‘Dilbert’ Dude Declares War on Sustainable Investing, Is Terminally Unfunny About It

Watch out, climate-conscious companies: The man who attracts Dilbert is out to get you.

Scott Adams, the creator of the long-running caricature Dilbert, stated in a YouTube video posted final week that he can be getting down to “take a shot at” or “destroy” the enterprise follow of environmental social governance utilizing his comedian a couple of dude who works in a cubicle. Scary!

Environmental social governance, extra generally referred to by its acronym ESG, is a set of standards supposed to information traders and companies into making socially acutely aware selections and investments. Climate change has shaped a key part of many ESG doctrines, as monetary establishments have acknowledged—no less than on paper—the significance of creating investments that don’t fuck up the planet.

The idea has picked up pace over the previous 12 months as a brand new bogeyman for fearmongering from the right-wing, who’ve branded it as a type of “woke capitalism” and have attacked firms like BlackRock for partaking with the idea of investing responsibly. Several pink states throughout the nation now have legal guidelines on the books that prohibit the state from partaking with banks or different monetary entities that follow some type of ESG insurance policies. Late final month, the Heritage Foundation, a well-known right-wing suppose tank with deep financial ties to the Koch brothers, launched a marketing campaign in opposition to the idea of ESG, calling the follow “the Left’s latest political tool to use businesses and financial institutions to advance progressive ideology in American society.”

Now, it appears, Scott Adams has determined to weigh in. Recent comics have made blundering passes on the concept of accelerating range at large companies, like this one from Tuesday. The yuks don’t finish there. On Monday he posted this one, which manages to hit each the Gender and Climate alarm bells.

Wow, these are… so funny. Real cutting-edge stuff there, Scott.

The common right-wing bozos have been lapping up Adams’ new tack. “Congrats to @BlackRock and Larry Fink for appearing in today’s Dilbert,” Republican Sen. Tom Cotton tweeted last week with a hyperlink to a cartoon concerning the definition of ESG.

To be fair, there are plenty of critiques to be had with the way ESG currently operates: Obviously, there are ways to put money toward a social problem that don’t actually go very far in solving said problem. The SEC in May proposed rules to ensure that ESG claims made by U.S. funds were actually legit and to increase disclosure around those funds. But the idea of companies putting their money where their mouth is on important social issues is overall a good idea. When it comes to climate, especially, investing in companies and funds that don’t pollute the planet so much is not only responsible but also financially beneficial in the long run.

What’s more, right-wing forces have actually opposed the new SEC rules, with several Republican attorneys general filing comments with the SEC last month challenging the rules. The Biden administration is trying to “radically transform the SEC and other agencies run by unelected bureaucrats and make them champions of climate change, regardless of what those agencies’ functions are,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, who led the challenge, told E&E News.

For his half, Adams is clearly approaching his ESG critique from a bad-faith angle. He’s lengthy expressed skepticism round local weather science, authoring a number of strips on the topic and challenging his Twitter audience in 2016 to “find a scientist — just one — who says the climate prediction models are credible”—a proposal that’s rooted in a basic and deliberate misinterpretation of how scientific modeling works.

In the video posted last week, Adams encourages people to share his strips and for employees to send comics to their bosses to help take down the big bad ESG machine.

“It should start to become known that Dilbert thinks it’s ridiculous and then people who also think it’s ridiculous will start retweeting it,” he said. “And then the boss who’s in charge of it will start to get these sent to him by email or printed out and slipped under the office door. Mockery is very powerful and mockery, in theory, could dismantle this.”

The idea that heads of major investment firms in charge of billions of dollars will be swayed by a couple printouts of an extremely dated cartoon that recycles its punchlines from right-wing Twitter really speaks to Adams’ idea of his own self-importance. If you slip a Dilbert comic under your boss’s door, please film it for me. That would actually be funny.