing. It goes against the best interest of the client.
There are two kinds of people. One group wants to leave you alone, to let you live your life as you see fit. The other is never content to leave you alone. They incessantly meddle, hector, wheedle, command and dream up new schemes to bother you and be up your butt.
They're known as Democrats.
ESG is doing to finance what the left has done to our universities. A bunch of know-nothings with an agenda ride a wave of sanctimony to take over an institution while the people who know better roll over and let it happen.
NYU Professor Aswath Damodaran, known as the “Dean of Valuation”, had the most scathing takedown of the charade: “I find the purveyors of ESG to be among the most sanctimonious and arrogant twits (and you can quote me on that) on the face of the earth, convinced that they have the right definition of good, that they will thrust down the throats of everyone else. The ESG measurement services, in my view, are a charade, measuring neither goodness nor risk, but they have real effects, since companies take consequential actions to improve these scores.” https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-raise-your-esg-score
Love your handle.
Comrade - If you love the handle, you'll love the Stack!
ESG is a cover for funneling money to friends. Recall bond rating companies during housing meltdown? It’s just another fraudulent means of money transfer on the backs of the common man.
Crony capitalism at its worst. ESG commissars can make $500K+ by flying around to conferences to pat each other on the back. Let's end their grifter parties.
And they punish companies like oil and gas by NOT investing a nickel in them. Investors are really losing out on that one because these companies are the true engines of our economies and are needed now and well into the future. So-called ‘renewables’ are another grift and Blackrock, State, Rockefeller, Gates, WEF are all heavily invested in them as are our idiot governments. The billions invested in solar and wind by our governments is OUR money...taxpayer money. Subsidies are a grift.
I agree subsidies are a grift. However, you do realize BigOil and BigAgriculture also receive large government subsidies, yes?
There’s nothing in what I wrote that says otherwise.
It is not a subsidy, oil companies are able to write off intangible drilling losses ie: drilling a dry hole, which has a huge cost, against other income. Saying oil companies get government subsidies is like saying homeowners get government subsidies because they can write off their mortgage interest expense. I am sure farms have huge losses ie: crop failure due to drought that they can also write off, but that is not a subsidy. What IS a subsidy is the taxpayer money handed over from government to solar and wind companies in the name of ‘green new deal’. I don’t believe in the climate scam so you can imagine how ticked off I am that my money goes to pay China to produce a product that can’t even be recycled to buy someone some solar panels for their home, or get $7000 towards an EV.
We subsidize farmers to plant or not plant. It is a method of controlling supply and demand and thus markets.
Government subsidies come in many different forms, and yes, that includes those to the oil and agriculture industries to this day. Just check out how much your favorite company gets using this tool: https://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/
And here's one specifically for farm subsidies: https://farm.ewg.org/
Years ago I decided to educate myself on investing. Not easy, I assure you, but worth it. I started living off my retirement savings in 2009 and have more savings now than I did then. Never invest in a cause. Look for long term trends and solid companies poorly valued and priced low by the market. Pick your targets and know when to buy, but more importantly when to sell. And as you age, the most important tactic is capital preservation. You can make more dollars with a large investment base than you can with a small investment base. ESG “criteria” should never enter into an investment decision. The activists who praise you for investing in their cause will turn their backs on you when you lose money and find yourself in a worse position.
During a trip to China in 1955, Milton Friedman saw many workers digging a canal using shovels instead of modern excavators. When he asked why they weren't using machinery, he was told that using shovels created more jobs. Friedman then asked why they didn't use spoons instead.
ESG is like that.
I had this same discussion with my chief X-ray technician, who wanted those she supervised to set X-ray exposure parameters manually "from experience" rather than using Automatic Exposure Control to actually measure the radiation and terminate the X-ray picture at the proper time. Her argument was that it "made the technicians lazy." Mine? "We are not here to build character; we are here to take care of patients with the least radiation possible. That same argument could be used to justify roadbuilding with shovels instead of bulldozers." We were not friends after that - or before, much, actually ....
