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.
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No-one seemed to care when they had chiropodists in the original list of people who say it can’t be anything other than man-made global warming. The description was ‘settled science’. It isn’t even science.
You could say that they Put their Foot in it by Toe ing the line !
Hey hey..!!
I’ve known for decades that man made climate change is BS.
Apart from the obvious, you just know that whenever they say “all scientists agree” it can’t possibly be true. Scientists never agree on anything. Proper scientists, that is. The ones who understand that science is a culture of doubt, not a culture of faith.
Stating there is no climate emergency is like saying water is wet, everyone except the watermelons is aware the climate is much like it always has been.
Impossible!
The Consensus™️ – 96%, no wait 97% of scientists agree global warming is ‘real’, er..but stopped in 1996 – drat!… correction climate change is ‘real’ and all Man’s fault.
It would appear the age of reason has come to a close. It was the clergy that for centuries stifled our scientific progress during the dark ages, now in an ironical twist of fate it is the scientists who’ve created the religion.
And that religion is known as –
“The Science.”
We need to avoid confusion with real science.
Just like we need to avoid confusion of Duchess of Sussex’s. “My truth” with real truth.
Just how is that people like me who are not professional ‘scientists’ or ‘academics’ but who are soundly educated and who have a professional background that requires an understanding of climate and weather knew the whole climate thing was a Great Lie, fraud and scam from the very start. We were just voices in the wilderness.
This article appears to rubbish the claims made in your article – which is correct?
https://insideclimatenews.org/todaysclimate/experts-debunk-viral-post-claiming-1100-scientists-say-theres-no-climate-emergency/?utm_source=InsideClimate+News&utm_campaign=294aed9976-&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_29c928ffb5-294aed9976-329054845