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Disney (DIS) and Apple (AAPL) became the latest companies in the crosshairs of anti-ESG efforts after Vivek Ramaswamy, the executive chairman of Peter Thiel-backed Strive Capital, sent letters to the companies urging them to halt diversity audits and avoid making political statements.

In the letter released on Monday, the "Woke, Inc." author railed against the companies and financial institutions for promoting "one-sided political agendas." Ramaswamy has been a vocal critic of the practice of incorporating environmental, social, and corporate governance issues, known as ESG, into corporate and investment decision-making.

ESG has become more entrenched in the financial world. But like everything else these days, it's attracting scrutiny and skepticism from all quarters. In other words: from Wall Street to the Comptroller's office in Texas, ESG has become a lightning rod and the end game, at this point, isn't exactly clear.

At its core, the ESG approach gauges potential risks and opportunities not usually accounted for in financial measures. These factors range from a company's exposure to climate-related risk to board room diversity.

Folks like Ramaswamy aside, ESG strategies have gained traction. In 2020, 92% of S&P 500 companies and 70% of Russell 1000 companies published an ESG-related sustainability report, according to Governance & Accountability Institute, up from just 20% a decade earlier. And nearly a third of S&P 500 companies mentioned ESG on their earnings calls in the fourth quarter of 2021, Factset reported.

But the acronym has ballooned into a shorthand expression for a variety of different meanings. It could represent an investment framework for risk analysis, corporate responsibility efforts, or an ideological agenda, depending on who you ask. Without uniform standards or definitions, the belief that ESG can serve all stakeholders equally has weakened lately. Even adherents have raised a number of concerns about ESG, including the difficulty in measuring impact, potential interference with business operations, tradeoffs across the three pillars of ESG, and a murky relationship with financial performance.

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The Utah State Capitol, rear, is shown behind an oil refinery on Thursday, May 12, 2022, in Salt Lake City. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

The backlash over ESG has arrived in a number of forums: op-eds, Elon Musk tweets, scrutiny from state politicians, and an anti-ESG fund from Strive Capital backed by PayPal co-founder and Republican activist Peter Thiel that has raised more than $250 million. These politically-charged allegations that ESG is an apparatus for ushering in "woke" capitalism have added to a storm of challenges for the strategy long dominated by an optimistic streak.

Still, investors and companies don't appear to be dialing back their commitments. In fact, some are taking the concept even further. Patagonia, long held up for its exemplary sustainability practices, recently pushed the envelope again when its founders announced they donated the $3 billion company to fight climate change.

We're getting to a point now where ESG has kind of moved out of purely financial circles and into the mainstream, Lindsey Stewart, director of investment stewardship at Morningstar, told Yahoo Finance. And people are starting to really ask: 'What does that mean in practice for me for my business, for my portfolio?' And perhaps the answers that we landed on even as recently as last year are not necessarily the same ones that we'll end on this year or next year with new risks emerging."

Among those who are skeptical of ESG's lofty goals include Tariq Fancy, the former head of sustainable investing at BlackRock. Fancy has become a vocal critic of ESG, likening it to "wheat grass to a cancer patient" and a "dangerous placebo."

The real question at the bottom of ESG that's never really been answered satisfactorily is, are we doing this to make the world a better place or to improve investment returns? Fancy told Yahoo Finance Live (video above). And the promise by ESG is arguably three things: You get better returns, you make the world a better place, and asset managers get more in fees.

In reality," he added, "I can tell you only the third thing is happening.

Morning sunlight is reflected off buildings in the financial district of lower Manhattan at the start of a work day on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022, in New York. (AP Photo/Wong Maye-E)

The term 'ESG' was minted in a 2004 UN Global Compact report that urged the financial industry to consider companies' environmental and social stewardship in order to compete in a more globalized world.

The notion that companies should be socially responsible for strategic or ethical reasons has been around for much longer, however. There was a divestment campaign in the 1980s against apartheid in South Africa and the development of new environmentally-focused frameworks such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Carbon Disclosure Project in the late '90s. These initiatives usually fell under different terms, such as corporate social responsibility (CSR) or socially responsible investing (SRI), but the premise was similar.

Since ESG took over, it has grown tremendously, with the global pandemic, a racial reckoning stemming from the George Floyd protests in the U.S., and growing awareness of the human-created climate crisis fueling demand for ESG-labeled assets. Impressive returns generated by those funds in recent years also helped the cause.

While the relationship between ESG initiatives and financial returns has been the subject of debate and isn't yet settled, ESG integration and corporate efforts appear to boost performance and limit downside risk, especially over longer-term horizons, an NYU review of more than 1,000 research papers found.

Just how big has the market for ESG gotten? It's hard to tell.

