by James Murphy
The New American
On Tuesday, six GOP lawmakers sent a letter to leaders of Climate Action 100+, a group describing itself as “an investor-led initiative to ensure the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitters take necessary action on climate change.” The letter appears to represent an opening salvo of a GOP effort to investigate so called Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) investments and whether they may violate antitrust laws.
Addressed to Mindy Lubber and Simiso Nzima, the letter requests that Climate Action 100+ produce and preserve scores of documents relating to how the group pushes ESG priorities on corporations.
Among the firms involved with Climate Action 100+ are BlackRock, Rockefeller Asset Management, Rothschild and Co. Asset Management in both Europe and the U.K., and HSBC Global Asset Management. Several regional, state, and local investment managers are also listed as “investor signatories.” Lubber is the CEO and president of Ceres, a nonprofit that primarily concerns itself with “sustainability,” and Nzima heads CalPERS, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System…
Self-professed climate-science contrarian Steve Milloy sums it up well when he calls ESG “an ILLEGAL leftist scam for circumventing democratic processes to impose arbitrary standards on corporations to hijack them for political purposes.”
