Environment, Social, and Governance, better known as ESG, is a metric that measures whether a nation or corporation can demonstrate the maximum amount of corporate virtue-signaling.  The most striking example is Sri Lanka, the former government of which massively increased its ESG by mandating only organic fertilizer in the small nation, leading to massive inflation, famine, and the violent overthrow of its government.  ESG is bad business and, as Sri Lanka demonstrates, dangerous to human well-being.  Now Governor Ron DeSantis has announced that Florida is leading the way to stand against this utterly toxic metric.

For just one example of the mindless gobbledygook behind ESG, take a gander at this recent write-up from Kyle Peterdy at CFI, which is an accredited provider of online content for finance professionals (that is, it's teaching this crap to the next generation):

ESG is an acronym for Environmental, Social, and Governance. ESG takes the holistic view that sustainability extends beyond just environmental issues.

ESG is best characterized as a framework that helps stakeholders understand how an organization is managing risks and opportunities related to environmental, social, and governance criteria. 

While the term ESG is often used in the context of investing, stakeholders include not just the investment community but also customers, suppliers, and employees. All of them are increasingly interested in how sustainable an organization's operations are.

Blah.  Blah.  Blah.  I'm sure Mr. Peterdy is a nice man, but this is a wall of garbage words aimed at imposing every kind of leftist policy, provided it's wrapped in virtuous language, on financial and political marketplaces.

Read on and get to the key takeaway: "ESG has changed how many investment and capital allocation decisions are made."  In other words, if a corporation or country virtue-signals its green credentials, that will drive money toward it in the short term.  The problem is that, in the long term, those same virtue-signaling acts are unsustainable, and they either destroy corporate profits (wiping out investors and employees) or push countries into famine and blackout territory.

Image: Ron DeSantis goes to war against ESG.  Fox News.

In addition, by using the metric of ESG, corporations can discriminate against one another on ideological grounds.  For example, banks and credit card companies are frequently refusing to do business with companies that engage in what were, until just a few years ago, completely unexceptional activities (e.g., manufacturing guns, building border walls, etc.).

This is not to say that corporations should return to the bad old days of the 1960s, when lakes next to factories were catching fire from the toxic chemicals in them.  That needed to be cleaned up.  But in all things, there must be a balance.  ESG is entirely unbalanced, destroying investors' finances; gutting jobs; and, again, killing countries.

That's why it matters that Governor Ron DeSantis showed up on Tucker Carlson on Wednesday night to announce that Florida will (a) use the Florida state pension fund to place a flat ban on any type of ESG-driven investing and (b) protect people in the financial marketplace from being subject to viewpoint discrimination under the guise of ESG metrics.

"The upshot of all this, Tucker," said DeSantis, "is we want to stop these kind of Masters of the Universe from trying to do through economic power what they cannot achieve at the ballot box.  And it's really an end-run around democracy where they're trying to impose these things."

That's exactly right.  In addition, DeSantis believes that other states will follow Florida's lead.  DeSantis also wants to get conservative states to come together with their proxy voting rights, which control over $1 trillion in assets, to end the ESG culture entirely.

Ron DeSantis announces plan for Florida to take on ESG | https://t.co/Ivg79TP4PF

— American Thinker (@AmericanThinker) July 28, 2022

What I like about Ron DeSantis isn't just that he's willing to fight, although, in a world of RINOs, that's a rare and valuable quality.  It's also that he fights intelligently, an even more rare quality.  I wish him a very successful future political career because we badly need leaders like him.