Capitalism is sustainable – mainstream media pressures companies to go green. The neg ignores recent developments and assumes the worst of the outcomes
Capitalism is sustainable – mainstream media pressures companies to go green. The neg ignores recent developments and assumes the worst of the outcomes
Etchart 1/12 – [Linda Etchart a lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Kingston, London, UK, and a regular contributor to the Latin America Bureau, she is a lifelong social activist and environmentalist; “Sustainable Funds and “Cuddly Capitalism””; 1/12/22; https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-81519-6_7#Sec13; Lowell-JL]
Ethical investment had expanded in the 1990s, with the foundation of the non-profit Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES) investor advisory network in Boston, Massachusetts, following the Exxon Valdez oil tanker disaster in 1989 (CERES 2020). CERES created the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), which established environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards for private companies.By 2020, the GRI had been adopted by 13,400 companies, mainly in the USA (CERES 2020). CERES was also one of the founder members of industry-centred Climate Action 100+1 in 2017. By 2021, Climate Action 100+ was supported by more than 570 investment management companies, with more than US$54 trillion in assets under management (Climate Action 100+ 2021). This level of enthusiasm indicated that ethical investments had become mainstream and that any company that did not avowedly embrace ESG guidelines was risking being left behind or being called out for unethical practices in both social and mainstream media. Such that, the largest investment management companies, the foremost being BlackRock, followed by State Street (US$3.9 trillion in assets under management in 2021) were the main drivers putting pressure on company directors to give priority to environmental concerns, for financial or altruistic motives. By the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance’s calculations, funds managing US$31trillion—one-quarter of the world’s total—were applying some form of ESG screen to their investments in 2020 (Edgecliff-Johnson and Mooney 2019). The reason for the change was that not only were reputations at stake, but the risks of investing in fossil fuels were becoming greater than investing in ethical funds, whose returns were beginning to outperform investment in traditional sectors. Companies began to reposition themselves, creating compensation incentives for executives to adhere to ESG standards and to set ESG goals. As millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) began to populate climate change campaigns and mobilizations, it also became imperative for investment management companies to continue to appeal to the pool of graduates from whom they were choosing the next generation of employees, who would also be future investors. Similarly, over the same period, gathering pace in the second decade of the twenty-first century, trade union leaders, workers’ pension fund holders, and student unions across the globe began to ally themselves with divestment campaigns targeted at university endowment and pension fund managers with the goal of achieving a just transition to greener economies (International Trade Union Congress 2020).