By the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance's (GSIA) measure, as of 2020, $35 trillion in assets were held in sustainable investments more than a third of all assets under management. That figure includes assets that are screened for desirable or undesirable factors as well as ESG incorporation, a broad definition that means some form of ESG consideration was taken into account alongside other investment strategies.

Morningstar, which accounts for global funds marked specifically as sustainable, says the amount held in sustainable funds is closer to $2.47 trillion after inflows into sustainable funds hit a new record in 2019 and then doubled in 2020.

Although there are discrepancies in the overall size of the market for ESG assets, it's clear the concept has become hard for companies to ignore.

As the externalities are increasing and increasing in their complexity, it's basically reinforcing the need for companies to think about their purpose and how they address these externalities, Lucy Perz, a senior partner at McKinsey, told Yahoo Finance.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gestures as he delivers a speech during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, Britain, November 2, 2021. Paul Ellis/Pool via REUTERS

The market for ESG-related assets took a step back in the second quarter with U.S. sustainable funds seeing outflows for the first time in five years as ESG faced crosswinds from tightening financial conditions, scrutiny over assets held in Russia prior to the country's invasion of Ukraine, and the onset of a bear market in the S&P 500.

There were other controversial moments earlier in 2022, such as when S&P Global removed EV maker Tesla from its benchmark ESG index but added Exxon Mobil, citing industry weighting and Tesla's social and governance ratings.

That led some including Tesla chief Elon Musk to point out apparent hypocrisy in the ESG approach. Critics argued that fund managers have been allowed to slap a green label onto standard assets in order to charge a higher fee or, in a more charitable view, they overpromise on environmental and social policies.

The fact of the matter is when you dig into what (ESG) is today, it's primarily marketing policies that are non-binding, and they can't be binding because we have legal duties to focus only on sort of maximizing return, Fancy said. It's a set of products that really just shuffle around things that already exist so that you can give baskets of already traded publicly shares to socially conscious investors and get a fee bump.

A man checks his documents after leaving a government-run job centre in Malaga, southern Spain January 3, 2018. REUTERS/Jon Nazca

Regulators want to solve some of those problems by making it easier for investors to compare companies' exposures to climate change and clamp down on greenwashing. The next evolution of ESG investing will likely depend upon uniform standards and enhanced disclosure requirements.

In the U.S., the SEC is evaluating more than 14,000 comments on proposed rules that would require companies to disclose climate-related risks as well as their greenhouse gas emissions.

Most of the comments are supportive," SEC Chair Gary Gensler told the Senate Banking Committee last Thursday. "Investors are using this information now, and they want the information, and I think it does fit into our 80-or-90-year history of how we do disclosures.

This aerial picture taken on February 27, 2019 in Jacobsdorf, eastern Germany shows wind turbines in the wind farm "Odervorland" in the Oder-Spree district in the morning fog. (PATRICK PLEUL/DPA/AFP via Getty Images)

Morningstar's Stewart sees ESG evolving; he noted that companies are including more specific environmental disclosures beyond carbon emissions and climate goals and have started to focus more on diversity initiatives and human rights as well.

However, better measurement of ESG factors such as emissions and water usage may just be a starting point for tackling these issues.

In general, information and disclosure at the right level is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for change across the board, Hamid Samandari, senior partner at McKinsey and co-author of 'Does ESG really matterand why?', told Yahoo Finance. It will help with both internal decisions and the choices that other stakeholders make, but information in itself is not sufficient.

The backlash against ESG has taken another turn lately. Once consigned to financial circles, these debates are now being aired out in public as right-wing politicians slam Wall Street firms for their ESG strategies.

In late August, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis banned state pension fund managers from taking environmental, social, and governance issues into consideration when making investment decisions. Texas enlisted a ban of its own, barring 348 funds and 10 companies, including BlackRock, UBS, and Credit Suisse, from doing business with the state over their vocal ESG stance and alleged "boycott" of the fossil fuel industry.

BlackRock, a promoter of sustainable investing with nearly $10 trillion in assets under management, rebuffed claims that it boycotts oil companies, asserting that it has $310 billion invested in energy companies, Bloomberg reported.

BlackRock Chairman and CEO Laurence Fink is interviewed by Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business Network's "Opening Bell with Maria Bartiromo," in New York. Fink, who oversees the management of about $7 trillion in funds, said in his influential annual letter to CEOs Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2020, that he believes we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance because of a warming planet. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File)

On Wednesday, blue states also hit back at those moves in an open letter signed by state treasurers and comptrollers from 15 states including Illinois, New York, California, and Maine.

