It wasn’t only a bad year for ESG on the stock market. Earlier this month, Vanguard announced that it was quitting Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (NZAM), set up by former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney a little over a year ago. “We have decided to withdraw from NZAM so that we can provide the clarity our investors desire about the role of index funds and about how we think about material risks, including climate-related risks,” the world’s second-largest asset manager said. 

Two months ago, Alex Edmans, coauthor of the latest edition of the standard textbook on the principles of corporate finance and professor of finance at the London Business School, published a paper titled, The End of ESG—without a question mark. Edmans criticizes what has become the primary justification for ESG: the claim that business can generate higher returns for investors by tackling climate change. Since governments are [said to be] democratically elected by a country’s citizens, they are best placed to address externalities, whereas investors disproportionately represent the elites. “If ESG is pursued for its externalities, companies and investors should be very clear that it may be at the expense of value,” Edmans says.

October also saw the publication of Terrence Keeley’s Sustainable, where the former BlackRock senior executive penned what amounts to a requiem for ESG. Rather than “doing well by doing good,” the logic of Keeley’s case, as I reviewed for RealClear Books, is that investors in conventional ESG investment products are likely to end up not doing very well and leave investors feeling good, not doing good.

It has not all been going one way. In May, HSBC terminated Stuart Kirk, its global head of research at HSBC’s asset-management arm, for voicing some hard truths about ESG. Earlier this month, HSBC announced that it will stop financing new oil and gas fields, putting the West’s third-largest bank on Putin’s side in Russia’s energy war on the West. 

What is now a negative factor disadvantaging the West in a world increasingly characterized by East–West geopolitical tensions originated after a period when the United Nations had been fostering a horizontal global division between a rich North and an exploited South. As University of Pennsylvania’s professor Elizabeth Pollman records in her June 2022 paper, The Origins and Consequences of the ESG Moniker, through the 1970s and early 1980s, the UN promoted the New International Economic Order that called for the regulation of transnational corporations on the alleged grounds that they were widening the gap between developed and developing countries. 

After Kofi Annan became secretary-general in 1997, the UN shifted from a strategy of confrontation to co-optation. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 1999, Annan launched a Global Compact between business and the UN. In 2004, the Global Compact’s financial-sector initiative published a report titled “Who Cares Wins”—a rip-off of the British special-forces SAS motto “Who Dares Wins”—arguing for “better consideration of environmental, social and governance factors” in investment appraisals, claiming that this would both improve outcomes for investors and help the UN achieve its sustainable development goals. 

ESG means different things, depending on whom you’re talking to. Is it about risk disclosure? Or about factors driving long-term shareholder value? Or is it about society holding business to account? [Or, is it about a social credit system for corporations to reward their virtue signaling and Net Zero long-term goals and hiring based on melanin not merit?] One thing is clear: ESG’s unsustainable dual mandate of boosting shareholder returns and at the same time making the world a better place— “doing well by doing good”—was present at the creation of ESG. It was a masterstroke by ESG’s designers to incorporate “G” for governance. No investor can be against improved governance, and it helped mainstream ESG, whereas previous iterations, such as Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), remained niche. 

The 2008 financial crisis subsequently turbocharged the uptake of ESG. Having caused the financial crisis, Wall Street was going to redeem itself by saving the world from a planetary catastrophe. Without climate change, ESG would have vastly less salience. Although marketed as a climate risk analysis tool, ESG is no such thing. In reality, it’s about investors and debt providers driving the decarbonization of Western companies and sunsetting its oil and gas companies. 

According to ESG doctrine, there are two types of climate financial risk—physical risk and transition risk—and it’s straightforward to demonstrate that both are spurious. Take the Bank of England. For its climate stress tests, the Bank of England uses a scenario derived from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) extreme and physically implausible RCP8.5 climate scenario. Roger Pielke, Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado–Boulder, and Justin Ritchie have documented how use of the RCP8.5 scenario represents “a stubborn commitment to error,” with its absurd projection of a sixfold growth in per-capita coal consumption to 2100, based on erroneous reports in the late 1980s of virtually unlimited coal deposits in Siberia and China. The Bank of England compounds implausibility with impossibility by taking the RCP8.5 pathway of 4 degrees by the turn of the century and telescoping it into a 3.3-degree Celsius rise by 2050. Central banks resorting to these types of games constitutes strong evidence that climate physical risk is a nonissue for financial stability. 

