The federal government’s leftist ESG agenda is threatening to pervert the nation’s entire market-based system, Utah State Treasurer Marlo Oaks warns.
The ESG (environmental, social, governance) threat is especially acute in Western states like Utah, Oaks explained in a Daily Signal podcast interview published Wednesday:
“In Utah, we have the second-largest amount of federal land that’s managed by the federal government. Over 67% of the land of the entire state is federally owned.”
“That kind of federal ownership puts a lot of pressure on land use, particularly when there’s an effort to change historical norms,” Oaks said, citing the Biden-Harris administration’s initiatives to remove land from productive use.
Government-issued conservation leases, for example, can take precedence and prohibit land uses, like natural resource extraction and grazing, in the name of alleged man-made climate change, Oaks said:
“Grazing is a big issue in Utah, because over 70% of grazing takes place on federal land. So, there’s a very serious threat to agriculture.”
“We’re often in a fiduciary role, because we’re overseeing investment portfolios, whether it’s pension or operating money, tax money, that sort of thing,” the Utah treasurer said.
ESG threatens to fundamentally alter America’s successful free market system, Oaks warned:
“And so, these kinds of issues definitely play into our area, because we’re talking about a fundamental change of our market-based system.
“When you have a market-based system, part of the beauty is that decisions are to be made on an economic basis. And it’s almost a blindfold analogous to the legal system that the decisions you make as a financial officer be based on risk and return and, kind of, these traditional metrics.
“And what’s happened with ESG is introducing non-economic metrics that really are political in nature. And it threatens the economic system, because it will change how decisions are made and how capital is allocated.”
The sole purpose of ESG is to punish those who don’t submit to its agenda, Oaks explained, using ESG’s attack on the fossil fuel industry as an example:
“And that’s really the whole point behind ESG is to punish those who are considered not adopting the right agenda – punishing them with either not being allowed access to capital or making it more expensive to access capital. So, you see that the fossil fuel companies have a challenge getting capital for projects, whether it’s coal or oil or whomever.
“So, ESG really is a threat to our free enterprise system, because it attempts to change how capital is allocated. It politicizes that whole process.”
“All of us should consider it a threat to our most basic economic freedoms,” Oaks said.
“It really is a wake-up call to us to understand what our fiduciary duty is and to exercise that in a way that is appropriate and has been traditional law for decades in the United States,” Oaks said, warning that money managers need to constantly be on the lookout, because ESG attacks can come from a wide range of sources and directions:
“Federal government overreach is being seen in so many different areas. So, it’s keeping an eye on those different potential areas that could be abused trying to drive an agenda at the expense of citizens of the state.”