When Donald Trump first won the White House in 2016, his victory created one of the all-time best sales pitches for green-minded investment funds: If Washington wasn’t going to push for a transition to cleaner energy to slow climate change, maybe capital markets could.
Now, as Trump returns to power, the movement for environmental, social and governance investing, or ESG, is in a much weaker position after years of Republican backlash and a stretch of rough performance. “ESG is a dead man walking,” says Will Hild, who runs Consumers’ Research, a nonprofit backed by Leonard Leo, leader of the rightward shift in the Supreme Court during Trump’s first term. While Trump himself has barely mentioned ESG, his plan to embrace fossil fuels will inevitably undermine one of its key pillars, Hild says. He adds that the conservative attacks on climate finance groups are only going to get louder.
