On Feb. 28, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote an impassioned appeal in The Wall Street Journal for Republicans to support environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores because ESG ostensibly represents the free market at work, by offering investors more “choices.”
Schumer appears to be deeply confused about how ESG operates. Or, more likely, he’s pandering to his powerful donors; pro-ESG asset management titan BlackRock reportedly donated more than $100,000 to Schumer’s reelection campaign in 2022.
Whatever the case may be, in reality, ESG results in the complete opposite of what Schumer claims. Putting aside the highly problematic “woke” metrics ensconced in all ESG frameworks, ESG at its core is designed to centralize decision-making power among an enormously powerful public-private cartel of elites and international organizations. It blatantly attempts to fundamentally transform the economy by severely altering traditional methods of assessing risk and allocating capital and credit. Rather than being judged solely based upon material factors such as revenue and the quality of goods and services, entities under ESG are judged based upon their commitments to arbitrary, subjective, political goals such as mitigating climate change and advancing social justice causes.
Businesses deemed by this elite cabal to be sufficiently committed to said goals are given a “high” ESG social credit score, and are rewarded with substantial capital in-flows, tax breaks, grants, access to special financial vehicles, preferential contracting, and other advantages. Businesses assigned “low” ESG scores suffer from reduced or eliminated access to capital, credit, and even insurance.
Just listen to Bank of America CEO and Chairman Brian Moynihan, who also runs the World Economic Forum’s International Business Council. At the WEF’s 2022 Annual Meeting in Davos, Moynihan committed to using the financial clout of his entire institution, including the funds of individual investment account holders. As Moynihan put it, “200,000 people, a three trillion-dollar balance sheet, 60 billion in expenses; you start aiming that gun, and you take that across all these companies, it is huge. … [The companies] delivering on the metrics will get more capital, the ones that won’t will get less.”
With so much wealth in the hands of a relatively small group of players who are committed to using their capital for ESG objectives, companies have little choice but to comply and pursue those objectives, lest they risk dying on the vine. There’s little to no actual choice involved, for the business or the investor.
For instance, entire industries such as oil and natural gas extraction, tobacco sales, and firearm manufacturing are often designed to be screened out from investment funds, loan offerings, and insurance underwriting, with many large asset management firms like BlackRock divesting heavily from critical economic sectors. These fund managers even target much of the agriculture sector due to its supposedly high carbon dioxide emissions, further exacerbating negative food supply shocks. This occurs, regardless of whether investing in such industries would result in financial gains for the investors who have entrusted asset managers with their hard-earned money.
Asset managers—including the fund fiduciaries charged with safeguarding and growing retirement accounts and pension funds—have a legal responsibility to their investors. And, investors often don’t even know that these fiduciaries are using their funds to pursue political objectives at the expense of financial returns.
The result is that investor choices are limited by the fund managers to those companies that produce less greenhouse gas emissions, have the “right” ratio of white, black, Asian, and Latino employees, and donate to the “proper” political causes such as Black Lives Matter and Planned Parenthood.
I would bet that if these investors’ wealth had been allocated based purely upon financial metrics, and diversified to include companies involved with fossil fuels, firearms, or agriculture, they would have seen substantially higher returns on their investment in recent years. In fact, many studies have shown ESG-centric funds significantly underperform compared to traditional funds.
Using a natural experiment, University of Chicago researchers found that none of the highest-rated sustainability funds they studied outperformed any of the lowest-rated sustainability funds—though the former received more capital than the latter.
In December 2022, Bloomberg analyzed the 10 largest ESG funds by assets as compared to the S&P 500 index. Eight of the 10 funds performed worse, many substantially so. For instance, Vanguard’s FTSE Social and its ESG U.S. Stock both suffered year-to-date losses of minus-20.6 percent, compared to S&P’s minus-14.8 percent. The Brown Advisory Sustainable Growth Fund suffered a staggering minus-28.1 percent loss, nearly double that of the S&P index fund.
Regardless of the financial performance aspect of ESG investing, intentionally screening out companies involved with certain industries distorts the marketplace and the macroeconomy, and limits choice. Moreover, decreasing investment flows to vital industries such as energy—which is the lifeblood of any economy—results in reduced research and development that drives economic growth, and less prosperity for everyone.
Ultimately, rather than letting the invisible hand of the free market decide where investment should flow, the intervention of ESG factors into investment decisions fundamentally changes our entire financial and economic systems. Controlled investment is the antithesis of a free market, and is very similar to a socialist or fascistic command-and-control economic model. And, unsurprisingly, those advocating for this new economic model stand to gain the most.
To be clear, if an individual wants to invest funds in companies that are more “socially responsible,” that individual can do so of his or her own volition. But, ESG takes that choice away from those who value financial returns more than sociopolitical objectives.
Don’t be deceived. ESG systems are designed to subjugate free markets by relying upon coercion, pressure, and control—not to “provide more information” to socially conscious investors. Nothing about ESG belongs in a free marketplace in which businesses supply goods and services based upon societal demand for those goods and services. It’s past time to snuff out ESG before it grows unstoppable.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.