ESG and anti-ESG

I understand why people like the idea of ESG. I understand that cynical, hard-nosed hustlers want to muscle in to profit on what the mass of suckers want. I guess this explains Blackrock’s obsession with ESG, but I am not totally sure. I suspect that this is a classic ‘bootleggers and Baptists’ scenario. Different groups want the same outcome for very different reasons, one to save the planet and make companies cuddly, the others to make money by raising barriers to entry (big companies can tick boxes more cheaply). Recently, coal companies have done fantastically well, notably Thungela, a spinoff from Anglo-American, which wanted to qualify for inclusion in popular ETFs.

You can now invest in an anti-ESG ETF, as Kuppy points out (sorry no link, but it’s in an email promo. for KEDM.com). Of course, you could always invest in coal or oil directly.