Are Your Investments Causing Harm?

“We've heard people think that ESG stands for ‘Environmental and Social Good,’” said Zach Stein, co-founder and CEO of Carbon Collective, an online investment firm that helps clients divest from fossil fuels. “I think that generally speaks to what most individual investors imagine they'll see when they crack open an ESG fund — companies that clearly are doing some kind of good in the world.”

Unfortunately, that perception is inaccurate: ESG funds have been exposed as misleading, or even an outright sham.

For investors who hope to do better for the planet, the bad news seems clear: Investing with a conscience is not as easy as many believed. Yet there appears to be good news too. Some investments can genuinely meet the twin goals of bettering the planet while delivering a return.

But they’re harder to find.

Parnassus’ ESG fund is invested in the paint manufacturer Sherwin Williams, which has been sued on multiple occasions for polluting communities and harming air quality.

Vanguard’s ESG is invested in Mondelez, a food company that said it had reduced its carbon footprint — which it accomplished by shifting responsibility to its suppliers, who have not, in turn, reduced their carbon footprint.

These three major ESGs reveal that there is a disconnect between Wall Street’s approach to packaging ESG funds, and the hopes of individual investors who are buying them. Wall Street is committed to generating predictable returns, which leads banks to package ESG funds to be less bad than the average fund — but less bad doesn’t necessarily equal good for the planet.

Part of the problem also stems from the very concept of “ESG.” The framework of “Environmental, Social, Governance” was initially designed to be a big tent that could encompass a wide range of goals, from environmental stewardship to human rights and labor standards. But the vagueness of the term created room for large institutions to include stocks that aren’t “environmental” at all, even if they’re marketed as such.

This also points to a deeper problem. Companies use raw materials to create products that many of us ordinary consumers enjoy every day. In virtually all successful business models in today’s global economy, the process of creating products brings with it a carbon footprint and, in many cases, involves the use of harmful chemicals or the production of disposable packaging that can end up in the ocean. Both the iShares and Vanguard ESG funds mentioned above are invested in beverage companies that are the world’s top plastic polluters, while tech companies produce staggering volumes of e-waste and have outsized carbon footprints.

In other words, when you really get into the details, the possibilities of including major stocks in a genuinely green fund vanish quickly. That’s why it might be time to look beyond the major stocks. In the words of a favored tech company whose stock, rightly or wrongly, is touted as “ESG,” it might be time to “think different.”