GOP Hammers on Climate Change As Just One More Woke Example
Climate change is the newest dog whistle in the unrelenting, Republican campaign to label as “woke” all progressive causes such as gun control and sex education.
Take this quiz and if you answer “yes,” you are “woke,” which is a good thing if you are a Democrat and not very good if you are Republican.
Are you concerned with the proliferation of guns and support gun control laws? If so, you are woke and the right wing says you should know the 2nd Amendment is sacrosanct.
Are you supportive of efforts to help children understand their sexuality and gender? If you do, then you are woke and don’t you know, according to the Republicans, that by discussing sex and gender, you are grooming children for pedophiles.
Do you support LGBTQ rights? An affirmative answer means you just don’t understand that God created two types of humans, Adam and Eve, and not Adam and Steve, as far as the right wing is convinced.
Do you believe it’s important to understand the racist underpinnings of the U.S.? If you say yes, you are woke and conservatives say that you must understand that you will bring down this country if you criticize American history and educate students about the insidious ways that African Americans have historically been mistreated.
Is it important to allow students to read books that portray diverse points of view? Sorry, but if you do, you are contributing to the moral destruction of our culture or something like that, says the conservatives.
Are you supportive of a woman’s right to choose to have an abortion? There you go again. If you agree, then you are a murderer and that is the attitude of many Republican lawmakers.
And now, the latest target of the Republicans. Do you worry that climate change is reaching the point of no return for the planet? If you raised your hand in agreement you are woke and you are undermining our nation with you false beliefs or so the right wing claims.
Originally, being woke was a good thing, it meant being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism, as in “we need to stay angry, and stay woke.” Beginning in the 2010s, it came to reflect a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for left-wing ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.
Following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, the phrase was popularized by Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists seeking to raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans.
As a reaction to the BLM movement, right wing politicians began to use the term “woke” as a pejorative referring to destructive elements on the left.
A major United Nations report warned last month that the world could reach a threshold by the end of this decade beyond which the dangers of global warming including worsening floods, droughts and wildfires will grow considerably. In 2021, there were 20 weather or climate-related disasters in the United States that each cost more than $1 billion in losses, according to the federal government.
“Investing in fossil fuels is a dead end — economically and environmentally. No amount of greenwashing or spin can change that,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres told recent graduates at Seton Hall University. “So my message to you is simple: Don’t work for climate-wreckers. Use your talents to drive us towards a renewable future.”
But to conservatives, concerns about climate change is another example of woke, with Republican political leaders latest action including threatening to cancel state support of companies with positive, climate action agendas.
In the latest volleys, Republican legislators are organizing and using legislative powers to punish companies that are trying to reduce dependence on fossil fuels that create the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.
Riley Moore, the West Virginia state treasurer, said companies that are cutting investment in coal and gas are creating an “existential threat” to the state.
“All of our jobs come from coal and gas. I mean, this is who we are. This is part of our way of life here in the state,” said Moore. “And they’re telling us that these industries are bad. We’re an energy state and energy accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue for us.”
Moore withdrew about $20 million out of a fund managed by BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, because the firm has encouraged other companies to reduce emissions.
The $20 million deduction is only a tiny percent of the $259 billion in assets that BlackRock handles in fossil fuel companies around the world, with $91 billion invested in Texas fossil fuel companies alone, including Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Kinder Morgan. BlackRock’s chief executive, Larry Fink, is a particular conservative woke bogeyman because he said the temerity to say that climate change poses an economic risk to companies.
In his annual letter to business leaders that BlackRock invests in, Fink defended his approach to social and environmental issues.
“Stakeholder capitalism is not about politics,” Fink wrote. “It is not ‘woke.’ It is capitalism.”
Fink also urged chief executives to continue embracing their moral responsibility as the pandemic reshapes society and business, and as consumers and workers demand more from companies.
“Make no mistake, the fair pursuit of profit is still what animates markets; and long-term profitability is the measure by which markets will ultimately determine your company’s success,” he wrote. “We focus on sustainability not because we’re environmentalists, but because we are capitalists and fiduciaries to our clients.”
