SEPTEMBER 18 — The latest report on NY Post on 26th August 2023, Blackrock’s CEO Larry Fink announced emphatically that the ESG movement, which it founded, has gone too far, and BlackRock will be part of the solution to prevent its excesses from destroying the US economy.
Let me remind everyone again of what this ESG is supposed to entail:
E - Environment: I will talk on it a bit more in this article and how this part has played a disastrous role for Malaysian economy aided by BNM and Bursa Malaysia by promoting this satanic tenet of ESG.
S - Social (Justice). What is this? Don’t we already have CSR as part of our corporate requirements already? Why this extra bureaucracy and administrative costs on our businesses?
G - Governance. Has all the Bursa Practice Notes and rules and regulations and Bank Negara’s rules not addressed governance issues all these years? If it has not, then it is not the failure of governance, but the failure of implementation as had happened during its watch such as 1MDB.
So now that even Larry Fink is running scared of being blamed that his ESG is destroying the mighty US economy, what does BNM and Bursa Malaysia have to say on its part about this satanic ideology that it has allowed to infect our fragile Malaysian developing economy? Has the “social justice stakeholder" neo-colonialism of the World Economic Forum (WEF), as founded and controlled by Klaus Schwab, so deeply penetrated our government institutions, political parties, and leadership, that we cannot think clearly for ourselves already?
As a capitalist I understand this phenomenon very well, we had “re-engineering” in the 90s, then “climate change” in the 2000s first powered by Al Gore, and now it’s on steroids with ESG. The ESG marketing is so well-funded that we are now captive slaves in this neo-colonial capitalist trade of renewables for sustainability scam. Very highly paid people in high positions in our institutions today rely on this ESG religion to maintain their posts and command higher pay; not to mention the coterie of consultancy work it has spun in its wake.
If we are still enamoured by ESG, we had better put a stop to it right now. Bad ideas will not last long in the face scrutiny. Finance professor Aswath Damodaran, Stern School of Business at New York University, mocked it as a “goodness gravy train.” He called ESG “a feel-good scam that is enriching consultants, measurement services and fund managers while doing close to nothing for the businesses and investors it claims to help, and even less for society.”
We are funnelling our public and sovereign funds to so-called "renewables" of which we have no capacity to develop sufficient raw materials or even an inventor or first mover, which means we will be a net importer forever. We will import expensive hardware and technical expertise at the mercy and behest of foreign powers, both in terms of resources and funds. Our people do not even want to process these "rare earths" in our own backyard for decades. Have we even contemplated what are we going to be doing with the non-perishable hardware of solar and wind turbine facilities and other so-called renewables when their inevitable short shelf life is over? Where are we going to pile these wastes?
We are in fact, impoverishing our own citizens with high prices of energy with government subsidised renewables when natural gas is in abundance for us to exploit. Our stagnating and lowly paid citizens are paying high energy prices to subsidise the imports of the foreign sourced "renewable energy industrial complex" pushed by the ESG agenda funded by mega-funds in the West. Where are the natural areas for us to build wind turbines or solar to harness the limited sun in our limited land and oceans in our monsoon influenced region? Where is our common sense?
I have railed against ESG as this satanic ideology, movement, and practice in Malaysia for some time now. The west especially in its largest economy, the USA has now begun to see its folly and the backlash has now begun. At this point, I want to digress slightly on the issue of Environment in this neo-colonialist ESG movement; firstly, let us address how this alarmist environmental political movement started and what it has morphed to what we see today into the renewables industrial complex.
Do all these people who parrot these environmental alarmist concerns ever research contradicting scientific literature on climate change and the so-called effects of carbon dioxide on global temperature? Anyone who opposes this climate change orthodoxy is simply labelled as climate deniers, and conspiracy theorists. They are cancelled out, every entry to their names is asterisked with opinion notes of inuendoes of their misconceptions of “the science”.
Did you know that Dr William Harper, a professor emeritus of Physics at Princeton University, served from 1991 to 1993 as Director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science was dismissed in 1993 by the Clinton Administration after disagreements on climate change? I presume Al Gore must have inconveniently understood more of the physics of climate change than Dr Harper. Steven Koonin, the theoretical physicist, and professor at New York University was British Petroleum’s Chief Scientist charged with spear-heading the corporation’s future pivot into alternative energy, was from 2009 to 2011, the Under Secretary for Science in the Department of Energy in the Obama Administration; wrote the book interestingly titled Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. And does he get vilified.