"The blacklisting states apparently believe, despite ample evidence and scientific consensus to the contrary, that poor working conditions, unfair compensation, discrimination and harassment, and even poor governance practices do not represent material threats to the companies in which they invest," the letter stated. "They refuse to acknowledge, in the face of sweltering heat, floods, tornadoes, snowstorms and other extreme weather, that climate change is real and is a true business threat to all of us."

The dispute has also spread to shareholder meetings. Morningstar found that there were a record number of ESG resolutions during the 2022 proxy season, including a handful of anti-ESG proposals.

According to Morningstar's Stewart, the wording of these "Trojan Horse-like" proposals mimic that of ESG proposals. For instance, an anti-ESG proposal might request a company to disclose how its diversity initiatives affect groups without a history of exclusion.

I see this anti-ESG push as the next extension of the ongoing culture war, Morningstar ESG equity strategist Kristoffer Inton said in a Morningstar's report. Many of these thoughts, and even some of the bills, are written without a great understanding of sustainable investing. Any investor who ignores ESG risk, like any other risk, does so at their own peril.

Shareholders in overflow rooms watch on big screens as Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett, left, and Vice Chairman Charlie Munger preside over the annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting in Omaha, Neb., Saturday, May 4, 2019. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

While few of the 43 anti-ESG proposals received traction, they did offer groups a chance to voice complaints against ESG or advance a cause, especially at high-profile companies. The overwhelming number of proposals came from just three right-leaning groups: The National Legal and Policy Center, the National Center for Public Policy Research, and Steven J. Milloy, a lobbyist with ties to the tobacco and oil industries.

While ESG strategy has come under fire, the demand for companies to pay attention to issues like climate change and worker conditions has remained resilient.

In a recent report, McKinsey partners argued there's one factor that ESG cynics are missing: corporate social license, or the trust held between a company and its stakeholders. We do see room for improvement across all dimensions," McKinsey's Samandari said. "At the same time, we believe that the underlying impulse remains more valid than ever."

A Patagonia store is seen on Jan. 12, 2022, in Pittsburgh. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

The authors held up the early successes of some companies as a reason for optimism. They also explained that improved measurements will also improve clarity on corporate actions and investments. One of the things that we anticipate going forward is that there'll be an improvement in measurements as we've seen, for example, in other fields, such as financial accounting, Perz said.

ESG as a buzzword may ultimately dissolve or evolve into something different. But the McKinsey partners contend that clients, investors, talent, and leaders have already started going in the direction of facing the climate crisis and other social issues, and that will continue.

Will the acronym stay or go? I don't know, and this is not what is important, Samandari said. "The underlying point that it is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to ignore what economists call externalities that is, the unaccounted side effects of their operations within the society and the environment.

Grace is an assistant editor for Yahoo Finance.

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What is ESG? The latest front in the culture wars - Yahoo Finance

The following article was originally published on News5Cleveland.com and is published in the Ohio Capital Journal under a content-sharing agreement. Unlike other OCJ articles, it is not available for free republication by other news outlets as it is owned by WEWS in Cleveland.

In the second edition of OCJs state Board of Education series, the candidates for District 10 discuss controversial topics.

The first edition focused on funding and school choice click or tap here to read.

To learn why you should be paying attention to the Board of Education races, click or tap here.

District 10 is made up of Senate districts 21, 27 and 28. This contains the east side of Cuyahoga County, part of Geauga County and all of both Summit and Portage counties.

To find out if you are in District 10: The Sec. of State website has a handy tool calledFind my District.

If it says District 10, you can learn more about the candidates youll be voting on below.

All candidates are elected as nonpartisan, however, they always have political leanings.

Tim Miller is the Akron-based incumbent. He was appointed by Gov. Mike DeWine to complete the last two years of a four-year term. He is a former Akron Schools board member. He also leans conservative.

Tom Jackson is from Solon, one of the east side suburbs of Cleveland. He has a degree in education and is on the Solon City Schools Strategic Planning team. He leans progressive.

Cierra Lynch Shehorn is a Summit County consultant. She owns her own firm and has worked in PR and media relations. She leans conservative.

The battle around what students should be taught in school continues to rage on in not just the Ohio Legislature but also at the local level.

Parents have been raising concerns on each side for about two years now, but the debate is heating up as the election gets closer.

Dozens of families, students and educators have reached out to OCJ, asking the team to speak to candidates for the state school board about the culture wars.

Democratic-leaning candidate Tom Jackson wants to protect educators from issues that he says detract from their real mission teaching the students.

What we have are largely false attacks and efforts to solve non-existing problems, Jackson said. And its being driven by the state Legislature.

More than 100 schools across the state arereceiving calls for book bans,to stop discussions of race, sexuality and gender or to teach atrocities such as the Holocaust from both sides.