Having people use the calculations isn't about character, its about ability. Take away the manual work, and they'll lose that ability. The automation route is best in the short term, but in the long term, you won't have any real technicians left, only button pushers ... maybe you only needed button pushers. One day you'll be looking for a technician, but you'll only have a gaggle of button pushers.
I'm familiar with that. We had a case of the "blue flu" - or "white flu," I guess it was - when I was a first-year resident. Since I already had considerable experience with high voltage devices, I approached the Chair, who let me organize the residents to take all the X-ray pictures. We cancelled all interventional procedures, the chief tech - who had NOT gone on strike - and I rotated around the twelve X-ray rooms, helping the residents take all the "pictures." I have to say, they got pretty good at it by the end of the day.
The next day everybody came back. We pretended not to notice. THAT stuff never happened again. (A perfect example of why lawyers never go on strike; it would take people about a day to realize that they didn't need them.)
The "lazy" X-ray techs should've been fired. The AEC had already made them obsolete anyway.
We're getting there. Unfortunately, scanning software is proving just as accurate at diagnosis as radiologists with eight years of training. Oh well, can't fight progress I guess ....
Is there a traditional cultural system--religious, medical, legal, financial, you name it--that Leftist orthodoxy has not seriously damaged?
I can't think of one.
Leftism destroys everything it touches. It's their raison d'etre.
Hmmmm, let me think-No!
I’m thankful to have taken control of my retirement account over 3 years ago. It took some education, but my money isn’t being controlled by bad actors (and fund managers who don’t give a shit about me). I’m sad for my fellow Americans who are stuck with retirements they can’t control.
“It’s not that she’s against the asset managers who handle her company’s pension fund investing in green energy. “I have no objection to saving the planet,””—————————————————
It does nothing to save or marginally improve the planet. It will result in catastrophe and a noticeably worse planet.
If these diabolical imbeciles are still effectively manipulating you with their satanic horseshit then you deserve to lose all of your money.
"Saving the planet?" So some halfwit can feel virtuous sucking on a paper straw the fails after two sucks? Or relying on "renewables" that are made in China, aren't really helping the environment and will fail spectacularly resulting in gruesome deaths, societal breakdown and the end of US energy independence?
Yes and this is why I will never buy an electric car until it is 100% Not Made in China
Because China uses the world's dirtiest coal (not petroleum, not natural gas which are better) and dumps garbage directly into the Pacific Ocean, when they make renewables. As long as it is made in China, it is much much better for the environment to use a non-Chinese made Internal Combustion Engine.
Excellent comment and spot on. Take a look at the air in the Chinese cities. You can actually see the filth and pollution circulating. And don't get me started on the plastic crap they dump into the oceans. Or how they treat their indigenous wildlife. There are many good reasons to boycott Chinese made goods, not least of which they declare us to be their enemy. But their destruction of the environment is another good reason.
When we were visiting Seoul ten years ago we noticed a frequent haze of pollution. Commenting on it to locals we discovered that it wasn't Korean in origin, but drifted west from China. Nothing they can do about it but endure it.
Love this quote: Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, said in an email: “ESG is a scam, an idea that was born in sanctimony, nurtured in hypocrisy and sold with sophistry.” ❤️
It perhaps needs to be said that Anthropogenic Climate Change is not real almost as many times as it needs to be said "Communism has failed miserably and violently every time it has been tried."
The Earth has been without ice, and covered in ice. Everything in between is natural variation.
And the DATA DOES NOT EXIST either to claim that our period is exceptional, or even that the Earth actually is warming. Most of the temperature sensors are placed in places like airports and cities which warm as obvious and very local human activity increases. We have almost none in the polar regions; and in any event the hypothesis, to the extent it is actual science (almost none, at this point), predicts differential warming about one mile up that IS NOT HAPPENING.
Humans in groups get progressively stupider. If that is progress, then Progressives are. I myself tend to call them Regressives, because that is what I see.
The "heat islands" you speak of where temperature sensors are located that purport to show global warming are bogus, but the worst part of the Climate Hoax concerns carbon dioxide. CO2 is a trace gas – 0.04%. 97% is from nature; only 3% is man-made, and of that 3%, the US accounts for 14%. You do the math: 0.000168 percent of the atmosphere is CO2 from the U.S. and theoretically available for “reduction.” Sheer lunacy. Add to that carbon dioxide's remarkable effect on plant growth - effectively greening the planet - and what are we even discussing this for?