When he was governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney gave an agenda-setting speech alleging a tragedy of the horizon as the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors. Climate catastrophes are presumed to be triggered by tipping points, one of the earliest being the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. In its sixth assessment report, the IPCC declared that with sustained warming, there was limited evidence that the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would disappear “over multiple millennia.” That is some time horizon. Despite the best efforts of central bankers, geologic timescales of millennia and human timescales of decades are completely out of whack.

Similarly, climate transition risk and the stranded assets trope defy economic and financial logic. If you restrict the flow of capital into a sector producing stuff that people want and are willing to pay for, the price of the output of a capital-embargoed sector will rise, as will the value of its invested capital. This, in essence, is what has been happening in energy and capital markets over the past year and explains why ESG as an investment strategy does not work. In the absence of draconian government policies to suppress demand for oil and natural gas, ESG policies strangling the supply of capital to Western oil and gas producers have two effects: they push up the price of hydrocarbons; and they displace supply from Western producers to neutral or hostile ones, with major detriment to the economies and security interests of the West.

Although the disintegration of ESG as an investment strategy became unmistakable in 2022, its existence as a political doctrine will continue until it is challenged and defeated politically. This is already happening in Red states such as Florida, Texas, West Virginia, and Utah. It also requires concerted leadership at a national level to get central bankers and financial regulators to quit playing covert climate policy and to shame banks such as HSBC into switching their support from Russia in the energy wars by dropping their anti–oil and gas financing policies. Defeating ESG not a case of “who cares wins” but “who fights wins.” (read more)

Fullilove, who is Black, has spent her career studying epidemics: first AIDS, then crack, then multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. She has seen how disease can ravage cities, especially in Black and working-class communities. From the beginning, Fullilove was skeptical of how the federal government handled the coronavirus pandemic. But these new recommendations from the C.D.C., she said, were “flying in the face of the science.” Not long after the announcement, she sent an e-mail to a Listserv called The Spirit of 1848, for progressive public-health practitioners. “Can we have a people’s CDC and give people good advice?” she asked. A flurry of responses came back.

What emerged was the People’s C.D.C.: a ragtag coalition of academics, doctors, activists, and artists who believe that the government has left them to fend for themselves against COVID-19. As governments, schools, and businesses have scaled back their COVID precautions, the members of the People’s C.D.C. have made it their mission to distribute information about the pandemic—what they see as real information, as opposed to what’s circulated by the actual C.D.C. They believe the C.D.C.’s data and guidelines have been distorted by powerful forces with vested interests in keeping people at work and keeping anxieties about the pandemic down. “The public has a right to a sound reading of the data that’s not influenced by politics and big business,” Fullilove said.

No one is in charge of the People’s C.D.C., and no one’s expertise is valued more than anyone else’s. The problems of “the pandemic and its response are rooted in hierarchical organizations,” Mary Jirmanus Saba, a filmmaker and one of the volunteers, told me. Roughly forty people come to each weekly meeting, but many more are involved. (This spring, after a few of the group’s organizers published a manifesto of sorts in the Guardian, several thousand interested people reached out, Fullilove said.) The group sends out a weekly Weather Report—put together by a team composed, in part, of doctors and epidemiologists—summarizing data about transmission rates, new variants, and death rates. They’ve published explainers on testing, masks, and ventilation, among other topics, typically with a call to action: call the White House, call your congressperson, demand free tests and treatment for all. On their Web site, they recently posted a guide for safer gatherings, which recommends that all events be held outdoors with universal, high-grade masking. The organization has nearly twenty thousand followers on Instagram, and it prides itself as a resource for various groups, including people who are immunocompromised and want to find a way to protect themselves and activists who are trying to lobby their local government for more COVID restrictions.

