Tenured Harvard Business School professor Robert G. Eccles interviews Desiree Fixler, who called out the egregious ESG greenwashing by DWS Group, majority owned by Deutsche Bank, that led to a police raid and the firing of most of the group’s management team.
I applaud Desiree’s disclosure of the widespread corporate ESG BS, but the exposure of covert greenwashing does nothing to illuminate the overt greenwashing by ESG. You see, the problem with ESG lies not in the finesse of its implementation but in the attachment to flawed first-principles.
ESG hinges on sustainability, which, considering the universal effect of entropy, by Richard Feynman declared as the decline of available energy, makes ESG incompatible with nature, for you cannot support sustained growth amid an irreversible decline of available energy. So, even a correction combined with a refined strategy of ESG leads to greenwashing.
We must align finance to evolutionary first principles, not to manmade make-believe, to avoid overt and covert greenwashing. We do so with method EVA.