Agree fully. We are demonizing the gas that makes beer bubble and bread rise. And for that matter, that makes us breathe. We don't respond to insufficient oxygen, but too much carbon dioxide. That triggers breathing.
This is just one of many things that are bat guano insane.
I've never understood this. Anyone who's ever taken a Historical Geology class knows that CO2 levels have been several orders of magnitude higher in the past. Photosynthesis (mostly photoplankton in the oceans) ate it up as fuel and brought it down slightly lower than it is now, starving themselves into a mass die-off and setting off the biggest of the ice ages. It was only the evolution of lignin consuming bacteria and fungi that began to partially reverse this process and enable levels to rise above this floor a bit. We're not far above it. Plants love CO2. We can easily stand more of it. Sea levels will rise a bit, but they are still pretty low now, historically, and this can easily be adapted to as it will be slow. For most of earth history there were no polar ice caps. The myopia of these people is truly epic.
I was reading that sequestration by coral (shells are CaCO3) and other sea life threatens to drop CO2 levels even further. Any insight on that? (addendum) re: sea levels. The climate hoaxers need to remove the arctic from their sea level rise computations. That ice is floating, and just like the ice in your tea, when it melts it doesn't change the water leval.
I've read that also - and that contrary to Green Belief those coral atoll islands are actually growing faster than the sea level is rising (I think the current rate is about 1 cm a decade but this is from memory). Satellite imagery shows net gain of land area. It's a natural process.
What will be comical is watching things thrown hard the other way when the next ice age comes along (roughly 5-15k years) should humans still be around to see it. Then they'll be trying to figure out how to generate more CO2, or trying to blow up the central American isthmus to let the Pacific Ocean flow into the Atlantic that route like it used to before South America Crashed into North America (plate tectonics). Before that happened there weren't any ice ages except for that first big lack of CO2-induced one. Seems to have re-routed the flow of major warm and cold water currents in some complicated way that causes these ice age oscillations.
The current climate models are so comically crude an inaccurate. There's a great article on Judith Curry's site from several months ago that has proposed one of the big missing link pieces in heat transport theory, involving the fact that more heat radiates away from earth at the poles than elsewhere. It apparently reconciles several of the hugely ignored inaccuracies in modeling. But I notice that nobody in the Climate Change Community has paid any attention to it. The problem is that it would show that CO2 is a minor player in global climate and they don't like that. Can't keep beating their heads with boards if they go that route. (Monty Python)
In case anyone is interested, I tracked down a couple links. It's actually tricky - there is a lot of deceptive stuff out there; mostly truncating graphs to eliminate the inconvenient stuff. One of the best graphs I've run across compares O2 with CO2 back almost a billion years - it's in Steve Drury's book "Stepping Stones". But I can't find a stable link to this graph. I have a copy of it on my (private) website, but if I link it from here someone will probably DDS me out of existence. But these links make the point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phanerozoic_Carbon_Dioxide.png
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth103/node/1018
https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=77
And the paper Judith Curry was reviewing is discussed here:
https://judithcurry.com/2022/10/20/winter-gatekeeper-hypothesis-new-support-for-the-effect-of-solar-activity-on-lower-atmospheric-circulation/
I try to explain that to people they look at me like deer in headlights , we are soi fucked
Precisely. Climate alarmism is merely the strategy of enemies of capitalism to subjugate the world to an authoritarian regime. It’s astonishing that so many wealthy individuals ascribe to this nonsense, believing they will somehow be exempted as the guillotines of the “woke” are strategically located in financial centers worldwide.
it is just old time religion wrapped in a new package instead of witches and blasphemers it is carbon burners and capitalists . I am all for a clean water and air supply , but don´t sell me cars are the culprit . Hit big industries dumping tons of crap in the water and air . Ever notice how there are strange weather patterns in areas of those big hydro projects ? China and India have had much bigger rain seasons and heat waves since the new hydro projects cut down all those trees to make room for huge heat sink waterways