House Bill 616states that no school district, community school, STEM school, non-public school that enrolls students who are participating in a state scholarship program, or any employee or other third party representing a school district or school, can teach any divisive or inherently racist concepts. That includes all of the critical race theory, intersectional theory, the 1619 project, diversity, equity, and inclusion learning outcomes and inherited racial guilt.

The next section of the bill touches on sexuality and gender identity.

RELATED: Lawmakers hear Ohios version of Floridas Dont Say Gay bill

This bill came after OCJ aired an exclusive report about comments made by one of the primary sponsors of the original divisive concepts bill H.B. 327. The report stemmed from an interview exchange between state Representative Sarah Fowler Arthur (R-Ashtabula) and a OCJ reporter Morgan Trau in early March.

RELATED: Comments about the Holocaust from representative sponsoring divisive concepts bill raise concerns

During the interview, Fowler Arthur was asked about the financial aspect of the bill. While attempting to talk about funding, she brought up the Holocaust, saying that students needed to hear the massacre from the perspective of the German soldiers.

After the exclusive OCJ story on House Bill 327s sponsors comments on the Holocaust went international, the original divisive concepts bill has been renamed the both sides bill or the both sides of the Holocaust bill.

The lawmakers say this is to provide transparency to parents and to protect against indoctrination.

If a bill that says we need to teach all sides of the Holocaust gets a committee hearing in the state, well, thats just an embarrassment for the state, Jackson added. Theres no room for this.

Not addressing the specific bills, conservative-leaning Cierra Lynch Shehorn said she believes in parental rights and that schools should be able to do what they want.

It ties into transparency and local control, she said. Those are things that I really believe in. I dont believe in the state overstepping.

When pressed about how she would handle the state enforcing rules on how to teach subjects like the Holocaust, or gender, to local schools, she said that her role would be to just serve the purpose given to by the General Assembly.

She is much more interested in making sure there is a functioning school board than dealing with controversial topics.

While Conservative-leaning incumbent Tim Miller said he also believes in local control, like the other two candidates, he differs from Lynch Shehorn by explicitly condemning censorship.

On book banning and things of that nature, Im not supportive of that, he said. You certainly have to be aware of age appropriateness.

Miller is against banning books especially when it comes to high-level and college classes, which tend to be more worldly.

Some people didnt like some of the material there, but those are college-level classes, Miller said. Kids of that age should be exposed to everything and anything. If youre going into a four-year degree, thats part of a four-year degree.

Despite his support of exposure to difficult topics, Miller was one of the Board of Education members to repeal a 2020 anti-racism resolution.

The resolution condemned racism, made a goal to have equity in opportunities for students of color and encouraged diversity training.

When asked about his vote, the incumbent said he still stands behind it. Defending himself, he said he voted to remove the condemnation of racism document due to a technicality.

After that resolution passed, the state required diversity, equity, inclusion training for all state employees, he said. So that part of Resolution 20 was not needed anymore.

He took a lot of blowback for his vote in Akron, he said.

The board ended up with a replacement resolution, he said. The gist of the new resolution is that the board condemns any teachings that seek to divide.

Im here to help every child, regardless of their background, you know, race, color, creed, orientation and things of that nature, Miller said.

It is likely Lynch Shehorn would have voted the same way as Miller.

Im not a big fan of resolutions, she said. I believe that we need to leave the legislating to the legislators.

OCJ repeatedly asked Lynch Shehorn for her response to specific bills and how she would consider discussions of race in class, but she would not answer. Instead, she insisted that she is just there to serve the General Assembly.

Jackson was adamantly against this logic, citing it is ridiculous that condemning racism has become a political battle.

I will leave it up to your viewers on what you would call an anti-anti-racism resolution, he said.

The repeal of the anti-racism resolution shows a lot about the members who voted for it, the Democratic-leaning candidate said.

Teachers already had to deal with so much during the pandemic and now they have to deal with laws introduced or signed that the vast majority of educators are against. It is up to the school board to support them, he said.

To attack [teachers] for political or cultural reasons is just a disservice to the very children that were trying to support and lift up, Jackson added. We need people that are going to stand up to those forces and really be champions of public schools in Ohio.

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District 10: Ohio's Board of Education candidates talk culture wars - Ohio Capital Journal

On a muggy day in Tampa this summer, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida took the podium and unleashed an attack on what he claimed was one of the principal threats to the livelihoods and freedoms of upstanding American citizens.

This is something in many respects that is crushing the little guy, he said. So we want to make sure that were standing on the side of average people.

DeSantis was not talking about aggression from overseas, high gas prices, inflation, pandemic lockdowns or even the Democratic Party.

