Tobacco companies lead the ESG pack while electric vehicle giant Tesla languishes near the bottom because it won’t toe the woke line, exposing the ‘ethical’ ESG scheme as a virtue-signalling racket, say critics. The Washington Free Beacon has more.
S&P Global made headlines this month when it gave Tesla, the world’s largest manufacturer of electric cars, a lower environmental, social and governance score than Philip Morris International, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes.
The electric car company, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has become a culture-war lightning rod, earned just 37 points on the 100-point scale compared with the cigarette giant’s 84.
ESG ratings are supposed to guide investors, and their money, toward ethical enterprises. But Big Tobacco has lapped Tesla in the ESG ratings race more than once: Sustainalytics, a widely used ESG ratings tool, gives Tesla a worse score than Altria, one of the largest tobacco producers in the world. And the London Stock Exchange gives British American Tobacco an ESG score of 94 — the third highest of any company on the exchange’s top share index — while Tesla earns a middling 65.
How could cigarettes, which kill over eight million people each year, be deemed a more ethical investment than electric cars? It may have something to do with the tobacco industry’s embrace of corporate progressivism.
Companies like Altria have gone out of their way to emphasise the diversity of their corporate boards and the breadth of their social justice initiatives, from funding minority businesses to promoting transgender women in sports. But Tesla, whose executives are overwhelmingly white men, has resisted that bandwagon, going so far as to fire its top LGBT diversity officer last year.
The ‘S’ in ESG typically includes diversity programs. Philip Morris International, which in 2021 advertised a partnership with “African data scientists,” got a social score of 84 from S&P Global. Tesla got a measly 20.
The contrast highlights the hazards of a movement that lumps pressing health and environmental issues in with ideological fads. Early ESG efforts were laser-focused on ‘sin stocks’ — companies whose core business was deemed immoral — including tobacco. But as ESG investing has ballooned, so has the number of variables used in ESG ratings, which now encompass everything from labor practices and carbon pledges to diversity trainings and human rights. That has created countless opportunities to game the system, experts say, and lets even the most sordid companies score points — and investors — by toeing the progressive line.
Worth reading in full.
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Well I really hope we get to see a video of Kathleen’s talk at the University now because I hadn’t even heard of her but it seems she’s getting quite the big build-up so my expectations are high as a result! lol But what I don’t understand about the article above is that nobody’s being forced to attend her talk, presumably, so why would there be all this fuss anyway? And I do think that if you can’t sit through a learned academic’s lecture in such a setting without making a complete song and dance about it then you clearly don’t even possess the life skills and emotional maturity to have even left home in the first place. You are not ready to fly the nest as you evidently do not have the necessary tools to navigate life’s totally normal ups and downs yet. Stay with your parents mollycoddling you until you’re in your 30s then, because you seem the sort of people who can’t even boil an egg without feeling traumatised! Either don’t attend the talk or sit through it and give Kathleen the respect that you seem incredibly vocal in demanding everybody else shows you.
Here’s an 11min segment of a recent interview with Freddie Sayers and Kathleen Stock, and she seems like a perfectly interesting, reasonable and pleasant person to me;
https://unherd.com/thepost/kathleen-stock-i-feel-sorry-for-the-students-trying-to-ban-me/
A segment from Kathleen’s book, ”Material Girls”. Can anybody point out the controversy to me because I can’t find my magnifying glass..
”In this book I’ve rejected gender identity theory. Since current trans activism enthusiastically embraces gender identity theory, it follows that I don’t believe ordinary trans people are well served by current trans activism. Trans people are trans people. We should get over it. They deserve to be safe, to be visible throughout society without shame or stigma, and have exactly the life opportunities non-trans people do. Their transness makes no difference to any of this. What trans people don’t deserve, however, is to be publicly misrepresented in philosophical terms that make no sense; nor to have their every day struggles instrumentalised in the name of political initiatives most didn’t ask for and which alienate other groups by rigidly encroaching on *their* hard-won rights. Nor do trans people deserve to be terrified by activist propaganda into thinking themselves more vulnerable to violence than they actually are.”
Nobody has a right to other people’s involuntary attention (visibility). Assuming otherwise is just passive-aggressive behaviour. What so-called consenting adults do privately to each other is their business. But it’s really their business and certainly not mine. I insist that I have the absolute right not to be molested with it.
When I was at Uni we made use of other means of relieving stress. And that’s why I need glasses these days.
I do hope they don’t eat them. Can you imagine how many germs are on those things? I’ll bet nobody sanitises the crayons or their hands before use, nor, for that matter, the table and chair. Oh, God! They’ll all die horribly! (With luck)
How long before a university education on your CV makes you unemployable in the real world (but probably ideal for the civil ‘get nothing done’ service)
FGS. Yes, give them their non-toxic crayons, alongside some little pretend kitchen / oven / kettles; pretend lawnmowers; safety scissors; little pretend irons and ironing boards; pretend drills and little swirly mobiles over their
cotschairs. Not forgetting the socket covers to keep prying little fingers out of electrical sockets. Wouldn’t want the little loves come to any harm.I hope they’re wax crayons so the little darlings can’t self harm with those sharp points…