During the last couple of years, an increasing number of companies have subscribed to the environmental, social and governance (ESG) framework, promising to adhere to, and promote, the goals of corporate social responsibility and sustainable business strategies.
These ESG-oriented companies embrace non-financial accountability indicators to assess the implementation of systems and processes that manage their carbon footprint and treatment of employees, suppliers, and other stakeholders.
The ESG criteria include a commitment to lower “greenhouse gas emissions and CO2 footprint” to support “LGBTQ+ rights and … all forms of diversity.”
The success of the implementation of ESG depends on whether its criteria “encourage companies to drive real change for the common good, or merely check boxes and publish reports.”
The growing list of companies that have committed themselves to ESG reveals that most of these embrace the official narrative on climate change and demonise coal and gas even though these are reliable and clean resources, the use of which would lower electricity prices.
Some obligations imposed by ESG on companies are already legislatively mandated. For example, section 134(3)(m) of the Companies Act 2013 requires the inclusion of a report by companies” Board of Directors on the conservation of energy and a listing of the equipment used to achieve that result.
The ESG Framework received a boost from the adoption in 2015 of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as a plan of action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all people around the world.
The U.N. Agenda contains 17 integrated sustainable development goals and 169 associated specific measurable targets. A prominent feature of the agenda is the emphasis on the role of the private sector in advancing and achieving sustainable development initiatives, working in partnership with governments, civil society, and other stakeholders.
Foray Into Politics
Of course, companies’ interest in social responsibility and sustainability is commendable. However, this interest has sometimes been used as an excuse to enter the political arena.
Specifically, several companies have declared their support for social engineering programmes and unrealistic sustainable development goals. Sporting and religious organisations have also often joined the world of politics.
For example, readers would recall that Qantas relentlessly supported the same-sex marriage campaign, which resulted in the adoption by the Turnbull government of marriage equality in 2017.
With regards to race relations, several Australian churches and religious leaders have backed the Voice proposal and encouraged their members to vote “Yes” because they perceive this as the right thing to do.
Very recently, Tennis Australia has called on the International Tennis Federation (ITF) and the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) to adopt rules regarding the participation of transgender athletes in women’s competitions.
In this context, the CEO of Tennis Australia, Craig Tiley, told the Sydney Morning Herald that “We are an organisation that believes absolutely in inclusivity, in diversity, in equality—so any decision made will need to be aligned with our core values.”
The Transgender Inclusion Guidelines for Community Tennis specifically state, “Players who identify as women should be allowed to play as women; players identifying as men should be allowed to play as men.”
Most of the time, these actions are not based on or supported by rigid analysis but rely merely on “feelings” and vague ideas of “compassion” and “justice.”
But more importantly, in participating in politics, these institutions radically change the purposes for which they were established.
In the case of companies, their function is to make money for their shareholders and to provide quality service to their customers.
While businesses and corporations will want to keep abreast of the financial and economic management of the nation, their forays into the world of social engineering politics surely divert from their real function and are incompatible with their declared mission.
Driving Away the Traditional Base
Big business and sporting organisations also seem to tolerate the imposition of political correctness codes on people, promote the “cancel culture” movement, and condone the teaching of critical race theory in schools and universities, all of which adversely affect people’s right to freely express their opinion.
In addition, the relentless pursuit by the government of its Voice referendum, aimed at entrenching this body into the Constitution, has divided Australia based on race.
There is no doubt that these developments have alienated stakeholders and members of these companies and institutions.
For example, many members of the Liberal Party believe that their views are routinely disregarded and even ridiculed by the party in the pursuit of nebulous and untested notions of “diversity” and “inclusiveness.”
The Moira Deeming affair, which involved her expulsion from the Liberal Party for attending a pro-women rally, the rejection of membership applications based on perceived Christian views in South Australia, and the support of Queensland’s Path to Treaty Act—which provides for truth-telling and the conclusion of treaties with Aboriginal people—surely have driven away scores of once-committed members of the Liberal Party.
Similarly, it is difficult for a Christian to stay as a practising member of his or her church if it embraces secular practices and ideas that are antithetical to its core teachings and even allows the incorporation of pagan practices in its rituals.
In this context, writer Joel Agius has argued that Catholics “are fed up with the Catholic Church being pushed towards something that is more of the world than of God.”
Where can these people who are no longer comfortable in their natural homes go? Are they the unfortunate victims of the implementation of ESG by Australian organisations?
Whichever way these questions are answered, there is a discernible need to ensure that the implementation of the ESG Framework does not affect the true function of organisations in Australia.
Article cross-posted from 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.