Unfortunately esg suffers from three fundamental problems. First, because it lumps together a dizzying array of objectives, it provides no coherent guide for investors and firms to make the trade-offs that are inevitable in any society. Elon Musk of Tesla is a corporate-governance nightmare, but by popularising electric cars he is helping tackle climate change. Closing down a coalmining firm is good for the climate but awful for its suppliers and workers. Is it really possible to build vast numbers of wind farms quickly without damaging local ecology? By suggesting that these conflicts do not exist or can be easily resolved, esg fosters delusion.
The industry’s second problem is that it is not being straight about incentives. It claims that good behaviour is more lucrative for firms and investors. In fact, if you can stand the stigma, it is often very profitable for a business to externalise costs, such as pollution, onto society rather than bear them directly. As a result the link between virtue and financial outperformance is suspect. Finally esg has a measurement problem: the various scoring systems have gaping inconsistencies and are easily gamed. Credit ratings have a 99% correlation across rating agencies. By contrast, esg ratings tally little more than half the time. Firms can improve their esg score by selling assets to a different owner who keeps running them just as before.
Source: ESG should be boiled down to one simple measure: emissions | The Economist
