BlackRock’s timing couldn’t be better: It literally exited a weird, self-serving and futile environmental virtue signaling coalition of companies, sponsored by the unctuous bureaucrats at the United Nations no less, as Los Angeles was being burned to the ground because of woke climate policies.
Corporate leaders are getting the memo, while progressives are left to sift through the ashes.
Last week, The Post was first to report that BlackRock was leaving the “Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative,” a UN-backed group of institutional investors who say they want to save the world from climate Armageddon. It sounded like a good idea when BlackRock joined a few years back.
The corporate ecosystem went hard left out of alleged necessity — the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer was evidence that the country was systemically racist, hence the need for racial quotas in hiring through the practice of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies.
The world was changing fast and the working and middle class needed to be indoctrinated on left-wing dogma just like they do to people in Europe, or our neighbors up north.
Team-building seminars were replaced by critical race theory seminars preaching the evils of the freest place on earth.
TV commercials needed to feature trans women sipping a Bud Light because American workers needed to be reminded of intersectionality 24/7.
On top of this, the environment needed to be protected at all costs. Al Gore’s dystopian prediction of massive climate change that would destroy the US economy was heading for us like a runaway freight train.
Scary stuff, which is why asset managers like BlackRock — the world’s biggest — but also JPMorgan and State Street joined the UN-tied group, and others like it, and began investing in a way that made sure the environment would be protected from dreaded climate change.
Of course, they left out several key facts in their proselytizing. First, none of these businesses are charitable institutions; they’re publicly traded companies.
If they’re going to make the world a better place, they better make money doing it.
The money spigot was known as ESG, or Environmental Social Governance, investing, which uses the power of the investment dollar to tell management what to do.
The misguided strategy told oil companies they needed to drill for less oil and build more windmills to get that old carbon footprint down.
Lefty pols wanted ESG
ESG funds carried huge fees, much higher than any found elsewhere on Wall Street. And they were seen as a gold mine by woke investors.
Big state pension plans in blue states run by some of the most left-wing pols in the country were now demanding it.
You could win their business if you showed sufficient fealty. BlackRock and others spread ESG dictates not just on investors who wanted it, but stealthily throughout their investment process.
Big bucks to be made in going woke. Plus you had the UN to provide you with political cover.
As I point out in my book, “Go Woke Go Broke; The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America,” there are real questions — serious scientific questions — whether any of these efforts to curtail carbon emissions were working and whether they were doing more harm than good.
Telling oil companies to scale back on production has consequences, particularly when supply chains are stressed post-COVID.
Larry Fink of BlackRock and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan are billionaires. They aren’t really affected by $5 gas that began to kick in around mid-2021 when ESG was the way of the world.
But working-class people felt the pain at the pump, and they had enough. The blue states lost population and their pension clout waned as people fled. Red state pension officials demanded an end to the ESG nonsense.
Republicans took Congress and later, under the decidedly non-woke Donald Trump, the presidency. Jim Jordan, the powerful Ohio GOP congressman, looked into the UN-endorsed coalition, and investigated whether it violated antitrust laws involving collusion.
It was one reason cited for BlackRock’s departure. (A spokeswoman for the coalition tells The Post the group “is not in violation of antitrust laws or any laws for that matter.”)
In California, that woke mentality has become painfully clear. LA doesn’t have enough water to put out the flames. Gavin Newsom instituted strict environmental laws to save a small fish species.
For all his left-wing posturing as governor, Newsom seems oblivious that climate change isn’t reversing because protecting small fish won’t stop a wildfire in a state that deals with them every year.
Meanwhile, the meritocracy of the LA Fire Department is in shambles. The city’s mayor, Karen Bass, and its fire chief, Kristin Crowley, embarked on a DEI hiring spree — men need not apply for a particularly strength-intensive job.
These two dunderheads aired a recruitment video that suggested it isn’t a female firefighter’s fault that she can’t physically remove someone from a burning building — it’s the victim’s fault for being there.
I can’t tell you when lefty pols will end their woke insanity, but CEOs are. Fink is moving away from ESG; so is Dimon.
Others like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg are ending corporate DEI policies because not only does it deprive companies of merit, but also because people hate it — and it’s a violation of civil rights laws.
If you go woke, you might not only go broke — you could also destroy an entire city.
