Calling all asset managers, mid-tier financial institution workers, and monetary sustainability advocates: You’re in league with the Satan, in response to Utah’s State Treasurer.
Marlo Oaks, who was appointed to the Treasurer place in 2021 and reelected in 2022, instructed a crowd over the weekend that environmental social governance, or ESG—the observe of creating investments utilizing social and environmental rules—is an “outcomes-based” plan, just like the biblical “battle in Heaven.” The feedback, which have been first reported by the Salt Lake Tribune, have been made on the Salt Lake County Republican Get together Conference final weekend.
“Outcomes-based governance just like the UN’s [Sustainable Development Goals] and ESG opens the door to authoritarianism,” Oaks mentioned. “It’s Devil’s plan.”
Oaks’ workplace instructed the Salt Lake Tribune in an e mail that the Treasurer’s “use of scripture was an try to talk to an viewers that may perceive the instance and illustrate the issue with techniques that try and push outcomes on everybody. His opposition is to coercion as a mechanism in society.”
We reached out to Oaks’ workplace for additional remark. In an e mail, a consultant reiterated what his workplace mentioned to the Tribune and mentioned that Oaks’ “opposition to ESG just isn’t opposition to the underlying points addressed by ESG.” Oaks has a sister who was affected by the California wildfires, the consultant wrote, however Oaks says that ESG “is not going to end in options to environmental and social challenges. It could assist some individuals really feel higher about their investments, however its coercive nature ought to scare us all.”
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It’s hard to imagine a world in which anyone would think that the relatively benign practice of ESG, once the purview of greenwashy shareholder reports, is somehow the devil’s work. Yet the Republican party has ramped up its war on ESG over the past few years to a fever pitch, enacting a slew of anti-ESG state legal guidelines, attempting to make federal legal guidelines in opposition to it, and making opposition to ESG a centerpiece of their anti-left ideology. It’s not significantly shocking that we’ve reached this level. (By means of his consultant, Oaks mentioned that ESG ignores “the very actual human value of boycotting fossil fuels” and that its “coercive techniques” imply that “capital just isn’t going to the place it could usually go—to worthwhile tasks within the oil and fuel business.”)
This isn’t the primary time Oaks has talked about ESG; quite the opposite, good ol’ Marlo is type of obsessed with ESG. His Fb web page has a number of fliers promoting numerous talks he’s given on the subject since 2021. Oaks ascended to the highest of the pyramid for local weather deniers this yr: he gave a discuss titled “The Risks of ESG” on the Heartland Institute’s Worldwide Convention on Local weather Change, the place he was launched as “an absolute chief on ESG points.” (One of many slides within the 45-minute presentation was titled “ESG and TYRANNY” and included a photograph of Hitler.)
Not like quite a lot of the blowhards who wax poetic concerning the evils of ESG on Fox Information, Oaks is a man who is definitely materially concerned in figuring out the funds of a whole state—and he’s put the state’s cash the place his mouth is. Final fall, Oaks went so far as to divest $100 million of state public funds from BlackRock to different funding managers. (A spokesperson for the bigger state retirement system instructed the Tribune it nonetheless had round $6.8 billion sitting in BlackRock administration, with no modifications being made for ESG-related causes.)
Throughout his current speech, Oaks additionally claimed that the UN’s Sustainable Growth Targets “have broadly been touted by UN leaders because the grasp plan for humanity” and have been partially created by the Chinese language Communist Get together. Oaks’ workplace despatched the Tribune articles to again up this declare that have been from the Epoch Instances, a paper linked with the Falun Gong non secular cult that has been recognized to unfold right-wing conspiracy theories and misinformation.
We requested Oaks’ workplace to supply us with proof that the UN Sustainable Growth Targets have been created by the CCP that was not from the Epoch Instances. The workplace despatched hyperlinks to a report citing Chinese language funding in UN initiatives, in addition to two UN reviews on tasks tied to China’s Belt & Street Initiative.
