James Lindsay: This is how they'll get people to join the new personal ESG system. They will call it "Eco benefits" or "Socially Responsible Credit Card" or "Ethical banking." There is no substantial "climate-conscious consumer demand" for credit cards.
Per Stephen Soukup in the must-read book The Dictatorship of Woke Capital:
"ESG investments promise solutions to issues that otherwise seem intractable. Thus, they have become an attractive alternative to at least two types of investors.
"The first of these is the investor who very much wants to make gobs and gobs of money but doesn't want to seem crass and greedy. He wants to be seen as 'socially responsible,' even as he earns an eight- or nine-figure salary and amasses a net worth in the billions...To him, ESG is the means to an end. And that end is Jamie Dimon and his friends getting filthy rich.
"The second type of investor is the utopian/religious fundamentalist, the kind of investor who believes that he can change the world and can make himself rich in the process, a happy coincidence. This investor is the modern-day Calvinist, someone who believes that his wealth and success are outward signs of his righteousness...
...This second type of investor believes that changing the world will require eliding politics as usual and circumventing the will of the people, as expressed through political means. Like so many other projects before it, saving the world—from fossil fuels, from the patriarchy, from homophobia and other intolerances, from capitalism—requires that people be cut out of the process. The canaille, you see, is simply too uncivilized, too unsophisticated, too unaware of its real interests and needs to be expected to must the will to make the changes necessary. So someone else has to make the changes for them. Once those changes have been made, and the masses see what their betters have given them, then—and only then—they will awaken from the slumber of cultural hegemony and understand what is truly good and just in the world."
To Soukup's point, these ESG initiatives are a means of bypassing the democratic process to force new political and social realities upon the masses. They will force you to invest 'ethically', by a leftist, statist standard. They will prohibit you from spending your money in ways that the elites think imprudent or contrary to their internationalist agenda. "ESG promises the best of all possible worlds. Not only can it change our culture and our civilization without involving those who cling to said culture and civilization, but it can do so painlessly, seamlessly, and most important, profitably...Why [wonders the Wilsonian progressives, Larry Fink and his ilk] shouldn't we insist that our values—religious in nature and unpopular in the voting booths—be the standard for participation in our system?"