A Republican congressman slammed the use of environmental, social, and governance investing and said that “asset managers are prioritizing ESG goals over profit and risking Americans’ hard-earned money.”
“Millions of Americans across the country trust their investments will be used to make a profit and hopefully one that they can live on comfortably in retirement because what we’re really after here, what we’re all investing in the long term, is financial security,” Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, said at a hearing. “But these days it’s not crazy for many Americans to wonder: Will I even be able to afford retirement?”
“This administration has driven inflation through the roof, it’s at a 40-year high, and pushed the economy to the brink of a major recession, which we all pray won’t happen, but it very well could in the next year,” Fallon, chairman of the economic growth, energy policy, and regulatory affairs subcommittee, said. “Now, due to Democrats’ ESG push, asset managers are prioritizing ESG goals over profit and risking Americans’ hard-earned money.”
ESG, which stands for environmental, social, and governance, is a business framework that elevates environmental and social causes over profit and shareholder value creation and has been popularized by some businesses and financial investors.
House Oversight and Accountability subcommittees on economic growth, energy policy, and regulatory affairs and health care and financial services held a hearing Tuesday titled “ESG Part II: The Cascading Impacts of ESG Compliance.”
The full committee previously held a hearing in May titled “ESG Part I: An Examination of Environmental, Social, and Governance Practices” with attorneys general.
“This administration has driven inflation through the roof and pushed the economy to the brink of a major recession.
Now, due to Democrats’ ESG push, asset managers are prioritizing ESG goals over profit and risking Americans’ hard-earned money.”@RepPatFallon opens ESG… pic.twitter.com/HMQX0z12Lk
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) June 6, 2023
“With ESG investing, businesses are now tasked with accounting not only for their own carbon footprints, but maybe the footprint of their contractors and suppliers, the race and gender of their corporate boards instead of the merit and performance of those same corporate board members,” Fallon said.
ESG flips financial management on its head and puts politics over your hard-earned money.
It's a sickening display of leftist nonsense that has no place in your investments. https://t.co/31V15i2ZyW
— Representative Lisa McClain (@RepLisaMcClain) June 6, 2023
“I am for the freedom to invest your own money into the causes you the client actually believes in. But that’s not what’s happening here. Managers are investing your money in causes they believe in and we are seeing real consequences for Americans’ retirements,” Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Mich., said at the hearing. “Americans’ retirement assets were down nearly 15% last year. Fifteen percent.”
“This includes state pension funds. State pension funds support teachers, librarians, firefighters, and other public sector employees,” McClain, chairwoman of the health care and financial services subcommittee, said.
McClain also said, “Some states, such as Texas and Kansas, are actually getting in front of this by advancing laws that restrict investments that consider non-financial factors, remember they’re in the financial sector, they should be focusing on financial factors, like ESG for state pension funds.”
"While branded as an investment strategy for good, ESG manipulates markets as well as access to markets in order to advance a leftist political agenda," @MississippiMG says. pic.twitter.com/arlWTrXJwY
— Samantha Aschieris (@samantharenck) June 6, 2023
Mandy Gunasekara, director of the Independent Women’s Forum Center for Energy & Conservation; Jason Isaac, director of of Life:Powered at the Texas Public Policy Foundation; and Stephen Moore, distinguished fellow in economics at The Heritage Foundation, testified on Tuesday. Shivaram Rajgopal, Roy Bernard Kester and T.W. Byrnes professor of accounting and auditing at Columbia Business School, was the Democrats’ witness.
“The ‘E’ standards result in higher cost energy, unreliable electricity grids, and stand to undermine environmental progress,” Gunasekara said. “The ‘E’ standards also enrich high-end asset managers at BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard at the expense of retirees and pensioners.”
“‘S’ standards force companies to engage in controversial political issues, such as campaigns to defund the police or promoting ‘gender transitions’ in children, cultivating division in the workplace and the marketplace,” Gunasekara, who is also a visiting fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment, said. “‘G’ standards give the appearance of diversity while restricting freedom of thought and competing viewpoints in the workforce.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
“Now, ESG standards are purposefully complex and convoluted in the hopes that the everyday man and woman will not catch on,” Gunasekara said.
Jessica Anderson, executive director of Heritage Action for America, the grassroots arm of The Heritage Foundation, weighed in on Tuesday’s hearing.
“Today’s hearing is another crucial step in investigating and exposing the true cost of progressive ESG policies,” Anderson told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement. “The coercion caused by harmful ESG compliance distorts business risk assessments and upends the freedom of private market decisions.”
“Lawmakers at both the state and federal level should continue evaluating the threat of ESG and its impact on American industries,” Anderson said.
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Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.
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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.