The depthless stupidity of Republicans' anti-ESG campaign Volts

In this episode, Kelly Mitchell of journalistic watchdog group Documented discusses Republicans’ furious pushback against ESG funds due to their ostensible greenness, and the ridiculousness of said vehemence since ESG ratings are actually a poor reflection of companies’ true environmental impact.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
For the last few years, the fastest growing segment of the global financial services industry has been ESG (environmental, social, and governance) funds.
Here’s how it works: one of several ratings firms uses its own proprietary formula to rate how well a company is responding to environmental, social, and governance risks. An environmental risk might be: will the county where you’re locating your data centers have sufficient water supply in coming years? A governance risk might be: have you filed all the proper disclosures?
Fund managers like BlackRock then gather highly rated companies into ESG funds, which are sold to investors as socially responsible. Hundreds of billions of dollars flow into ESG funds every year.
Note that there’s a bit of a shell game at the heart of the enterprise. What customers and investors generally think is that a company gets high ESG ratings because it goes above and beyond in those areas, that it is trying to “do well by doing good.” But in reality, high ESG ratings simply mean that a company is responding to material risks — maximizing its profits, as public companies are bound by law to do.
So Tesla gets no ESG credit for accelerating the electric vehicle market, but it can pull a low ESG rating (and fall out of ESG funds) over vulnerability to lawsuits over working conditions. (This is why Elon calls ESG “the devil incarnate.”) McDonald’s loses no ESG points for the enormous carbon impact of its supply chain, but it gains points for reducing plastic in its packaging, because regulations against plastic packaging are imminent in Europe.
So investors get to feel like do-gooders and big companies are rewarded for carrying out their legal obligation to assess risks to their business. There’s not much social benefit to the whole thing, but everyone feels good and green and happy.
Except now there’s a problem: Republicans bought it. The whole sales pitch — they believe it. They believe that companies in ESG funds are going out of their way to do social and environmental good … and they’re furious about it.
Over the past year or two, an enormous, billionaire-funded backlash against ESG has consumed the GOP, leading to multiple congressional hearings, hundreds of proposed state bills, and red-state treasurers vowing never to do business with woke lefty activist funds like [checks notes] BlackRock.
It is stupid almost beyond reckoning. And I’m just brushing the surface. To dig into the deep layers of dumb and where it all might go, I called Kelly Mitchell. She’s a senior analyst at the journalistic watchdog group Documented, which uncovered emails and other communications between the architects of the anti-ESG campaign that led to a New York Times exposé.
All right then, let's do this. With us, we have Kelly Mitchell from Documented. Kelly, welcome. Thank you so much for coming to Volts.
Kelly Mitchell
Thank you, David.
David Roberts
Kelly, when I first decided to do this episode, I started looking into it, thinking, you know what, this all seems kind of stupid. But what happened is as I dug in and explored it into the nooks and crannies, some of the background, some of the work you've done, some of the work Documented has done, what I discovered is that it is actually so much stupider than I ever could have imagined. The depth of stupidity here is remarkable. So I just want to thank you. I feel like you should get hazard pay for what you do. And I just want to thank you for immersing yourself in this. It must be wearying.
Kelly Mitchell
It is. It's like the Thunderdome of stupidity. But I'm glad we