Or has any of our public or even authority-leaderships know or even read these luminaries? All we hear are the science of climate change is settled by a consensus of scientists. Is it, really? Or maybe you have heard or read the writings of Dr Patrick Moore, the co-founder, and past President of Greenpeace, yes that Greenpeace. This is the man who at that time put himself in harm’s way to physically lead the organisation to stop whaling and the nuclear bomb tests. Dr Moore called out the environmental movement for scare tactics and disinformation and that they have “abandoned science and logic in favour of emotion and sensationalism”. I could list more scientists of stature and their arguments, such as Dr Richard Lindzen, the atmospheric physicist who was the Alfred Sloan Professor of Dynamic Meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but I doubt most have ever heard of them mentioned in the mainstream media.
Why Bursa or even Petronas is not inviting such speakers to talk at their forums or oil & gas exhibitions to hear a different point of view on the so-called carbon pollution issue and climate is beyond me.
All these research and literature by contradicting scientists are never mentioned by the mainstream media. No fear, no sales, no revenue for alarmist NGOs, news outlets, renewable proponents, and their industrial complex. To quote Dr Moore, "fossil fuels are 100 per cent organic, produced with solar energy from CO2 and H20, and when burned produces H20 and CO2, the primary foods for life. It’s the largest storage battery of solar energy on earth.”
I am declaring my love for fossil fuels. Galileo was imprisoned for saying the earth revolves around the sun against the consensus. They used to burn witches at one time; today we are called climate deniers. The politics is funding and dictating "the science", not the other way around. And there is a new industrial complex colonising the globe — it’s called “renewables” through the might of ESG investing.
In the 70s, the West was threatened by Opec oil embargo. The US and Europe were net importers of petroleum. The environmental movement was at its infancy fighting obvious fights against the slaughter of whales, species extinction and forestry and then moved against the nuclear warfare. But western superpower politics must either obtain more petroleum assets outside its borders, hence the control of puppet-regimes in oil rich nations were the focus. Nuclear power then became a real alternative especially for Europe. In all these geo-political machinations, the west developed alternative to petroleum in renewables such as solar and wind turbines relatively successfully by the end of the 20th century. This also coincided with the environmental movement’s turning against its perceived alarm at the “dirty” and dangers of nuclear and coal as energy source.
Wall Street and major global funds have limited capacity to control the big oil majors such as Exxon Mobil, BP, Chevron, Saudi Aramco, or any other National Oil Companies of the Middle East and the likes. But they sure can come in and fund the newly start-up industries in renewables. Today, they have turned it into a global US$ 1.1 trillion industry that now runs against the competition of fossil fuels. So how do these global funds controlling the renewable industrial complex beat the fossil fuel industry, despite being just less than 2 per cent of the current electricity generation capacity? The answer is to fund the politics, shape the policies, influence the environmental movement, fund “the science” in your favour, control the media narrative and being the financial muscle of stock markets – promote your agenda through access to your monies. The confluence of all these converging interests has created an expensive renewable industry that imposes its influence through western liberal socialism policymaking of the UN, the IMF, World Bank, and the World Economic Forum was born pushing a religion called ESG that subjugates corporations, especially damaging to developing countries’ petroleum interests and even multi-national oil companies to toe their line.
This is where we are today. Either we or our leaders in Malaysia wake up to the hegemony of neo-foreign imperialism against our freedom of charting our own control maximising our mineral petroleum resources and make a stand to go our own way. We must chart our destiny, or we shall waste the 50 years of capacity-building and technical expertise in our petroleum industry. I am willing to bet that in 30 years’ time the folly of renewables will become a harsh reality.
The US is today a net exporter of petroleum, and it knows renewables cannot survive without subsidies and it does not want to be dependent upon limited supply of rare minerals for renewables especially since most are in the control of China. There is hardly any possibility of even replacing 30 per cent of the current fossil fuel requirements for energy. The situation will come to a head. We, Malaysia, either stay ahead of the curve, expand our capacity and capability, and exploit our petroleum resources for the future or waste the revenue accumulated from it into the mirage that is the renewable industry that will bring us down to again being colonised and left standing on the ashes of it when the times come. The choice is ours.
*This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