Although the group has been scathing in its critiques of the C.D.C., it has received support from respected institutions in the public-health world. It has also received blue-chip funding from organizations such as the Kresge Foundation, which focuses on expanding opportunities in American cities, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, one of the most influential health-focused philanthropies in America, which gave the group a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. As it happens, Robert Wood Johnson’s C.E.O., Richard E. Besser, is a former acting director of the C.D.C.

Fullilove would neither confirm nor deny whether there are any current C.D.C. employees involved with the People’s C.D.C., but, in a recent Webinar, Edgar Rivera Colón, who often serves as the group’s meeting facilitator, claimed that there has at least been some moral support: “We have comrades that are within the C.D.C. who are saying to us, ‘Go ahead with your bad selves.’ ” The volunteers don’t necessarily agree among their bad selves about what, exactly, their larger goal is—whether their project is a protest, an act of mutual aid, or an exercise in shadow governance. What’s clear is that the People’s C.D.C. interprets evidence about this stage of the pandemic, and what we should do about it, differently than the C.D.C. and the White House. Their goal is to provide the public with an alternative source of information. The organization is part of a much broader ecosystem of left-wing public-health groups that advocate more persistent mitigations: there are support communities for those experiencing long COVID, including Survivor Corps, which has almost two hundred thousand members on Facebook; research groups like the U.K.’s Independent SAGE, which reviews the British government’s pandemic policies; and nonprofit activist groups such as Public Health Connected, which provides resources to health-care professionals. This constituency is loud on Twitter, and they are influential in the press.

“There’s a second story of the pandemic happening, which is not about ‘It’s time to go back to normal,’ ” Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist and activist, told me. “Normal for whom, and who’s getting left behind? I think that’s where the People’s C.D.C. and others are trying to stake a claim and trying valiantly to make an impact.” Gonsalves was deeply involved in AIDS activism in the nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands; though he is not part of the People’s C.D.C., he’s sympathetic to their project. Throughout the past six months or so, he has watched with dismay as big public-health organizations have lined up behind the White House’s relaxed COVID policies, even as more than three hundred people, on average, die from the virus each day. Gonsalves and like-minded colleagues had assumed that, after Joe Biden was elected, they’d feel more aligned with the government’s COVID policies. That’s not what happened, though. “It wasn’t just Trump. It wasn’t just Biden,” Gonsalves said. “There’s a struggle going on right now for the soul of public health.”

In November, I met with some members of the People’s C.D.C. on Zoom. The meeting was a snapshot of how these strangers, who are scattered across the country, have encountered one another during the past year—it’s a new form of activism that takes place, partly as a matter of principle, not in the streets but from behind a computer screen. Rita Valenti, a retired nurse in Georgia, who sat in front of a curio case full of dishes, explained that the People’s C.D.C. wasn’t created in order to shame people for not wearing masks in the grocery store. “What endangers others is when a President says the pandemic is over,” she said, referring to a comment that Biden made in a television interview, this past September. (The White House later backtracked.) The group takes issue with the way that the C.D.C. emphasizes individual choices over collective action; as the current C.D.C. director, Rochelle Walensky, has put it, “Your health is in your hands.” Zoey Thill, a family physician in Brooklyn, who was Zooming in from a room full of potted plants, got heated just thinking about it. “When we say, ‘Do your individual risk assessment and plan accordingly,’ that says to certain people, ‘Stay inside forever—for fucking ever!’ ” she said. “For me, it’s about countering that. It’s about saying, ‘No, that’s not O.K.’ ” The other People’s C.D.C. members threw up emojis in approval: red hearts, clapping hands.

In the organization’s written materials, a few specific grievances come up again and again, with varying degrees of scientific support to back them up. First, they hate the new map that the C.D.C. débuted in February, which reflects COVID “community levels” around the country, instead of raw case counts. The map tries to account for how hard the virus is hitting health-care systems in a given area, factoring in things like hospitalization rates and the availability of hospital beds. On the community-levels map, COVID looks as if it’s largely under control, with much of the country shaded green to indicate a “low” level of spread. “The C.D.C.’s pastel-green map creates the false impression that the pandemic is over,” Thill said, in an Instagram Reel posted in June. The map that the People’s C.D.C. circulates, which is based on individual transmission rates, is bright red. “At the People’s C.D.C., we want you to know that the community-levels map masks the state of the pandemic,” she continues. “It pretends that COVID transmission doesn’t matter. It pretends that it’s O.K. for people to continue dying.”

