Bloomberg Businessweek har analyseret ESG-data fra MSCI, der er verdens største og mest anvendte ESG-rating bureau. Konklusionen er klar: der er næsten ingen sammenhæng mellem en høj ESG-score og bæredygtig virksomhedsdrift.
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Yet there’s virtually no connection between MSCI’s “better world” marketing and its methodology. That’s because the ratings don’t measure a company’s impact on the Earth and society. In fact, they gauge the opposite: the potential impact of the world on the company and its shareholders. MSCI doesn’t dispute this characterization. It defends its methodology as the most financially relevant for the companies it rates.
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The most striking feature of the system is how rarely a company’s record on climate change seems to get in the way of its climb up the ESG ladder—or even to factor at all. McDonald’s Corp., one of the world’s largest beef purchasers, generated more greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 than Portugal or Hungary, because of the company’s supply chain. McDonald’s produced 54 million tons of emissions that year, an increase of about 7% in four years. Yet on April 23, MSCI gave McDonald’s a ratings upgrade, citing the company’s environmental practices. MSCI did this after dropping carbon emissions from any consideration in the calculation of McDonald’s rating. Why? Because MSCI determined that climate change neither poses a risk nor offers “opportunities” to the company’s bottom line.
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What does sustainable mean if it applies to almost every company in a representative sample of the U.S. economy? One thing it’s meant for MSCI and its leader: a more than fourfold increase in its share price since the start of 2019, when Fernandez introduced his “better world” rebranding. Through his own holdings, that’s likely made him the first billionaire created by the ESG business.
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Fernandez has said he views ESG investing as a tool for preempting change as much as one for bringing it about. When he was on a marketing blitz last year to promote what he called the urgent need for the world to more fully adopt ESG investing, Fernandez got on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street, a kind of investment sports show for who’s up and who’s down on Wall Street. “By the way,” he told the hosts, “we’re doing this to protect capitalism. Otherwise, government intervention is going to come, socialist ideas are going to come.”
