The Hypocrisy of ESG Investing

In this episode, Carson Block sits down with Tariq Fancy, the former CIO of sustainable investing at Blackrock. As a big believer in capital markets, Tariq felt allocating capital to the problems of climate change could help solve one of the biggest problems on the planet. However, his experience in ESG was the opposite of solving problems. Tariq felt he was doing more harm than good and describes ESG efforts as giving wheatgrass to a cancer patient. This is one of the most candid disclosures of misaligned incentives and the moral righteousness of large corporations. Tariq captures the hypocrisy of ESG’s virtue signaling and relates its public persona to that of the cigarette industry of the 1970s which externally boasted about caring about their customers while simultaneously killing them.