Instead, he was talking about the rise of ESG, a catchall term in the corporate world used to denote a businesss focus on issues such as climate change and diversity.

Standing before a banner that read, Government of Laws, Not Woke CEOs, DeSantis railed against companies that he said were trying to use their power to advance a liberal agenda.

From Wall Street banks to massive asset managers and big tech companies, we have seen the corporate elite use their economic power to impose policies on the country that they could not achieve at the ballot box, he said.

DeSantis went on to announce measures intended to reduce the role of ESG or environmental, social and governance policies in investing in Floridas pension system. In doing so, he said, he was asserting the authority of our constitutional system over ideological corporate power. Besides stoking fears of globalism, it was a message likely to resonate with his base.

For nearly two decades developed economies throughout the world have adopted ESG investing policies setting aspirational targets to reduce carbon emissions, use more renewable energy or add more diversity to the workforce virtually without controversy.

The need for more such policies and commitment of funds for climate mitigation and adaptation will be among the topics discussed this week as scientists, corporate sustainability officers, government officials and others, including former Vice President Al Gore and John Kerry, now the US special presidential envoy for climate, gather in New York for The New York Times Climate Forward conference.

The event is part of Climate Week, an annual global summit that runs during the U.N. General Assembly, where the role of corporations in combating climate change and achieving social justice is emphasized, with such panels as Investing in Equity and the Economy.

But in recent months, what has become a plain vanilla bit of sustainability reporting in other parts of the world has, along with the related term stakeholder capitalism, emerged as the latest front in the culture wars roiling US politics.

Conservatives in the United States, closely aligned with the oil and gas industries, have begun calling foul as companies and investment firms embrace efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address international and local inequities. And in recent months, they have pushed beyond rhetoric to punish corporations they say are unduly focused on issues that they argue are unrelated to a companys bottom line.

Theres a lot of politics around the term ESG right now, said Reid Thomas, a managing director at JTC, a fund manager. Youve got different sides pushing back at each other.

Yet even as the rhetoric heats up, and executives brace for more attacks by Republican politicians, most companies and investment firms are standing their ground. Many corporate leaders say that, as a long-term strategy, it is in their best interests to invest in climate solutions and their workforces and worth the uncomfortable public relations moments in the short term.

Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the worlds largest asset manager, is a frequent champion of ESG He defended the firms policies in his annual letter to chief executives this year.

Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics, he wrote. It is not a social or ideological agenda. It is not woke. It is capitalism, driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers, and communities your company relies on to prosper.

The ongoing culture war

Tensions between conservative and corporate America have been growing for years. After the election of President Donald Trump, many CEOs found themselves at odds with the White House on issues including immigration, race relations and efforts to mitigate climate change by reining in oil and gas production and use.

Now, in addition to staking out policy positions that are unpopular with many Republicans, big corporations and investment firms are working to integrate ESG more deeply into their businesses.

Rarely do the setting of such goals result in swift and dramatic changes to how firms operate. And indeed, many companies are accused of greenwashing touting their commitments to ESG without instituting any real reforms.

Nevertheless, conservative leaders are now taking on the biggest companies in the country, attacking ESG and working to portray environmental and social priorities as bad for business and politically motivated evidence, they charge, that corporate America is committed to globalism and in cahoots with the left.

A record number of anti-ESG shareholder proposals were introduced over the last year.

Texas became the first state to pass a law that barred major financial institutions from state business if they were deemed to be boycotting the oil and gas industry. In truth, the financial firms targeted by the law still do ample business with the fossil fuel industry, but have pulled back lending for some parts of the oil and gas business that they believe to be poor investments.

Several more states, including West Virginia and Oklahoma, have passed similar laws this year.

At the same time, Republican state attorneys general have targeted BlackRock, accusing it of putting its climate agenda ahead of clients and being in league with climate activists because it is supporting the goals established at the Paris climate conference in 2015 and working on efforts to phase out fossil fuels, which are dangerously warming the planet.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, a potential presidential contender in 2024, said this summer that he wanted to rein in ESG.

A financial firm that says it is guided by biblical principles, Inspire Investing, lashed out at companies pursuing ESG efforts, saying that the term has become weaponized by liberal activists to push forward their harmful, social-Marxist agenda.

Elon Musk, the worlds richest man, has also soured on the term. ESG is a scam, he wrote on Twitter this year. It has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.

And with each passing week, more states are taking steps to penalize companies they say are unduly focused on climate issues, with DeSantis making good on his threat to ban ESG considerations from its pension fund managers, and Texas expanding its list of banned financial institutions to include many of the worlds biggest banks.

