ESG is dead, as it should be. Sustainability, upon which ESG hinges, does not exist anywhere in the universe. There can be no sustainability in a universe subject to entropy, referred to by Richard Feynman as the decline of available energy.
Larry Fink at BlackRock put the nail in the coffin from which the chicken of ESG with its head cut off seemed to have escaped and fled for final bloodletting in Europe. As Pensions & Investments reports, ESG “definitions aren’t universally understood or agreed upon.” –– as if that was ESG’s only problem. Never mind its fundamental incompatibility with nature.
Paul Todd, director of investment development and delivery at the National Employment Savings Trust in the U.K., adds: “I don’t think I’ve really understood how people interpreted (ESG) in different ways.” Or as Charles Van Vleet, assistant treasurer and chief investment officer of pension investments at Textron, remarked, ESG seems like “old wine in new bottles.”
Ingrid Albinsson, vice chair of the board at Swedish pension fund AP2, added: “We have different definitions; different languages; we also come from different situations,” amplifying how an investment strategy cannot favor different interpretations of nature’s truth but be based on a singular set of nature’s first-principles yielding the best proxy of its singularity.
ESG was doomed because it was invented by financiers who know nothing about evolutionary principles that spawn the renewal of human excellence. And it shows. Governments are responsible for establishing the human theory that, in the words of Albert Einstein, determines what can be discovered. The government cannot push that responsibility down the totem pole of elective morality in finance.
Governments must govern humanity with a theory, not endlessly legislate rules devoid of a theory. Establishing the theory of finance that determines the fractal of human expansion is a government responsibility, avoiding mindless legislation leading to conflicting expectations and unnatural outcomes.