More grievances: the People’s C.D.C. believes that the C.D.C. downplays the risk of long COVID, a post-viral syndrome that can follow the initial infection. The People’s C.D.C. matter-of-factly reports that getting COVID more than once increases your risk of death and hospitalization, and of developing chronic conditions affecting your lungs, heart, brain, and other organs. No amount of COVID is safe, and no number of shots can protect you: “We want to say plainly that you can have a mild infection and still get Long COVID,” the organization wrote, in a Weather Report in June. “Vaccinated people can also get Long COVID.” They frequently cite the figure that one in five cases may lead to long-COVID symptoms, based on a C.D.C. study of data gathered, in part, before vaccines were widely available. All of this is an argument against treating COVID like any other inevitable seasonal yuck, the People’s C.D.C. argues—instead, we should think about it as a “mass-disabling event.”

And then there are masks. The People’s C.D.C. strongly supports mask mandates, and they have called on federal, state, and local governments to put them back in place, arguing that “the vaccine-only strategy promoted by the CDC is insufficient.” The group has noted that resistance to masks is most common among white people: Lucky Tran, who organizes the coalition’s media team, recently tweeted a YouGov survey supporting this, and wrote that “a lot of anti-mask sentiment is deeply embedded in white supremacy.”

This kind of accusation is common for the People’s C.D.C. Their messaging has the unmistakable inflection of activist-speak, marked by a willingness to make eye-popping claims about the motivations of politicians, corporations, or anyone in power. “To name it clearly, the CDC’s policies are eugenic,” the Weather Report team wrote, in August. “They rely on and promote the indefensible stance that disabled and elderly, poor and working class people are disposable, unworthy of care, and unworthy of participation in society.” Eugenic policies have a long and ugly history, commonly associated with the Nazis, white supremacists, and others who advocate the racial purification of humanity. I asked Thill whether she truly believes that the C.D.C. is eugenicist, along these lines. “Just because a charge is difficult or impactful doesn’t make it a wrong charge,” she said.

The group’s saltiest spokesman is Rob Wallace, an independent scientist and researcher who anchors another weekly rundown called COVID This Week. In ten-to-twenty-minute-long video briefings, Wallace runs through slides mapping the rise of new variants and levels of COVID detected in wastewater—an indicator of spread that, he claimed in a November dispatch, will become increasingly important as states follow “the N.I.H. and C.D.C.’s lead [by] abandoning COVID-surveillance reporting.” Wallace saves the most colorful part of his reports until the end, when he comments on the political and corporate influences shaping public-health policy. In August, when the C.D.C. announced an internal reorganization to address its pandemic failures, Wallace observed that “the whole affair has an air of rearranging the chairs on the deck of a sinking ship.” He added, “The U.S. is on the far side of its cycle of accumulation and its high point in building empire. Its political class is now in the business of helping its financial supporters cash out, turning capital into money.” All the talk about empire-building and capital accumulation—a key component of Marxist economic theory—made me wonder whether “the people” in the People’s C.D.C. are those people. When I asked Wallace this on Zoom, he gruffly denied that the members are all communists. “There’s certainly an edge of Red-baiting on your part,” he said.

At its core, “public health is an argument,” Amy Fairchild, a professor and dean of the College of Public Health at the Ohio State University who is not part of the People’s C.D.C., told me. “It’s an argument about what we owe to—and what we must sometimes do to—each other, in the name of the common good.” The People’s C.D.C. is staking out a radical claim about our mutual obligations in a pandemic. “All of us believe that there’s no acceptable number of deaths,” Jirmanus Saba, the filmmaker, said. “We’re all responsible for the safety of all life.”

