In the past few years there's been a major backlash to what's called ESG investing.

Those letters stand for environmental, social, and governance and they refer to looking at particular risks that a company might have.

So not just their short-term financial performance but also how they're looking at

environmental risks to their supply chain for example or

social risks in terms of whether or not they're tracking diversity in their workforce, things like that. not their

tracking diversity in their workforce, things like that.

ESG has been around for a really long time

and it's mostly been pretty non-controversial

up until a few years ago.

Now there's this huge backlash.

People are calling it quote unquote woke capital,

all those kinds of things.

And that's been driven by a couple of factors. First, this increase in the last 10 years or so of what's

called shareholder activism. So when people who hold shares in a particular company put forth resolutions

aimed at improving that company's environmental or social performance and the

second is a move by the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US that

started a few years ago to try to provide some kind of consistency in the way that

companies report on climate risk in particular.

It's always been a little bit loosey-goosey, a little bit inconsistent, kind of changing from company to company,

depending on what industry they're in or

maybe who's auditing their reports those kinds of things so whenever the SEC

sees inconsistencies like that in a space around investment, they see that

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