I see this anti-ESG push as the next extension of the ongoing culture war, Kristoffer Inton, an analyst with the research firm Morningstar, said in a recent report. Many of these thoughts, and even some of the bills, are written without a great understanding of sustainable investing. Any investor who ignores ESG risk, like any other risk, does so at their own peril.

Yet as the right ratchets up its attacks on companies, most executives are staying the course, at least for now.

We see ESG, or resilience, or more specifically our decarbonization and diversity programs, as ways to enhance long term value for our companies, said Jean Rogers, head of ESG at Blackstone, the worlds largest private equity firm. So we are really not looking at the political fray.

Companies say that their efforts to reduce emissions are sound long term investments because the risks of climate change are increasingly material, and that efforts to promote more diversity among their workforces improves corporate culture.

Fund managers and investors arent really deterred by all of the noise, Thomas said. And, he said, the money is flowing in the direction of investing in issues like climate and equity.

BlackRock has defended its stance as a sound investment strategy. We believe investors and companies that take a forward-looking position with respect to climate risk and its implications for the energy transition will generate better long-term financial outcomes, the company wrote.

Many other big companies have taken similar positions.

The market is recognizing this and doing it because its good for business, not because its part of a political agenda, said Steven M. Rothstein, managing director at the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets, a group that supports sustainable businesses.

What is more, plenty of opportunistic corporations sense that there is money to be made as more renewable energy projects are built around the world.

This transition can lead to enormous opportunities, Rothstein said. There will be trillions invested in green technologies.

Confusing and inconsistent

Given the absence of uniform standards, what people mean when they say ESG is constantly evolving. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, analysts at Citi made the case that weapons-makers and defense contractors should qualify as socially positive investments because they were helping protect democracy.

Meanwhile, a whole new industry has emerged of providers offering reports, data, metrics and technology services to help big companies keep track of their ESG efforts.

There are hundreds of different reporting frameworks out there that are all confusing and inconsistent, Thomas said. There are hundreds of different companies out there selling reporting software.

Making matters worse is the fact that even those who support corporate efforts to combat climate change acknowledge that some funds and companies that boast of their environmental accomplishments are overstating their impact.

ESG funds do a lot of greenwashing, which we know, said Mary Cerulli, founder of Climate Finance Action. Its tainted the whole legitimacy of the broader framework.

Climate is a risk

For now at least, conservatives appear to have the upper hand in the battle to control the public narrative.

Theyve been spinning this narrative that ESG is woke, and theyve had a big head start in messaging, Cerulli said.

Prominent conservative commentators have amplified the message, often misrepresenting what the term means.

ESG has no real definition, but in effect it requires companies and countries to shut down their most productive sectors in the name of climate change and equity, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in a segment this summer.

And yet even as the attacks continue, big companies appear to be moving forward with their efforts to prioritize environmental issues.

The majority of anti-ESG shareholder proposals have failed to gain support from investors, according to the Morningstar report. More than 90% of companies in the S&P 500 index now publish an ESG report. And the Securities and Exchange Commission is considering adopting new rules that would require public companies to submit more detailed analysis of climate related risks and greenhouse gas emissions.

The private market is speaking, Rothstein said. And they are saying that climate is a risk.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Continue reading here:
Another culture war front: Are companies too woke when it comes to climate? - Kathimerini English Edition

When it was revealed Washington D.C.'s Corcoran Museum of Art was to receive NEA backing for an exhibition of photographs by Mapplethorpe, the right went absolutely berserk. The artist, who'd died of AIDS earlier in '89, had taken sexually explicit pictures of sadomasochistic acts. There were also two shots of children where their genitals were exposed, but the primary objection of the right had everything to do with the public funding of gay art.

When the Corcoran Museum buckled under political pressure, the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center stepped up and hosted the exhibit. The so-called Queen City of Ohio resides in a red corner of the state, and its most bigoted denizens turned out in droves to protest the museum's presentation. This led to a potentially dangerous obscenity trial which should've never been heard in the first place that thankfully shook out in the museum's favor.

Despite these high-profile, would-be scandals, the NEA's budget, though hardly significant in the grand scheme of government spending, continued to rise. The religious right needed another boogeyman, and they found it when Haynes' "Poison" premiered at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival (where it won the Grand Jury Prize).

Continued here:
The Todd Haynes Poison Controversy Explained: An Indie Classic Goes To The Culture Wars - /Film

In 2019, after BuzzFeed and Verizon Media announced a combined 1,000 layoffs on the same day, many people who had shared their layoffs on Twitter were inundated with replies telling them to learn to code.

It wasnt just ill-timed career advice. It was a targeted harassment campaign against media workers that was organized on 4chan by people on the right who hate the mainstream media.

