IN-DEPTH: State Auditors Say ESG Agenda Has Forced Them to Push Back

Louisiana State Treasurer: ‘I didn’t bring a fight to anybody, but corporate America has engaged us in a way that we have to push back on behalf of taxpayers.’

Oklahoma State Auditor Cindy Byrd says she would rather be at her desk, crunching numbers, than taking on political causes.

โ€œUsually, when an auditor is in front of the news, it is just not where we like to be,โ€ Ms. Byrd told The Epoch Times. โ€œWeโ€™d like to be back in our office with a spreadsheet computer.โ€

But that changed when the finance industry began targeting key industries and jobs in her state.ย 

โ€œOklahoma is a natural gas and oil industry state,โ€ she said. โ€œThese things are very important to us, and weโ€™ve seen that shut down over the last few years, which is really hurting Oklahoma.โ€

Increasingly, the environmental social and governance (ESG) industry is coordinating efforts among banks, insurance companies, and asset managers to cut Americaโ€™s production of fossil fuels. It coordinates these efforts through a coalition of net-zero associations under the umbrella of the U.N.-affiliated Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ).

The net-zero clubs that are part of GFANZ encompass virtually all elements of global finance, including theย Net Zero Banking Allianceย (NZBA), theย Net Zero Insurance Allianceย (NZIA), theย Net Zero Asset Managers initiativeย (NZAMi), theย Net Zero Asset Owners Allianceย (NZAOA) and theย Net Zero Financial Service Providers Allianceย (NZFSPA). Members of these alliances pledge to work together to achieve UN goals of net zero CO2 emissions by 2050 or sooner.ย 

โ€œWe thought about investments, getting good returns, trying to make money with your money, and that was the prominent thought when I first got in office,โ€ said Kentucky State Treasurer Allison Ball. โ€œI remember when I first started coming to events, I began to hear about an initiative called ESG, and I thought at the time that this was academic; I didn’t really take it very seriously.

โ€œIn the course of the last couple of years, it began to become very aggressively pushed,โ€ she told The Epoch Times. โ€œThere’s been an effort to really make it the only game in town, to really shift that mentality from investing to make money, making sure you’re getting good returns, to using investments as leverage to push certain mostly political ideas.

โ€œCoal and oil and gas industries, those are signature industries in Kentucky,โ€ Ms. Ball said. โ€œAnd they’ve been targeted very strongly by the E part of ESG, so I began to see real impacts on the economy of Kentucky, my home area.โ€

Byย Kevin Stocklin

Read Full Article on TheEpochTimes.com

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Watch Insurance Companies Flee UN Climate Club as Antitrust Investigations Over ESG Ramp Up: Kevin Stocklin

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