Fink defended a gradual approach, rather than widespread divestment of holdings in fossil-fuel companies.
“Divesting from entire sectors — or simply passing carbon-intensive assets from public markets to private markets — will not get the world to net zero,” he wrote. “Focusing solely on cutting down on the supply of oil and gas, and not reducing the demand for fossil fuels, would simply drive up energy prices and encourage more of a backlash against green-energy efforts.”
Climate change is not a major concern for all financial institutions, including HSBC Holdings, the largest bank in Europe by total assets. Stuart Kirk, HSBC’s top executive for responsible investing, recently gave a presentation titled, “Why investors need not worry about climate risk.” Kirk downplayed warnings of a climate crisis as “unsubstantiated” and “shrill.” He said international estimates of lost economic output by the end of the century were small enough to be “more or less irrelevant.”
“Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in a hundred years,” Kirk said. “Amsterdam has been six feet underwater for ages, and that’s a really nice place. We will cope with it.”
HSBC promptly suspended Kirk after the presentation.
Moore also wrote to 16 state treasurers and comptrollers urging them to consider “collective action in response to the ongoing and growing economic boycott of traditional energy production industries by U.S. financial institutions.”
Fink also joined with Vanguard and State Street to help an activist hedge fund, Engine №1, win three seats on the board of Exxon with the goal of pushing the energy giant to reduce its carbon footprint.
Months later, a nonprofit group called Consumers’ Research, received significant funding from undisclosed donors and began running ads attacking Fink because he had “helped vote on three radical environmentalists to the board of directors of Exxon whose stated goal is to get that company not focused on serving American consumers affordable gas but on Larry Fink’s personal politics.”
In 2021, Consumers’ Research launched an ad campaign to combat “wokeness” in corporate America, targeting companies including Major League Baseball, Ticketmaster, Coca-Cola, American Airlines and Nike.
A new Texas law prohibits the state’s retirement and investment funds from doing business with companies that the state comptroller says are boycotting fossil fuels. The Texas legislature also passed a bill to block state agencies from doing business with financial firms that divest from fossil fuels.
Similar laws are being proposed by conservative legislators in 15 other states.
In Utah and Idaho, officials have used the cudgel of environmental concerns to criticize a major ratings agency that uses environmental risks known as environmental, social and governance issues, also known as ESG, and other factors to assess states’ creditworthiness.
Top officials in Idaho blasted Standard & Poore’s use of ESG credit indicators in determining state ratings. In a May 18 letter to Martina L. Cheung, president S&P Global Ratings, the legislators said they “object to S&P’s attempts to overlook Idaho’s sound financial management in favor of evaluating its political priorities. This is inconsistent with the fundamentals of sound financial planning and evaluation.”
The letter said that S&P “is again embarking on a political course designed to curry favor with specific customers through the creation of a subjective ratings system.We respectfully request that S&P immediately take down these ratings and cease from engaging in any non-objective ratings criteria.”
Some companies have not succumbed to pressures to avoid “woke” practices.
Increasing respect for ESG concerns led to a 2015 threat by Salesforce to leave Indiana after the state adopted a law to allow businesses to refuse to serve gay customers. The law was reversed and Salesforce stayed in Indiana. Nike took a hit in 2018 when the company created a controversial ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick the former N.F.L. quarterback who knelt during the national anthem to protest racism and police brutality. Nike drew the ire of then president trump among many Republicans.
More than 2,000 companies, including many of the largest companies like Apple, Amazon and Mars pledged to continue to work toward climate goals after trump declared in 2017 that he would pull the United States from the Paris climate accord. With U.S. withdrawal, 195 countries remained committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions as part of the Paris agreement.
Also, many banks, investors and companies were at the United Nations climate talks in Glasgow last year and committed to reaching net zero, the point where their activities no longer add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, by 2050.
New York State’s pension fund plans to start ending its fossil fuels holdings, and Maine became the first state last year to require both its Treasury and its public employee pension fund to divest from fossil fuels.