Memes have been used to target marginalized groups for at least a decade now. A new book by researchers at Harvards Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy documents how memes and the online communities that produce them sow disinformation and erode trust in the government and the mainstream media. Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America explains how the Stop the Steal movement the false idea that the 2020 election was stolen from former president Donald Trump started online and resulted in the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, and used examples from Gamergate, theOccupy Wall Street movement, and Donald Trumps rise to the presidency to develop its playbook.

Meme wars are culture wars, the authors write accelerated and intensified because of the infrastructure and incentives of the internet, which trades outrage and extremity as currency, rewards speed and scale, and flatten the experience of the world into a never-ending scroll of images and words.

In April 2020, co-authors Joan Donovan, the research director at Shorenstein, and Brian Friedberg, a Harvard ethnographer studying online fringe communities, launched a newsletter, Meme War Weekly, that got really grim very quickly, they told me. It was impossible to write about the political impact of memes on a week-by-week basis without noticing their significant social and political impacts over time. Their Media Manipulation Casebook, a series of case studies published in October 2020, was a precursor to their new book.

I caught up with Donovan, Friedberg, and Emily Dreyfuss, a technology journalist and 2018 Nieman Fellow, to talk about their book and what journalists can learn from the last 10 years of memes to inform their future coverage of American democracy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Hanaa Tameez:At what point in your research did you realize you had a book on your hands?

In 2016, I had written an article in MIT Tech Review about meme wars in the 2016 election. We had a lot of interesting data lying around and wanted to put it into an internet history. We realized very quickly that our starting point would be the Occupy Wall Street movement and the use of memes to mobilize people in that moment in 2011. Many of the books and writings about the Occupy movement didnt attend to the fact that it was just as mobilizing for the right as it was for the left. And so we wanted to begin with our understanding of where Andrew Breitbart, Steve Bannon, and Alex Jones got their foothold in social media and meme wars.

It wasnt out of nowhere, but hearing people ask how it could be happening really clarified for me that we actually do know, [whereas many] other people dont know. Joan and Brians research about meme wars had been ongoing for years, but it struck us that this was the perfect vehicle to explain something that other people thought was unexplainable. That night, we wrote the outline for the book.

Tameez:After writing this, what are your takeaways about where we stand as a society, as a democracy?

What are the comparable big movements within [the Democratic Partys political communication]? You have the much discussed adoption of the Dark Brandon meme by more mainstream Democratic figures, potentially signaling an entrance into the meme wars. We have yet to see if thats actually going to impact the midterms. But there is definitely [increasing] adoption of us versus them messaging among most political factions in the U.S. I think we saw the foundation for that in the 10 years leading up to the book.

The media itself is a proxy for all types of institutions, including academia and government. I was awakened to that through the course of researching this book, and then I couldnt unsee it. With Roe v. Wade and whats going on with the Supreme Court in the U.S. right now, I think were watching that lack of trust in the system increasing on the left, as well as the right. Our book focuses a lot on the right, and there are a lot of people who feel that way on the right, but in the U.S., a lot of people feel that way on the left as well.

Tameez:Where do you think the press first went wrong?

One of the things that is important to understand here is that memes dont just come in the form of an image with some quippy text. Theyre viral slogans, too. Theyre the activation of peoples confirmation bias and stereotypes. As we watched political opponents begin to memeify one another and push these tropes some with the intention of sowing disinformation, others with the intention of spreading propaganda I think many journalists were initially very dismissive.

One big example is the way in which the alt-right arrived in the media landscape. Its not that journalists were unable to understand the rise of a white supremacist movement, but they refused to call it what it was. Instead, they used the branding and memes that had been drudged up by these groups that were specifically seeking to rebrand themselvesthey didnt know they were being played.

So you saw the rise, not just of the alt-right, but of a key figure in the alt-right with Richard Spencer, who was able to use all of that media attention to garner and recruit people into this movement, which then manifested and moved [into the real world] at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where many people were injured and a woman died.

When were trying to understand where the media is culpable in meme wars, its not just that they dropped the ball, but also that some in the mainstream media thought use of the term alt-right wasnt something that they needed to concern themselves with. In doing so, they spread the meme very far.

The media treating Twitter like an assignment editor is one of the fundamental errors that enabled meme warriors to play everyone. It showed that if they could get [something] to trend enough, then theyd get a story about it. In the era of social media taking all the ad sales out of journalism, it became even more important for journalists to write more, have a lot of content, and be covering the thing that everyone was talking about, which then created a snowball effect.

If something trended and someone covered it, a million other people covered it as well. It really reinforced things like the term alt-right, and if you then asked where the term alt-right even came from, it was very hard to find the origin because of all that content that used the term without questioning it. At Wired, we used alt-right for a very long time until it occurred to us: Whoa, wait, is this a problematic phrase? But at that point, wed already written a million articles adding to the problem.