If your goal is to get as close as possible to zero COVID deaths, the available policy options are not great. If the United States were an island in the South Pacific with a population smaller than that of New York City, we could pursue a policy similar to New Zealand’s in the early months of the pandemic, strictly limiting travel to and from the country. Or, if the government were willing to follow China’s longtime strategy, we could lock down whole cities, confine children at their boarding schools for months at a time, and forcibly send people to state-run quarantine facilities. The People’s C.D.C. members weren’t willing to talk about what it would take to achieve zero COVID cases in the U.S. “It’s not our job to dictate policy,” Thill said. “We’re filling gaps. We’re trying to change the narrative. And we’re trying to lean into love and equity.”

For the public-health leaders who do actually dictate policy, though, the question of how you put an ideal into practice is not one that can be sidestepped. “The goal initially was to eradicate and eliminate this virus,” Howard Koh, a Harvard public-health professor and former Assistant Secretary of Health, told me. “A couple years into it, everyone now realizes that that’s not a realistic goal.”

I called Tom Frieden, who led the C.D.C. during the Obama years, to see what he made of the People’s C.D.C. He had never heard of the group before I got in touch, but he took a look at their materials ahead of our call. He praised the organization’s guide to self-protection for immunocompromised people, and agreed that some of their recommendations, like universal masking in times of high COVID spread, were good ideas in theory. “But is that going to happen? Absolutely not,” he said. The next best thing is to try to get people vaccinated and boosted and to increase access to high-quality masks and Paxlovid. “If you’re giving recommendations that no one’s going to follow, that’s not only nonproductive,” he said. “It’s counterproductive, because that undermines your credibility.”

The scientific claims that the People’s C.D.C. makes about the real C.D.C.’s policies are not necessarily straightforward, either. The People’s C.D.C. says that a five-day isolation period for vaccinated people is unsupported by evidence, but some studies suggest that most transmission happens right before and right after people develop symptoms, and that vaccinated people spread the virus for a shorter period of time than unvaccinated people. The group argues that one-way masking is insufficient, but some experts in airborne transmission argue that it’s strongly protective for vulnerable people. Although the People’s C.D.C. tends to see large, corrupting forces at work behind shifts in public-health policy, sometimes the actual explanations are more mundane. Anne Zink, Alaska’s chief medical officer and the president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, pushed back on Wallace’s claim that states are in cahoots with the C.D.C. to abandon basic COVID data-gathering. Her department doesn’t have the money or political backing to set up daily nasal-swab testing sites. Instead, it’s investing in wastewater testing, but not as a conspiracy to obscure what’s happening—the practice is just more sustainable.

It’s tough to definitively adjudicate these disputes. In the progressive imagination, science is sometimes treated like a static text that’s easy to interpret, with clear takeaways for behavior. “One of the big mistakes in our field is this mantra ‘Follow the science,’ as though science is not contested, as though there are not evidentiary gaps, as though there are not conflicting reports and data points you have to navigate your way through,” Fairchild, the O.S.U. professor, said. The People’s C.D.C. talks about “science” as proof that the members’ position is correct, when in reality they’re making a case for how they wish the world to be, and selecting scientific evidence to build their narrative. It’s a kind of moralistic scientism—a belief that science infallibly validates lefty moral sensibilities.

This approach falls flat in areas where scientific knowledge is lacking, such as long COVID. Leana Wen, a professor at George Washington University’s school of public health and the former health commissioner of Baltimore, told me that there’s a distinction between patients who have trouble recovering from a bad COVID case or who experience lingering symptoms and those who are truly debilitated afterward. “That’s not one in five patients,” she said, of the latter group. The People’s C.D.C. rejects any suggestion that long COVID is less than a crisis. Wallace told me that Wen is “a quintessential minimizer” who has benefitted professionally by advocating, for example, to scale back mask mandates. She is widely distrusted by progressive activists who work in public health; earlier this year, a group calling her views on the pandemic “unscientific, unsafe, ableist, fatphobic, and unethical” circulated a petition to get her kicked off a panel at the annual American Public Health Association meeting, where Wen won one of the top prizes only a few years ago.

Among the people I spoke with who have actually led public-health agencies, all were sympathetic to some of the critiques that the People’s C.D.C. makes. “The pandemic has opened what were cracks in our health-care system and exposed them as large chasms,” Zink said. “The systems that we have built have failed America and failed us individually.” But these experts also found it hard to take the group seriously because of its strident analysis. “To make claims that C.D.C. is beholden to big business—this is just nonsense, frankly,” Frieden, the agency’s former leader, said. “Once you’re sitting at C.D.C., your goal is not to say the thing that makes you feel best or sounds most politically correct or radical.”

The C.D.C. has become “the punching bag of our country,” Zink told me. She recognizes that the pandemic has been scary, sad, and frustrating for many people. Her reaction to “hearing those criticisms, particularly the eugenics comment—it’s just more sadness.”

Perhaps when we look back on this time, the People’s C.D.C. will look like other activist groups that have agitated against the status quo of health care from the margins, ranging from the Black Panthers and the Young Lords of the nineteen-sixties and seventies to the AIDS activists of the eighties and nineties. They take explicit inspiration from groups such as ACT UP, which pursued its own medical research, provided treatments, and staged protests in response to the government’s inaction during the AIDS crisis. Those groups all found ways to help members of their communities when they felt that society had left them behind. One way to look at the People’s C.D.C. is as a movement to recapture our sense of interdependence, both in terms of our health and our communities; whether we acknowledge it or not, we all help determine one another’s health. “Nothing has underscored that as powerfully as the COVID-19 pandemic,” Fairchild said.

In much of America, the pandemic has seemed over for a long time. I asked the People’s C.D.C. members what they made of the fact that, in large swaths of the country, people don’t seem to care that much about COVID. “I would just disagree with the statement that they don’t care,” Hope Brasfield, an embroiderer who lives in Tennessee, replied. “How can you judge whether or not somebody cares about something if they don’t even know about it?” She pointed out that, in red states like hers, politicians have consistently downplayed the pandemic. “I don’t accept the idea that it is our fault—the people’s fault—for this pandemic continuing,” Valenti, the retired nurse in Georgia, said.

America is at a crossroads, a threshold, a tipping point. Every vital institution in the land has been at least partially wrecked, most especially the ones in charge of the rule of law, which was the best thing we had going for us. The Deep State is for real — the weaponization of a national bureaucracy against the nation itself. Yet, it’s certainly not just an American thing; it’s happening across Western Civ. Is it some natural process of self-destruction? An auto-immune disorder of a giant cultural organism, with parts attacking the whole? The USA, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia took such special pride in being open societies and now they are consumed in censorious lunacy. Continental Europe had a sketchier history with liberty, the enlightened individualism of Everyman, though they actually birthed its principles. But now the whole works is infected and ailing, and by what? It’s as if some cosmic spike protein came among us all and got into our hearts.

Most major religions feature some version of the idea of death-and-rebirth, and it’s a fact that we see ourselves embedded in cycles, especially seasons. Things turn and return, are born, develop, degenerate, pass away. This was the brilliant application of Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning theory to the study of history, and by those terms we have entered a deep secular winter of the human project. One can appreciate how the onset of winter spooked our prehistoric ancestors. They developed their prayerful ceremonies for bringing back the sun, and warmth, and new growth, dancing around the fire in the skins of animals, often making blood sacrifices to the mysterious forces in charge of… everything. The modern way of reenacting all that seems to be industrial-strength warfare. Many of us are praying right now that we don’t have to go through that.

More likely, I think, we’ll forego the nuclear fire and simply go through a collapse of the socioeconomic organization that our governance rests on, and the Deep State illness with it. It’ll come with plenty of hardship, but it will purge the poisons that have disordered us, and when we get through it, we’ll make new arrangements for daily life. For some years, I’ve been calling this process a long emergency, and now we seem to be right in the thick of it. I believe in the natural process called emergence. Systems transform themselves organically from one state to another when acted upon by the circumstances of time and place. The outcome is usually a surprise, and not all surprises are bad. So, adios 2022 and hello little baby 2023. Lead us where you will and let’s go forward into it bravely. As Bob said so many years ago, it’s all right, Ma. It’s life and life only….