[Plura-list] Green investing is a fraud

[Cory Doctorow]

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Tonight, I'm participating in a Clarion Writing Workshop panel called
"Balancing Worldbuilding and Narrative," with Karen Osborne and Kali
Wallace

https://ucsd.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YSvD5IjGS7Su2z-xhQN1ZA

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Today's links

* Green investing is a fraud: ESGs and other delusions.

* This day in history: 2001, 2011, 2016, 2020

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current
writing projects, current reading

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🕴 Green investing is a fraud

The pandemic showed us just how slow the global ruling class to move
through the stages of grief, often getting stuck in denial ("this isn't
happening") and bargaining ("can't I just reopen one teensy little giant
Tesla factory, pretty please?").

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/15/ulysses-pacts/#motivated-reasoning

The climate emergency is a sterling example of how "market forces" are
incompatible with the continued existence of a human-habitable Earth.

Cons like "carbon offsets" are trivially corruptible and instantly
become "markets for lemons," where the least effective climate measures
produce the most profitable (and therefore most common) carbon credits,
driving out all the good ones.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#greenwashing

Market-based climate measures are where Gresham's Law ("bad money drives
out good") meets greenwashing. Every promising financial vehicle
designed to harness markets to save our species becomes a scam.

Take "Environmental, Social, and Governance" (ESG) funds, pitched as a
way to save for retirement without annihilating the planet you're
planning to retire on.

These were once so promising that they panicked the finance sector, so
much so that the world's carbon barons convinced Trump to propose a law
making it illegal to direct your investment dollars into an ESG.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#crybabies

It didn't happen, because Trump is administratively incompetent and
easily distracted. But carbon criminals are very competent and good at
staying on-task. Rather than banning ESGs, they simply corrupted them,
turning them into another form of greenwashing.

Writing in USA Today, Tariq Fancy calls ESGs "marketing hype, PR spin
and disingenuous promises from the investment community" - and he should
know, he founded and ran the ESG program at Blackrock, the worlds
largest asset manager.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2021/03/16/wall-street-esg-sustainable-investing-greenwashing-column/6948923002/

The ESGs you're sold are stuffed full of the world's worst polluters,
from fast fashion companies to (not making this up) giant oil companies.
*Oil companies*!

ESGs are blowing up, with sales nearly doubling over the past year.

The SEC's new Climate and ESG Task Force" will "proactively identify
ESG-related misconduct." If history is any guide, it will fail. The most
profitable green investment strategy will always be investing in
polluters while pretending otherwise.

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-42ann

As Fancy writes, the solution to the climate emergency isn't asking the
public or business to do capitalism differently. As with the pandemic,
the answer is regulatory, coming from democratically accountable states,
not the autocratic satrapies of the corporate world.

"In response to the pandemic, we’ve learned that only top-down
government action, such as forcing the closure of high-risk venues and
mandating masks indoors, makes a real difference. A 'free market' will
not correct itself or fix the problem by its own accord."

The consumer movement was born at a time when competition made companies
sensitive to things like boycotts. Consumerists realized that they could
skip the tedious, unreliable legislative process (where corporations
could always outspend them) and hit companies where it hurt.

That's not the case any more and it hasn't been for decades. While
consumerists were focused on market pressure, corporations successfully
lobbied for new antitrust standards that allowed them to eliminate
competition through monopolistic mergers.

Once companies eliminated competition, boycotts stopped working. Every
time I post about Amazon's abuses, someone tweets that we should just
spend our money better, voting with our dollars. Which sounds great,
until you realize that every tweet generates revenue for Amazon.

By definition, you can't shop your way out of a monopoly. If you don't
believe me, hit your local grocery aisle, where two companies - Unilever
and Procter and Gamble - are responsible for nearly every product on sale.

The "cruelty free" brand is made by the same company as the "maximum
cruelty" brand. The "organic" brand is made by the same company as the
"Oops! All Additives" brand. The "low packaging" brand is made by the
same company as the "padded with spotted owl feathers" brand.

When Procter and Gamble buys up some beloved local organic babyfood
brand or a scrappy keto meal startup, they trumpet the acquisition as
"giving consumers more choice."

If Procter and Gamble does something you hate - marketing caged-veal
smoothies or whatever - and you protest by buying the "plant-based"
I-can't-believe-it's-not-veal smoothie, chances are, you're still buying
a P&G product (and if not, it's probably Unilever's).

Corporate America was once very afraid of consumer movements, but it's
been decades since boycotts or other spending choices were capable of
effecting real change. It's time to stop thinking of ourselves as
ambulatory wallets whose only way of acting is spending.

Structural change comes not from how market actors behave, but how
markets are structured. The rules for markets matter more than the
decisions we make under those rules. Our consumer power is irrelevant,
but our citizen power is essential.

The path to a better future lays through state action, through leaning
on your lawmaker (and agitating for electoral and campaign reforms), not
through endless agonizing over your joke of a 401k or the things you put
in your shopping basket.


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🕴 This day in history

#20yrsago The Gen-X Guide to Disneyland
https://web.archive.org/web/20020219025142/https://www.omnigroup.com/~cirocco/dizney/index.html

#10yrsago James Gleick’s tour-de-force: The Information, a natural
history of information theory
https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/24/james-gleicks-tour-de-force-the-information-a-natural-history-of-information-theory/

#10yrsago Man who wants to patent genome gets legal threat for embedding
James Joyce quote in artificial lifeform
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/03/14/craig-venters-genetic-typo/

#5yrsago Vulnerability in recorders used by 70+ manufacturers’ CCTV
systems has been known since 2014
http://www.kerneronsec.com/2016/02/remote-code-execution-in-cctv-dvrs-of.html

#1yrago Quarantine reveals the falsity of the automation crisis
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/24/grandparents-optional-party/#what-automation

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🕴 Colophon

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 500 words (119259 total).

* A short story, "Jeffty is Five," for The Last Dangerous Visions.
Yesterday's progress: 260 words (9827 total).

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." Yesterday's
progress: 1020 words (38362 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Free Markets
https://craphound.com/podcast/2021/03/22/free-markets/

Upcoming appearances:

*  Balancing Worldbuilding and Narrative (with Karen Osborne and Kali
Wallace), Mar 24,
https://ucsd.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YSvD5IjGS7Su2z-xhQN1ZA

* Launch for Brian David Johnson's Future You (Powell's Books), Mar 30,
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/5716148038801/WN_psgDGchIRfaUQOJyvLnvzw

* All the Teachable Things I Know About Writing, Apr 13,
https://www.changinghands.com/event/april2021/virtual-writing-workshop-cory-doctorow-all-teachable-things-i-know-about-writing

* Interop: Self-Determination vs Dystopia (FITC), Apr 19-21,
https://fitc.ca/presentation/interop/

Recent appearances:

* The Right to Repair Movement, Monopolies, and Solarpunk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmosdDCrL-4

* The surveillance state, digital monopolies, and why we should be
worried (Podsongs)
https://anchor.fm/podsongs/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-the-Surveillance-State--digital-monopolies--and-why-we-should-be-worried-eso43k

* Conspiracy Theories (Utopian Horizons):
https://soundcloud.com/utopianhorizons/conspiracy-theory-w-cory-doctorow

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
(print edition:
https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907)
(signed copies:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

Upcoming books:

* The Shakedown, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics,
Beacon Press 2022

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
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"*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion
Guy" DeVilla

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