Tameez: In the book, you write about hate facts, or misrepresented statistics and pseudoscience that often come up in these communities and target marginalized people. What role does the press play in perpetuating those?

One of the concurrent problems with the media coverage is that there will often be stand-ins, particularly in the right-wing press. Instead of saying Black people are doing something, theyll say inner city or Chicago. While they might not be directly quoting these [hate facts], they all line up with the comment sections and the Facebook shares. Theres a lot of informal knowledge-making that happens underneath the mainstream news stories that the outlets arent necessarily responsible for. One of the things that weve talked about is how the alt-right comment bombed and raided the comment sections of the conservative press, which is why a lot of comments sections on websites disappeared.

So there are placeholder words and frames that are being accepted, and a lot of uncritical adoption of official statements and statements by police that further criminalize marginalized communities. I think thats the next frontier that needs to be addressed [and understood]: That this stuff feeds into narratives that keep people impoverished and oppressed.

Tameez:What do you think are the major takeaways for journalists from Meme Wars?

[Journalists need to ask]: Is calling attention to these memes going to improve the audiences understanding? And then, is covering this going to be damaging in some way? Is it going to give oxygen to those who are trying to wage culture wars?

The point at which journalists should pay attention to these things is always a tough call, unfortunately. But weve noticed over the years that the far right is going to lie to you about who they are. Theyre going to lie to you about their intentions are, because their views are fringe, unethical, and antisocial. Journalists are going to have to learn the methods of digital internet forensics and become much more adept at internet sleuthing if theyre going to survive writing about these meme wars. We caution journalists not to get into things that they dont quite understand.

My broad advice to journalists is to get to know your beat, and to stay on top of those who are using media manipulation, disinformation, and meme wars to carry out their politics or to make a profit.

Tameez: Some people say that theres no difference between culture and internet culture anymore because the internet is a driving part of our lives and society. Does that logic apply to meme wars, too?

The impact of meme wars, central to the book, is Joans theory that meme wars drive something online to happen in the real world. The meme wars fail if something doesnt happen in the real world, because the point of them is not to just be online, but to actually influence culture.

Donovan: I would add that theres no more offline. If youre a child of the early internet days of AOL, it was very clear when you were online, because you literally were plugged into a phone line that was plugged into the wall. We started the book with the Occupy Wall Street movement because it was the first huge instance in the U.S. of social media moving into public spaces and promoting civil disobedience.

Tameez:What is your tech stack? How do you protect yourselves online and mentally?

The work is rewarding when you see things getting done that are outside of your purview. As researchers, we know the work that we do is of global importance. When journalists give us feedback saying that they were able to write better stories because of our research, when technologists say they were able to create better software because of our work, when civil society actors say they were able to influence culture or policy in certain directions, when members of Congress say thank you for the research that we do that, to me, is a really important protective element.

If we were doing this work and sort of screaming into the void and watching as democracies fail, it would be hard to keep doing it. But we know the work that were doing is getting taken up by important decision-makers and stakeholders, and is protecting other people from going through some of these very damaging campaigns. Theres a sense of justice in the work that you dont get from many other jobs.

Dreyfuss: There is power in explaining something that is happening in the world and figuring it out. The existence of this book, and a lot of the work that we do as a team, is about recognizing that something is happening and figuring out why. Life is full of unknowable things and unknown things. There is some power and calmness that comes from [the recognition] that this is not an unknowable problem.

Friedberg: I almost exclusively consume some kind of indie media. At this point, the far right is just one of the many voices I listen to on a daily basis. I would rather triangulate between a real Nazi podcast and a real lefty podcast than between CNN and Fox News. I prefer this side of the media world.

Tameez: Is there anything else you want to add?

The people who have most been marginalized by our political system use the tools of new media to be seen and be heard. But that doesnt necessarily make social media good for a society. Social media is now overrun with very powerful politicians and very powerful rich men who have a very particular political agenda.

Even though social media as a technology hasnt really changed that much over the last decade, its users have, and its become much more ubiquitous. Its become much more of a tool of the powerful to oppress, rather than a weapon of the weak to liberate. As journalists are thinking about what stories they should be telling, they should turn their eye to the groups of people who are the most marginalized, who are struggling for recognition. They should not assume that just because a few accounts on social media are being loud that that means the whole multiplicity of that identity is represented.

The way in which social media is structured is almost like a distorted mirror of our society. Its imperative that journalists understand that they are on the front lines of the meme wars, and that they can really shift the balance if they shift who they spotlight and what stories they choose to tell.

Read the rest here:
You don't know which side is playing you: The authors of Meme Wars have some advice for journalists - Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard