ESG metrics: the way climate alarmists are going to try to circumvent their now-hemmed-in ability to use executive-branch agencies to curb our freedom

 First, some background on what ESG is. It's the major component of "stakeholder capitalism":

Larry Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, is selling the idea that the world economy must embrace stakeholder capitalism and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing. Don’t worry, though, he wants you to know that stakeholder capitalism is just like capitalism because it is “driven by mutually beneficial relationships” that will help firms, customers, suppliers, and the broader community prosper. Fink suggests that stakeholder capitalism is necessary because “a company must create value for and be valued by its full range of stakeholders.”

This gets us pretty far afield from what economic freedom is all about: the reaching of an agreement between two parties - individual buyers and sellers, organizations in a vendor-OEM relationship, employee and employer - as to the value of a good or service the exchange of which they're considering. ESG and "stakeholder capitalism" bring in a bunch of other parties, claiming they have a right to a say-so in the reaching of an agreement.

And now that the Supreme Court has said that the EPA overreached in trying to tell coal companies what kinds of products they could offer in the marketplace, those who want you to believe the global climate is in some kind of dire circumstance are going to use ESG as the next available weapon to assault our liberty:

Bill McKibben, the influential head of the climate pressure group 350.org, explains why the left has so promoted the ESG movement — which judges corporations’ performance based on environmental, social and governance metrics — to force companies to put on the straitjacket of unworkable climate controls.

“Convincing banks to stop funding Big Oil is probably not the most efficient way to tackle the climate crisis, but, in a country where democratic political options are effectively closed off, it may be the only path left,” he writes in The New Yorker.

What McKibben is saying is that because climate extremists aren’t getting their way at the ballot box, they will embrace the ESG approach, which is modeled after a union tactic called a “corporate campaign.” Under it, unions pressure firms to follow the union line or face damage to their company’s reputation and alienation from propagandized employees. Not willing to bear the immediate costs, many companies give in. After seeing Tesla dropped from “approved” lists of ESG companies, Elon Musk sadly concluded that ESG has been “weaponized by phony social justice warriors” and is now a “scam.”

You didn't think they were going to fade away quietly, did you?