Last month, I reported on attempts to broaden the definition of ESG, so that investors in weapons systems could sleep easy at night knowing that the stock they were buying was helping turn Russians into pink mist on Ukraine’s front lines. Labour MPs were urging financial institutions to broaden the definition of ‘ethical’ to encompass things that those in the woke investment sphere, such as the Cooperative Bank, used to regard as ‘unethical’. Half-joking, I pointed out that if the definition of ‘ethical’ could be stretched to include bomb-makers, it could surely be allowed to include Big Oil. Reality was not far behind.
Last week, according to CNBC, executives at Goldman Sachs began pleading with investors “to re-evaluate their approach to oil and gas companies”. As has been widely reported, the last year or so has seen financial institutions in the USA and Canada reverse out of ‘alliances’ on Net Zero, mostly founded, at least ceremonially, at the COP26 climate meeting in Glasgow, back in 2021. These alliances were convened by Mark Carney – now the unelected Canadian PM – and supported by the offices of eco-billionaire Michael Bloomberg. Announcing the deals, then Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak took the stage following Carney’s presentation on money to declare that firms with $130 trillion of assets under management were now committed to Net Zero.
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