Blackrock

Monday

Emmet Penney

ESG is a surprise boon for fossil fuel giants

ESG, or environmental, social and corporate governance, has taken the financial world by storm. It first hit the scene in a 2004 United Nations report that argued the financial sector could rack up more profits if it focused on carbon dioxide reduction and UN-approved progressive causes and has ballooned into a big, green financial juggernaut. In 2021, ESG assets under management hit an estimated $35 trillion. Bloomberg projects that by 2025 $53 trillion will be invested in ESG vehicles — that’s over one third of global assets under management and over five times 2007’s total of $10 trillion of ESG assets.  The main thrust is to hasten the renewable energy transition to solve climate change by diverting capital from fossil projects to various green projects.

opec aramco esg

Thursday

Roger Kimball

The beautiful people turn their private jets towards Davos

Larry Fink is unhappy. The grand panjandrum of BlackRock, the world’s largest and most odoriferously PC pile of pelf, can’t understand why the Lilliputians of the world are singling him out for abuse. Having jetted in on his private plane to the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos in order to join the squads of beautiful people warning about the environmental dangers of gas stoves, the moral virtue of eating bugs not meat, and the need to “recalibrate” our understanding of free speech, the poor little rich boy is pouting because people are waking up to the totalitarian reality of what the WEF stands for. What is that reality?

Thursday

Grayson Quay

Time for conservatives to fall out of love with the suburbs

In the waning months of the 2020 campaign, President Trump cast himself as the defender of the suburbs. It didn’t work. Suburban voters made Joe Biden president. But although Trump lost that election, the pro-suburb talking points he popularized didn’t go away. Last month, after California legalized duplexes statewide, the outrage came roaring back. Tucker Carlson fumed that soon 'drug-addicted vagrants’ would be terrorizing innocent American suburbanites. Right-wing Twitter personality Auron MacIntyre perceived a plot to destroy the wealth concentrated in single-family homes and force everyone to live in the 'urban decay’ of 'the favela’.

suburbs